davka | דוקא | despite everything

Do you wear a Kippah and/or Tzitzit?

On Sep­tem­ber 24, 1996 I asked my rab­binic col­leagues… in par­tic­u­lar, those who wear Kip­pot (and request/require the stu­dents in their con­gre­ga­tions to wear Kip­pot when either study­ing or enter­ing the syn­a­gogue), whether they wear Tzitz­it as well, and if not, why.
My orig­i­nal ques­tion was not so much about Tzitz­it or Kip­pah as it was about how we make our decisions.
First, I clar­i­fy from where I come.

Polity, not Piety

My back­ground is not Reform, clas­si­cal or oth­er­wise. Nor is it Ortho­dox nor, Con­ser­v­a­tive (note: I list them in alpha­bet­i­cal order). In fact, I do not come to the rab­binate out of any of the “reli­gious” (per­haps I should say “syn­a­gogue”) move­ments of our peo­ple. I come to the rab­binate from “poli­ty” not “piety.”
My par­ents were Yid­dishist Sec­u­lar­ists and I grew up in Jew­ish Cen­ters and the Labor/Socialist Zion­ist move­ment. Even so (or per­haps so!), I am the only one of the kids in the small Los Ange­les Con­ser­v­a­tive con­gre­ga­tion, where I cel­e­brat­ed becom­ing a Bar Mitz­vah and Con­fir­ma­tion, who became a rab­bi (and one of only one other—outside my family—who became pro­fes­sion­al­ly involved in Jew­ish life, though a very few oth­ers (I’ve tried to keep track) main­tained high degrees of involve­ment). The rab­bi of the con­gre­ga­tion (B’nai Israel) (who I see once every three years or so — Paul Dubin, now (at the time this was first writ­ten, June 3, 1999) Exec­u­tive Vice Pres­i­dent of the South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Board of Rab­bis) used to tell us that he wished he had a hun­dred con­gre­gants like us instead of what he had. Though we rarely went to ser­vices (my father felt they destroyed our Shabbes obser­vance), we reg­u­lar­ly made Shab­bat din­ner at home with can­dles, etc. and sang “Shabbes songs”. Look­ing back on it, I see that we sang songs “about” Shab­bat, rather than singing Shab­bat songs. Even so, we had a rich­er Jew­ish life than most of the peo­ple I knew. As we began our Erev Shab­bat rit­u­al, my father would say that we per­form the actions and recite the words that iden­ti­fy our­selves with Jews through­out his­to­ry and around the world… and “as the world turns toward dark­ness, it has been the prac­tice of Jews to light can­dles in dark places.” Per­haps you could have called us “uniden­ti­fy­ing Recon­struc­tion­ists”. Since then I’ve coined the phrase “Clos­et Recon­struc­tion­ists”. Actu­al­ly, I often say:

99.44% of Amer­i­can Jews are Clos­et Reconstructionists

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