A bride has a lot to think about during the wedding planning process, and one of the more difficult ideas to swirl around is choosing a gift for her groom. It’s certainly not mandatory, but many couples decide they’d like to present each other with a wedding day present. In future posts, we’ll talk about options for many kinds of gifts, but did you know that there’s a traditional gift from the bride to the groom?
It’s a wedding custom that a bride gives a tallit to her soon-to-be husband just before the ceremony. The tallit, or prayer shawl, symbolizes that the man is off the market or spoken for. It serves as a sort of right of passage, which is also why many young men receive a tallit when they become a bar mitzvah. The wedding day tallit marks a new milestone in the man’s life as he takes on a new purpose as husband.
As with many Jewish traditions, there is a Torah-associated reason for the tallit gift. In Deuteronomy, the commandment for a man to wear tassels (the tallit) precedes the portion that begins, “When a man takes a wife…” The tallit and the ring that the groom wears are also related on the same level. Just as the wedding ring is a cyclical representation of never ending love, so is a tallit as it is wrapped around the groom as a reminder of spirituality and devotion to his bride.
I don’t profess to be good at math or numbers, but there’s also a “ah ha!” connection between the tallit’s tassels and love. This is a number game that even I can wrap my head around. Get this: On a tallit, there are eight strings in a tassel. There are four tassels on a tallit. A flashback to 3rd grade math and a simple computation will tell you that there is a total of 32 strings. Now, in Judaism, numbers have meaningful significance, usually symbolizing concepts or notions. The number 32 happens to be the numerical value of “lev” which means heart. Therefore, when a husband wears a tallit, he is absolutely wrapped in his wife’s love. Now if that isn’t an interesting yet romantic reason to gift a tallit to a groom, I don’t know what is.
Even if your groom doesn’t intend to wear a tallit every day, this wedding gift will always have special significance when it is taken out to be worn on future Shabbats and high holidays you spend together as husband and wife. Those occasions will be just a little sweeter as you look at the tallit and think back to your happiest day.
