idea

The knot as received law

correspondences

kindidea

dates200

nature

Menachot 35b: the knot of the tefillin is halakhah l'Moshe mi-Sinai — the shape of the knot is a received tradition, handed down rather than derived.

That is an unusual thing for the Talmud to say about a piece of craft, and it puts the knot in a small and interesting category: a detail with no argument behind it. Most of tractate Menachot is reasoning — this from that verse, this from that anomaly in the spelling. The knot is simply asserted to have arrived intact. Which means the one part of the object that the Name most depends on is the part the law explicitly declines to explain.

The head-knot sits at the nape, against the base of the skull, and the two strap-ends fall forward over the shoulders. The arm-knot sits hard against the box. Both are tied once and, in practice, left tied for the life of the tefillin.

threads (4)

Tefillin — the object that is already a diagram שדי — a Name assembled out of three pieces of leather Menachot — the Talmud on the boxes What the object is made of

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