Most students had little/no idea what these words mean (they sound non-sensical Seussian, don’t they?), but they were all wearing it! Nowadays, with our remove from how things are actually made, these terms are better known to those involved with fabrics – or to those who study the weekly Torah portion of Tazria-Metzorah!
The biblical malady of Tzaraat can affect a person’s skin, clothing or home. When it comes to clothing, the Torah repeatedly refers to the “Shesi & Airev” which translates to the warp and the woof.
Most fabrics are made of a warp & a woof (the woof is also known as weft). The warp are the vertical threads lined up tightly on a loom, and the woof/weft are the horizontal threads that are interwoven, in and out, above and below, the warp. Together they make up the fabric of much of our clothing. Look closely, close up and small, you might be able to see the warp and woof in the fabric.
Looms used to be operated by hand, back in the day many more of you would have known what a warp and woof was. For many years now it’s mostly mechanical. It’s quite an old piece of advanced precision machinery!
Think of this figuratively, in a life-sense: The warp is us and the length of our extended life journey. And as we travel and journey onward/upward we are constantly and continually intersecting with people, with things, with ideas, with challenges and opportunities. All those intersects, how we handle them and what we do with them, this makes up the fabric of our lives.
A mitzvah is often such an intersect – where soul, time/place, and an object/thing or even words meet up: eating matzah on the Seder night, saying Shema in the morning & evening, the Shofar on Rosh Hashanah day, studying Torah in a dorm room…
We can’t make fabric of life by warp alone. We don’t do it by ourselves. It’s the constant intersect and connection with people, places, objects and things, all along the route of life. At every juncture, indeed, every moment!
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Now as we have a special student guest from Iran (he left Iran 5 years ago) at our Shabbos Dinner this week, and as we speak of warp and woof on this Parsha Tazria-Metzora, I began to think of warp and woof in the famous and beloved Persian carpets, and this sent me down quite the carpeted rabbit hole:
Carpets take the warp & woof to the next level. At each intersection, a piece of colored yarn is tied in place (matching its place in the desired overall pattern).
Persian carpets do something a little different. Each carpet tie, each knot, is considered asymmetrical, because in Persian carpets one side of the tie goes over the warp, but the other side of the ties goes under the next warp line. It goes around the warp on both sides. It is also tied, but in a way that creates the pattern (in mirror image) on both sides of the carpet!
There’s a Yiddish/Chassidic expression: “Un fuhn Unten, Un fuhn Ayben” which means: both from below and from above.
Persian carpets may be expressing a consistency of above and below, both physical and spiritual, both outside and within – both expressing the same, one mirroring the other!