Q&A: Is One Required to Wrap Oneself in a Tallit During Prayer?
Is One Required to Wrap Oneself in a Tallit During Prayer?
Question
A. I do not understand why one should wrap oneself in a tallit during prayer.
There is the reason people give, that a tallit katan is not large enough to fulfill one’s obligation with it (if so, why wear it?).
Still, that reason would apply all day long, so why specifically during prayer?
And furthermore, young Ashkenazim prove the point, since they do not wrap themselves in a tallit until age twenty or thirty—so why should they be exempt? (The Mishnah Berurah cried out about this as well.)
B. If so, someone like me, who is careful to wear a tallit katan large enough that a minor could wrap his head and most of his body in it, and who was never accustomed to the practice of wearing a tallit gadol (as a young Ashkenazi), would I be exempt from a tallit even after marriage?
Answer
Simply speaking, there is no obligation either for a tallit katan or a tallit gadol. This is a conditional commandment: if you wear a four-cornered garment, you are obligated to place tzitzit on it. However, the custom developed to wrap oneself in a tallit during prayer, and several explanations can be suggested for that. But as far as I recall, there is no binding law here. I have not, however, checked carefully right now what the source of the matter is.
In any case, with a tallit katan that does not involve wrapping, one still fulfills the obligation. This is stated explicitly in the Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chayim 8:3. Perhaps it may depend on a dispute with the Rema in section 6 there.
In Orach Chayim 8:13, the wording is that if one goes to the synagogue and wraps himself in a tallit gadol, he must recite a blessing. Apparently this implies that there is no obligation to do so. But one could push this aside by saying that it comes to exclude someone who was already wearing it from the time he got up.