Word: עזים, izim, (female) goats
Possible related word: עוז, strength
Context: The outer covering of the Mishkan was made of goats’ hair. The spinning of the goats’ hair is described as follows:
וכל הנשים אשר נשא לבן אתנה בחכמה טוו את העזים
“And all the women who excelled in that skill spun the goats.” (Exodus 35:26).
Interpretation: “They spun the goats”? It should have said: “They spun the hair of the goats”! Rashi, based on the gemara, explains this strange phrase to mean that the women quite literally spun the wool while it was still on the goats’ backs! This was the extraordinary skill, umanut yeterah, of the craftswomen of that generation.
Take a minute to imagine the scene: the goats are walking along, going about their business, perhaps stopping to graze along the way, while the women walk alongside the goats, keeping pace, spinning the strands of hair that stretch between them and the goats.
Message: What is the appeal of advertising food as coming “from farm to table”? There is a sense of an organic continuity, of no break between the produce we put in our mouth and the earth that it came from.
The same is true here, with our goats. Normally, the process of turning goats’ hair into workable wool involves many steps – shearing, cleaning, combing, dyeing and only then, spinning. The women of this generation shortened the process, and most importantly, eliminated the essential step of shearing – of severing the connection between the animal and its hair. Instead, there is a feeling here of undisrupted connectivity to the source. Even as transformation and productivity are taking place — the hair is being spun into wool to be used for a tabernacle covering – there remains a continuous connection to the source.
What would that feel like for us – to work our magic, to make the changes we need to make in ourselves and the world, to do our work each day, whatever it is, and all the while, to remain connected to our source, inside and outside us, to The Source, to remain constantly aligned to our truth and the truth of the world? We could imagine for ourselves that there is an invisible but tangible thread – like the real thread between the women and the goats – between us and our truest self, our source in the divine, so that as we move along in life, we remain connected and aligned and nourished, never severed, like an umbilical cord to the Self and the Source. Our breath can serve as such a reminder, an invisible golden thread that streams in and out of us, creating an energy current that keeps us connected with the life force.
If we understand the word for goats, עזים, izim, as related to the word עוז, oz, meaning “strength,” then we can sense how this connection to the source is actually a strengthening agent, a way of constantly renewing our strength and power and energy. Like an electric outlet, we plug in to keep ourselves well charged. Life can feel impossible and overwhelming; we get lost, confused, exhausted and despairing. But if we walk along the path, doing our work with a sense of unbroken attachment to our Source, we can hold all that human angst in a sustaining flow of connection, clarity of purpose, and the strength to proceed.
ה’ עוז לעמו יתן ה’ יברך את עמו בשלום
God grants strength to His people. God blesses His people with peace. (Ps 29:11)
Photo by Nandhu Kumar from Pexels
A beautiful thought, but, as someone who regularly works with yarn, I can’t imagine this process at all. At some point the spun yarn needs to be cut away from the source. (maybe the women do this more gently than the men?) and it would be difficult to weave with the resulting rather short fibers of yarn or perhaps they then spun those fibers together into lengths that would be possible to weave. (at least as long as this sentence, oy!). Rashi was amazing, but I doubt that yarn-play or work was something he had time for.
Ha! Good point! Thanks, Faye!