Honor Thy Mother and Father

By Adam Kirsch for Tablet Magazine

Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world.

Why do Jews wear kippot? For men, the habit of covering their heads—when studying, eating, and praying, or else all the time, depending on their level of observance—is such a basic feature of Judaism that it seems like it must go back to the very beginning of the faith. Yet the fact is that covering one’s head is not mentioned at all in the Bible. The custom originates much later, in the Talmud, and even there it is not actually a law. It was in this week’s Daf Yomi reading, in Kiddushin 31a, that the origin of the kippa appeared: “Rav Huna, son of Rav Yehoshua, would not walk four cubits with an uncovered head. He said: The Divine Presence is above my head.” For Rav Huna, always keeping his head covered appears to have been an act of exceptional piety, or else the Talmud wouldn’t bother recording it. But it eventually became standard, and now Jews follow Rav Huna’s example.

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