The Tefillin's Four-Legged Shin

The Tefillin shel Rosh has the distinctive feature of possessing a regular Shin in its right side, and a bizarre four legged Shin in the opposite side. Considering that the Tefillin is a very popular and publicly displayed Mitzva, most people are aware of this strange four-legged Shin but few know the story behind it. We we will explore this topic in this post.

The Talmud in Shabbat 62a and in Menachot 35a brings in the name of Abaye that the "Shin, Daled and Yud of the Tefillin are all 'Halacha LeMoshe Misinai'" i.e. an oral tradition dating back to Sinai. The comentators note that there are allusions to the Daled and Yud in the Tefillin's knots, and these allusions are not literal but rather loosely based in the letters Daled and Yud - see diagram on the right. Only the Shin is clearly written as a full fledged letter.

Before we delve into the Shin, which stands out from the other two letters, it's worthwhile mentioning the great controversy in regards to the Daled which is related to our topic - how to identify the letters in the Tefillin.

Up to a few hundred years ago, all communities - Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Yemenite - had the same Daled-style knot in the back of the head and it looked like a square knot (also referred to as Double Daled knot) - see image below. Looking at the Original Daled (below), it's not immediatedly evident the resemblance to the letter Daled but if you consider two Daleds, connected to each other, you can arrive at that picture. Then it came the "new Daled", which is more like a single letter Daled and more immediatedly identifiable.

Rabbi Fleckless (1754-1826), a student of the Noda BiYuda, writes in his response (link here) that we must keep the established square knot, and refrain from adopting the "new daled knot which has surfaced around 50 years ago... and we only have our tradition to rely on (square Daled)". We can gather that the new Daled shape (also called Single Daled knot) was introduced in the 18th century by the influence of Kabbalah, and Rabbi Fleckless (like his teacher) was a staunch traditionalist and fought any changes introduced by Hassidim based on Kabbalistic ideas (other changes include the Leshem Yichud prayers before Miztvot, which I explored in an earlier post).

The new, single Daled knot proved to be very popular and with the expansion of the Hassidic movement in Europe and also with the wide adoption of Kabala by the Sephardic communities, the Single Daled eventually became the standard knot present in most Tefillins sold in the marketplace. I've seen this phenomena in my own family - while my grandfather has the square knot, most of my cousins today have single Daled knots in their Tefillins - only because the new Daled is the standard in the shops and they didn't pay attention. 

From this discussion, we can already glean that the letters in the Tefillin are very loosely based on the actual scribal letters used in scrolls and not meant to be actual letters. The same used to be the case with the Shin - it wasn't originally a full fledged letter as we have today in our Tefillins, and like the Daled knot - which with time evolved to be more clearly identified with the letter - the Shin also underwent transformations.

While the Talmud does not elaborate on the nature of the Shin, early sources point out to a possibility that the original allusion to Shin was actually just the actual shape of the Tefillin shel Rosh - the four different compartments resemble the Shin when looked straight on (or from the back) - see picture to the right. Rav Elyakim, a tosafist (quoted by the 13th century work Or Zarua), brings this possible explanation along with the more popular and accepted tradition - writing the shape of the Shin in the sides of the box. 

The Box itself looking like a Shin of 4 heads (black part)

Also possible to observe a traditional Shin of 3 heads if you focus in between the compartments

Notwithstanding this novel Shin allusion brought by Rav Elyakim, the prevailing custom throughout the ages evidently is to write Shins on the sides of the boxes. The earliest clear mention of the Shins in the sides of the Tefillin is the Shimusha Raba (who, by the way, has a different order of the four parshiot in the Tefillin unlike Rashi and R. Tam - explored here), an ancient work on Tefillin from the Gaonic period (roughly 589-1000CE):

"צורה דשין דימינא ג' רישי, ודשמאלא ד'

רישי, ואי אפיך לית לן בה"

"The shape of the right Shin is with three heads, and of the left is four heads. And if he made the opposite, it is of no concern"

Note how this passage only talks about three and four heads - that’s no coincidence; the original tradition was to write only the Shin lines without a base. The base of the Shin was the actual Tefillin Box base, serving as a flat base, as we learn from the talmud the the Shin should be touching the base (וצריך שיגיע חריץ למקום התפר) and the lines were not even very clear scribal letter - just lines (see below).

Ancient Tefillin, where the Shins are only lines touching the box base (source). See another example here

A scribal shin without a base, as per Yemenite custom 

As time passed, people started to made the Shin look more and more like the scribal shin, abandoning an allusion to an actual literal interpretation, leaving no mistake that this is a Shin. However, the Tefillin producers were carefull to always make sure the Shin is touching the base of the box even with the modified custom. 

Rabbi Yosef Karo writes explicitly, that "he heard that the Ashkenazi Jews make the Shins as simple lines... but we make them as actual printed letters... and go out to see what is the custom today (printed letters)". (see source here, midway through the page: ושמעתי שהאשכנזים נזהרים בכך, שמקמטים העור במלקט על ידי כפילה שכופל מהעור עד שנעשים סעיפי השיני"ן בחקיקת ירכות. אבל אנו נוהגים לעשות השיני"ן בדפוס, וגם בארחות חיים כתוב שיש אומרים שאין לחוש בזה, ופוק חזי מאי עמא דבר, עד כאן לשונו)

It is clear that the Shin in the Tefillin went through some significant transformation over time. Rabbeinu Simcha even writes that one should not "change from the old minhag of simple lines. If he wrote as an actual printed letter...we don't have the power to invalidate it" - a clear indication that he favors the early custom. (in hebrew:  וזה לשון הגהות בברוך שאמר, בשם רבינו שמחה: ושי"ן אין לשנותה ממנהג זקנים, שהיו עושין בקמט של עור הבית. ומיהו אם עשאה בדפוס, או כתבה בדיו על בית לבן, אין בידינו לפוסלה, עד כאן לשונו)

Now that we have established the two options of displaying the two Shins - either simultaneously in the shape of the actual box of the Tefillin or as two actual letters in the sides - we must understand what is the need of showing the second Shin. 

There are two forms of writing in Hebrew. One is what is referred to as “Moshe Rabeinu’s writing”, which is the standard writing method of a quill and parchment. The other writing form is the Ktav of the Luchot - Decalog, which was not written as a Torah Scroll but through carving in stone - and it was a Godly work,  delivered to Moshe at Sinai. In this form of writing, the letters are formed by the surrounding space made from stone. The letters themselves are hollow, nothing on their own. When writing a Shin, the surrounding space of the standard Shin looks like a four-legged Shin. 

According to Kabbala, the written Torah is only a part of our Torah - the surrounding spaces (i.e. negative spaces) are also part of the Torah but they are not revealed to us readily. They are mostly concealed, but they can make up sentences and a whole different level of teachings. 

The extra Shin is there to symbolize the hidden Torah from the surrounding letters, perhaps to remind us we only have access to part of the Torah. We can only speculate about the novel letters and wordings that will be revealed in later days, but I have seen an interesting drawing that helps illustrate how many possibilities there can be. 

Interporsing possible wordings within letters

Famous interplay between Pei and inner Bet

The Arizal (quoted here ) says that a person should look at the Torah Scroll after the weekly portion, when the Torah is displayed to the congregation (hagba’a), because every Jew has a corresponding letter in the Torah and perhaps he will find his if he looks for it. 

I've also heard in the name of the Ari, a person who yearns for wealth will have a letter connected to a word or sentence in the Torah relating to money. Someone who is drawn to helping people or healing people will be drawn to a letter corresponding to this topic. But, says the Arizal, a Jew can have not a letter but an empty space surrounding the letter of the Parsha and that carries meaning and relates to the person in some esoteric way. Hence, the written and blank spaces in the Torah scroll are equally important, and that is the message of the two Shins in the Tefillin.

I suspect that this can also explain one well established scribal tradition in the beginning of the Torah. While the tradition relating to extra tagim in the Torah as brought by the ancient Sefer HaTagim has been lost, scribes still do four extra tagim in the Bet of Bereishit - one of the very few surviving extra Tagim in our modern day Torahs. Perhaps these four lines convey the same message of the four-legged Shin of the Tefillin - it relates to the other writing form which was found in the Luchot. While our Torah Scroll is written in the traditional way, we keep tagim that look a four-legged Shin in the very first letter of  the Torah to allude to the invisible Torah, just like we do in the Tefillin, because the written Torah and space surrounding it are actually one unit, although we only have access to the Torah we see in writing. 

As we have seen, the shape of the Shin in the Tefillin evolved through time and it carries a great deal of symbolism. The Shin is also the main feature of the Mezuza, which has the Shin Daled Yud inscribed in the outside of the parchment and the widespread custom is to write a Shin in the outside of the Mezuza case - similar to what’s done in the Tefillin shel Rosh. The Tefillin and Mezuza have this commonality, and  they stand out in regards to the importance attached to the Shin, one of Judaism‘a most mystical and beautiful letters.

I conclude with the Talmud in Brachot 6a:

א"ר אבין בר רב אדא א"ר יצחק מנין שהקב"ה מניח תפילין שנאמר (ישעיהו סב, ח) נשבע ה' בימינו ובזרוע עוזו בימינו זו תורה שנאמר (דברים לג, ב) מימינו אש דת למו ובזרוע עוזו אלו תפילין שנאמר (תהלים כט, יא) ה' עוז לעמו יתן ומנין שהתפילין עוז הם לישראל דכתי' (דברים כח, י) וראו כל עמי הארץ כי שם ה' נקרא עליך ויראו ממך ותניא ר' אליעזר הגדול אומר אלו תפילין שבראש 

In short, the Talmud says that even God himself dons the Tefillin (!) and that the Tefillin relate to the passage "all the people of the world will see the name of Hashem in you, and they will fear you" - they will see the Tefillin shel Rosh and become fearful. Throughout the ages, the Tefillin has been a staple of Jewish life with amulet-like status, and archeologists even found them in Qumran, dating over 2000 years, and they look very similar to ours today - that alone, a great feat and giant testament of how well we kept our traditions, if if there were some minor tweaks in the body of the Tefillin.

Tefillin found in Qumran (source)