In English, the plot of a story is called plot, which is « ball of yarn ».

In French, the story is sometimes « sewn with white thread ».

In Hebrew, every treatise in the Talmud is called massekha, a word that originally referred to a « loom ».

In almost every language, text and textiles share the same semantic universe. It’s always about telling the interweaving of threads and how any story is the product of a weave. Marcel Proust put it beautifully in Le Temps Retrouvé, when he said he wanted to build his work « like a dress ». Writing is still a form of sewing.

Judaism seems to have a particular experience of it: that of shmattes. This Yiddish expression, which designates rag and textile waste, ends up referring to the art of tailoring in general, the occupation that has been the occupation of so many Jews throughout history.

This art of « doing with » what one has, of mending, of stitching up or of stitching what one has inherited, in order to give a new life to a factory, is not unrelated to interpretation.

The exegesis of the rabbis does not do anything else: it always inherits past readings but undertakes to take up or mend the meaning of a text in order to sew on it new possible interpretations. It is a tailor-made one that each generation passes on to the next to add points.

In this, this issue of Tenou’a is a shmattes of paper: a homage-work to the centrality of fabric in the Jewish tradition, and an interweaving of threads of creative thought. Writers, artists, rabbis, historians… have contributed to this patchwork, in an attempt to tell the truth about their text / textile link.

Although, as always, the truth is tailor-made.