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Joel Guberman has a colorful story but it's all in hues of royal purple and brilliant blue. From a nondescript building in an industrial zone in the Judean desert east of Jerusalem, the New Jerseyborn occupational therapist is engaged in a halachic revolution: getting Jews to adopt the lost commandment of wearing of blue tzitziot, ritual fringes.
Guberman is an expert on techelet, the little- understood dye referred to 48 times in the Bible that colored the tassels of Jews' prayer shawls. Long before Diaspora Jews began to specialize in the shmatte business, they had a historic connection to dyeing textiles, he explains.
One of the Torah's 613 commandments is to incorporate an azure thread among the tzitzit as a conspicuous reminder of the complete system of divine rules. That single blue thread and three white ones are folded so as to appear as eight strings in each of the four corners of both the tallii and the arba kanfot undergarment.
Guberman explains that the famous medieval commentator Rashi interpreted the word tzitzit as having the numerical value of...