Kittel

The kittel is a simple white robe, usually of cotton or linen, worn over ordinary clothes. It is worn on the Days of Awe, by many at the Passover seder, by the prayer leader at the services for dew and for rain, and by a groom under the wedding canopy. The colour is read through the verse in Isaiah promising that sins red as scarlet shall be white as snow, and through the tradition that the ministering angels are clothed in white.

Its plainness is doctrinal rather than aesthetic. On a day of judgement the rich man and the poor man stand in the same unadorned garment, and no cloth, cut or ornament distinguishes them. In most versions it has no pockets, so that nothing can be carried in it, and no gold or metal, on the traditional ground that nothing recalling the golden calf should be worn on the day atonement is sought.

The same garment is used as a shroud. The burial clothes of traditional Jewish practice are white, plain and pocketless for exactly the same reasons, and many men are buried in the kittel they wore at their weddings and on every Yom Kippur of their adult lives. That is the point of it: the reminder of death is not added to the day of judgement as a decoration but is what the wearer is standing in.

Nothing in Jewish law requires a kittel. It is minhag, custom, recorded in the glosses to the codes as the practice of Ashkenazi communities rather than as an obligation, and the variation between communities is correspondingly wide and entirely legitimate.

In most Ashkenazi practice only married men wear it, so that putting one on for the first time belongs with the wedding. In some communities of German origin every adult male wears one from bar mitzvah. In parts of the Hasidic world only the prayer leader and the rebbe wear it, or the custom attaches to particular occasions rather than to particular people. Sephardi and Mizrahi communities generally do not use it at all, and their Yom Kippur is not less solemn for that. Women do not wear it in traditional practice, and where liberal communities have extended it the extension is recent and locally decided.

The Passover use is the most striking, because it puts the shroud in the middle of the festival of liberation. Explanations offered include the leader's role as a figure of honour, the seder night as another occasion of judgement, and a deliberate holding together of freedom and mortality in one evening. As with most well-established customs, the practice is older and more secure than any of the reasons given for it.