Beautiful down to the foot

This Hebrew poem has survived in scattered fragments from the Cairo Geniza and summarizes the laws of tefillin (phylacteries), using material drawn mainly from the talmudic tractate Menaḥot. Isaac’s name appears in the acrostic, and the poem adheres to the Arabic-style quantitative metrics popularized by the Hebrew poets of al-Andalus. The reference to “splendor” in the opening line draws on the rabbinic understanding of this word, when it occurs in Ezekiel 24:17, as referring to tefillin. The name of God, Shaddai, is mentioned twice in the excerpt here; its letters are spelled out on the boxes and in the knots of tefillin.