What’s a Kvitl, and Why Wish Anyone a Good One?

“A gut kvitl!” East European Jews once said to each other in the days just before and during the holiday of Sukkot, and many Yiddish-speaking and Orthodox English-speaking Jews still say it, especially before the holiday’s seventh (and, in Israel, last) day of Hoshanah Rabbah, which this year falls on Wednesday October 11. But what’s a kvitl, and why wish anyone a good one?

The original meaning of kvitl, as of its German and English cognates Quittung and “quittance,” or the Polish kwit, was a receipt, so called because it acquitted its recipient of further payment for what was owed. But although the word still can mean this in Yiddish, it more commonly signifies a brief note written on a piece of paper (which was the form in which receipts were once generally issued)—and, above all, a note that contains a prayer to God or a request to a ḥasidic rabbi to pray to Him for the note’s writer or for someone else named in it. Many who do not know Yiddish and are not Ḥasidim are familiar with the word from its association with the Western Wall in Jerusalem, between whose stones numerous kvitlakh (kvitl’s plural) are inserted by supplicants every day.

And yet a popular misconception notwithstanding, the “good note” wished for by a gut kvitl, or by (as is sometimes heard from Hebrew speakers in Israel) its Aramaic equivalent of pitka tava, is not such a prayer or petition. It is rather what might be termed a court order. To see where it comes from, one has to go back to the Zohar or “Book of Splendor,” the foundational text of Kabbalah composed in Aramaic in the late 13th century.