The blessing blessing recited before donning a tallit is not on the tallit, per se, but on the tzitzit, which are the essence of the mitzvah. The tallit is really just our way of fulfilling the mitzvah of wrapping ourselves in a tzitzit garment. The wording of the Tzitzit Blessing is …l’hit’atef b’tzitzit, i.e. to wrap ourselves in tzitzit.

In the Mishnah Torah (Hil. Tzitzit, 3, 11), the Rambam says one should be wrapped in a tallit.

Even though a person is not obligated to purchase a tallit and wrap himself in it so that he must attach tzitzit to it, it is not proper for a person to release himself from this commandment. Instead, he should always try to be wrapped in a garment which requires tzitzit so that he will fulfill this mitzvah.

In particular, care should be taken regarding this matter during prayer. It is very shameful for a Torah scholar to pray without being wrapped [in a tallit].

How do you go about wrapping yourself in a tallit?

As Rabbi Yonatan Cohen explains, today the widespread custom is based on the custom from Eastern Europe to fold the edges up onto the shoulders so that two of the corners hang in back and two in front, similar to the way a cape is worn. To facilitate this the tallit has evolved almost square proportions (typically the measurements are a three-to-four ratio).

Although in halachic texts you will find various suggestions for performing some kind of “wrapping” around the head and/or shoulders immediately after reciting the blessing, for example “Yishmael” or Arab-style “wrapping,” it seems that the primary understanding of “wrapping” according to this custom is in the sense of “surrounding” yourself with tzitzit.

In the more western countries, among Sephardic, Ashkenazi and Yemenite Jews, the prevailing custom is to wear the tallit as a shawl, literally a “prayer shawl.” Therefore the tallit dimensions may be more rectangular, for example a standard size 36, which is wide enough to cover the back, and then wraps around the upper arms, with all four tzitzit hanging or held in front.

Proponents of the first method point out that it enables you to be “surrounded by the tzitzit,” i.e. with two in front and two in back, whereas the second approach enables you to be wrapped in the tallit itself, which is a far more literal interpretation of the word (l’hitatef) used in the blessing.

Today it is not uncommon to find very narrow shawl type tallits that are really no more than scarves, and a scarf cannot be used as a tallit. Indeed the Shulchan Aruch states that a scarf does not require tzitzit. “The general consensus,” explains Rabbi Cohen, “is that in order to qualify as a tallet it must be big enough to cover the head and most of the body of an 8-yr old child, and be worn over the shoulders and not just round the neck.”

He goes on to explain that regretfully, many people brought up in the S&P Sephardic tradition were persuaded to abandon the shawl custom and switch to the cape custom, “due to the unavailability of suitable tallets…or the mistaken impression that the method they had been taught was inferior or even wrong.”