Tzaddi is one of seven Hebrew letters, recalled by the mnemonic shatnez getz, that Jewish law requires a scribe to crown with three small decorative strokes called tagin in a Torah scroll, tefillin or mezuzah, a rule recorded in the Talmud at Menachot 29b. The ordinary, medial form of Tzaddi is drawn bent, resembling a Nun with a Yod attached at an angle to its back, and a widely repeated Kabbalistic and Chassidic teaching reads that bent posture as a picture of the tzaddik, the righteous person, humbled and burdened in this world, still upright in purpose but visibly stooped by hardship and restraint. That reading is completed only by looking at the letter's separate final form, used at the end of a word and discussed as its own entry elsewhere in this atlas, which straightens into a plain vertical stroke; commentators in this tradition read the straightened final Tzaddi as the same righteous person restored to an upright, unburdened state in the world to come, so that the two shapes of a single letter are read together as one continuous teaching about reward deferred rather than denied.
Tzaddi's literal meaning, a fishhook, is inherited from the older palaeo-Hebrew script that Jewish tradition holds the current alphabet replaced after the Babylonian exile, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, a plain everyday tool that later mystical commentary reworked into one of the more elaborate homiletic images attached to any Hebrew letter.