Tzitzit – Page 2 – Ben's Tallit Shop

Rabbi Sacks: Is anybody watching me?

by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks You are driving ever so slightly above the speed limit. You see a police car in your rear view mirror. You slow down. You know perfectly well that it is wrong to exceed the speed limit whether anyone is watching or not, but being human, the likelihood of being found out...

Tzitzit to Latvia

We don't get a lot of tzitzit orders coming out of Latvia. Now I think I know why. The Daugavpils Ghetto numbered as many as 14,000 residents The shipping address listed on the order info looked quite odd to me, so I did a Google search for the city, Daugavpils. On the Wikipedia page that...

Should I wear my kippah and tzitzit visibly in public?

What is wearing a kippah all about? The distinctiveness of the kippot is alluded to in Birkot Hashachar, the start-of-the-day blessing that thanks God for “crowning Israel with splendor” (Brachot 60b). Wearing a kippah is a reminder of G-d (Kiddushin 31a) – a recognition that there is Someone “above” us who watches our every...

Does a tallit (or tallit katan) have to be white?

Last week I was a bit surprised to get an inquiry asking whether we could provide someone with a camouflage tallit. Hi. I’m a soldier (U.S.) and was thinking of getting a tallis in a camouflage pattern, or that somehow incorporates it. I spoke with a frum chaplain and he knew of one supplier, but...

Tallit & tzitzit solutions for people with wool allergies

Every once in a while we get inquiries from people with wool allergies, or wool sensitivities. The good news is that one leading tzitzit maker in Jerusalem recently introduced a very high quality 100% cotton tallit in a few different designs, including a black-striped cotton tallit and a light blue-striped cotton. Today we received an...

How kosher are your tzitzit?

When you want to know whether the chicken you eat is kosher, in some ways the question is straightforward. Assuming you used a kosher species and did the salting right and no issues came up during shechita, if there is any uncertainty whether the trachea and esophagus were cut properly, you take it to...

Menachos: How big does a tallis katan have to be?

Were you to tie tzitzit on a super small beged, obviously everyone would agree you can't carry out the mitzvah of tzitzit with a tallis katan that small. What, then, is the size requirement for a tallis katan? The answer is a bit complicated. In Masechet Menachot and the Shulchan Aruch (O.C. 16, 1) we find...

Cotton or wool & other tzitzit quandries

The first tzitzit I wore was a mesh tallit katan I bought at a little "dry goods" store open a few hours a week on a religious kibbutz near Beit She'an. It's hard for me to remember clearly that far back, but I'm pretty sure I switched to regular cotton a short time later. While...

Is your three-year-old boy ready for tzitzis?

I've been selling talleisim and tzitzis full time for seven or eight years. Our tzitzis are worn by thousands of Jews around the world -- from Portland and Seattle to Chicago, New York and Toronto. From Los Angeles to Denver, Dallas, Atlanta and Miami. From Rome and Madrid to London, Berlin, Amsterdam and Stockholm....

Lightweight Tallit Katan

We often get customers who don't want to budge from wearing a wool tallit katan, but want it as cool as possible for summer use. Since summer is now right around the corner, we decided to put several wool tzitzit garments on the scale and see how they compare. Personally, during the hot summer months...