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 in the IDF I noticed that someone serving on my base in the Golan — just about the only other soldier there wearing tzitzit — wore a wool tallit katan. “Isn’t that hot?” I once asked him, as summer started to settle in. “It’s hotter in Gehennom,” he replied pithily. He was Sephardic and apparently felt that cotton is not really an option for him.
By the next summer I was wearing wool too. Again, memory fails me: I don’t know whether I decided to switch to wool based on halachic reasons or aesthetic reasons. I do recall that I felt it was very apt to a have a black-striped tallit katan with a straight edge for weekdays, and a white-striped tallit katan with a fringe for Shabbos.
But wool was not the end of the road for me. A few years later I started adhering closely to the customs espoused by the Vilna Gaon, and in Maaseh Rav it says that the Gra wore some sort of cotton tzitzit beged, not wool.
Years later I drifted to what I felt was a balanced perspective, and today I have both cotton and wool in my closet.
One tallit katan I’ve never worn — although we sell a whole lot of them and my sons wear them — is a cotton undershirt tzitzit (PerfTzit, etc.). Why not? Wearing a tallit katan against my skin just doesn’t work for me.
About a year ago the wool undershirt style tallit katan we sell (Wool Comfort) started to pique my interest. It seemed a bit odd at first because I kept thinking that for the same price or less you could get a standard wool tallis katan, which looks nicer, but when in doubt my motto is always: “Let’s give it a try.” So I wore a Wool Comfort several days a week for a month or so. I found it really is a bit more comfortable because the fabric is soft and stretchy, and because the pseudo-undershirt design keeps it in place better. That means less adjusting the tallit katan throughout the day, and it’s a whole lot easier when I lie down for a nap.
A few weeks I decided to give a similar product, Tzitzit Noam, a try. After a few weeks two things really impressed by: (1) the material is super lightweight and (2) for people like me who are hopelessly hung up on tallit katan shiur issues, the way it’s cut maximizes the shiur from the bottom of the neck opening down to the front edge. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that after several weeks no signs of tearing was visible in the fabric. The manufacturer tells me he did have complaints of tearing when he experimented with using 100 GSM fabric, compared to the 150 GSM fabric he now uses. For comparison, a standard wool tallit katan is 180-190 GSM. (GSM is a measurement of fabric density.)
