Entries by Ben
New demographic: The solid black tallit wearer
Most of my customers want a white tallit with black stripes, or sometimes blue stripes or other shades, but recently I encountered a bar mitzvah boy who decided he wanted an all-black tallit. His parents vetoed the idea, saying it was "too extreme."
And not long ago I had a customer who wanted a custom...
Keeping your tallit in place: How to keep a tallit from slipping
Does your tallit go slip-sliding off the sides of your shoulders every few minutes?
When you're trying to focus on tefilah, this can be an annoying distraction. Some people get used to adjusting the tallit on their shoulders without thinking, but others look for a way to prevent "tallit slippage."
Some turn to tallit clips, but...
Tzitzit: Thin or thick?
Tzitzit come in two standard sizes, thin and thick. Either can be used on a tallit, though it seems thin is more commonly seen in modern congregations, while thick is the standard in traditional congregations.
If you are tying tzitzit yourself, thick may be a bit easier on your fingers.
On a tallit katan, thick tzitzit...
Black-striped tallitot: Origins of the custom
When the formula for the techelet dye was lost, some adopted a custom of adding a blue stripe to the tallit itself. Others opted to add a black stripe of mourning for the loss of techelet. The black stripe gained popularity in Europe of the 15th through 19th centuries, when black-and-white clothing was more...
Tallis: ‘We close our eyes to the visual world’
This week I came across a fabulous commentary on tzitzis by Rabbi Avraham Greenbaum. He writes that the tzitzis surround us on all four sides, "a visual reminder of G-d's presence everywhere. The blue techeles thread in the tzitzis is the color of the sea, which is a reflection of the color of the...
Tzitzit tying: How long should it take?
Your son’s first tallit
Upon giving a bar mitzvah tallit to his son, Rabbi Menachem Creditor penned an insightful "meditation."
"Maybe once you wear this tallit, perhaps on a day when no one else is watching, you and I will be able to talk about how it felt," he writes. He shares with his son "an understanding gained over...
A tallit katan…in Wolf Point, Montana?
Where is the last place in the world you would expect to come across a tallit katan?
Judy Posen was headed for a scrabble tournament in Minneapolis and decided to make the excursion into a road trip. She set out from Seattle heading east, with her scrabble board, scrabble dictionary, road maps and and a...
Why the Black Stripe?
According to halacha, the earliest time you are allowed to recite the tzitzit bracha is when there is enough light outside to distinguish between your white tzitzit strings and your techelet tzitzit strings. Since today we do not have techelet (although there is room to disagree with that statement), I had always assumed this...