Skip to main content

A garment that resembles Tzitzit

Yesterday, my friend posted about this company tzitzit belts on Facebook. At first I thought that the idea was sort of interesting, but the more I looked at the product, and the more I thought about it, the crankier it made me.



The point of this product is to give the wearer an easy way to wear tzitzit.  They are made in versions for kids and versions for women and men. At first glance it seems like it might be a cool way to do the mitzvah of tzitzit.

But then, you need to look a bit more closely.

Tzitzit need to be attached to a four cornered garment. This belt is technically a four cornered garment. The tzitzit need to be attached a finger's width from the corner.  You can see that the corners are in the back of this belt and the tzitzit hang from the garment with no relationship to the corners.

Tzitzit need to be part of the garment and not pinned  or attached to the garment in a temporary way. The four 'buttons' on this belt are similar to the buttons on jeans jackets. The tzitzit are simply suspended from the belt. They are not integral to the belt. So what you have is strings tied in the manner of tzitzit suspended from buttons on a belt. What you don't have is a garment that allows you to fulfill the mitzvah of tzitzit.

I spend lots of time re interpreting traditional Jewish ritual objects in new ways. If you do that in a serious manner, you need to also pay attention to halacha, Jewish law. If you don't then what is produced is a toy.  if you just hang a bunch of string tied in the manner of tzitit from your belt loop, you have done something cool but you are not fulfilling the mitzvah of tzitzit. I feel sad when I see the public being misled.


Labels:

Comments

  1. BenApril 21, 2012 at 6:34 PM

    Well put! I suspect it's Christian mitzvah enthusiasts (Messianic Christians) who are primarily responsible for introducing this distortion. One point you could add is that according to halacha, a garment also has a minimum size requirement. Although there are different opinions (Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, Grach Naeh, Chazon Ish) everybody agrees that under 18 x 18 inches is not considered a garment.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sarah JacobsApril 22, 2012 at 3:52 PM

    Ben -

    I know that while there is s minimum requirement...I had head some shoah survivors tell me that some people wore small scale tzitzit that they kept in their pockets to escape detection. So under unusual circumstances the scale can be made smaller.
    Yes, there are also Christians taking on tallit, ztitzit and other central ritual objects and symbolism.That is a whole different essay...I clearly have complicated feelings about using a tallit or a torah scroll within a Christian context. It also makes me thing about how Tibetans feel about people using prayer flags as decor.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I love hearing from my readers. I moderate comments to weed out bots.It may take a little while for your comment to appear.

Popular posts from this blog

Barukh Dayan HaEmet - Blessed be the True Judge

In 1986, when I first began working for my synagogue, one of the volunteers was a teeny little Austrian woman. Ida was so little and cute, you could swear you could just put her in your pocket and carry her around. Ida also babysat for a little girl  in our community. When I saw the two of them running around together and laughing as if they were both four, I knew that when I had kids, Ida would babysit for my kids. In order to be sure that Ida would take care of my oldest, I told her I was pregnant at the same time I told my mother. Soon after my oldest was born,  Ida was ready. She was silly, but she was also Austrian. She had her rules. She would care for a child only until they could walk. She felt that she was too old to chase children. She would work only twelve hours a week. The baby had to be fed, dressed and ready to go out when she showed up. Ida's rules made sense. It taught me, and my oldest, the value of having a schedule. Ida and ...
1 comment
Read more

Two funerals and a birthday

 I know that it has been a while since I posted. We went to Boston last weekend to celebrate the bar mitzvah of a family friend. I may post about the weekend in a different post. Two disparate topics in one post is all I can manage today.  Yesterday was a busy day and filled with big emotions. We began the day at the funeral  of a young man who was a Hebrew School classmate of my older son's. I had such fond, fond memories of the sweet, funny, kind and exceptionally bright young man who also had terrible struggles. I kept remembering the young man both  as a delightful child full of promise and the suffering that he and his family have been through for the past many years. I sat with two women whose children attended preschool with the young man. We three held one another in our sorrow. Yesterday was also my husband's birthday. My husband is not someone who wants things.  When we were  at Bingo---the kosher version of Costco I spotted a large package of ste...
Post a Comment
Read more

It All Feels Like Yesterday

Today, an oponion piece in the Wall Street Journal had the headline These Days, It All Feels Like Yesterday. It seemed a perfect way to sum up how we live our lives these days. I have been far more willing during this Covid time to do the sort of slow going work that I tend to avoid like the plague during normal times. I have been working away on Max's tallit. I had decided to get the lettering on the atara in a new to me way. Actually, to be completely honest, this is a method I have read about since I was a kid. You draw the design on a bit of what is called "waste fabric". Then you embroider the design and then you pull away the waste fabric thread by thread. The embroidered design remains, but all of your guidelines are gone, as if by magic. I had more or less finished embroidering the letters. (There were little bits of letters I hadn't quite finished but knew that I could add after the purple fabric was pulled away.) I began by picking out all of my red basting ...
2 comments
Read more