A
few weeks ago I noticed that one of our suppliers, Malchut
Yerushalayim, now has a siddur just for weekday Shacharis. These seem to be becoming quite popular.

Among my family members, pocket siddurs and bigger softcover siddurs just for Shabbos and Yom Tov are quite popular.

For
months I’ve been thinking of getting a weekday Shacharis siddur for
myself. I almost started using one of the Malchut Yerushalayim weekday siddurs
mentioned above, or maybe a very similar weekday siddur published by
Simchonim or Oz Vehadar. I like the idea of a siddur that has readable
print, but which doesn’t take up an more more space than necessary in my
tallit/tefillin bag.

There’s just one thing not quite right with them for me: all of the
weekday Shacharis siddurs I’ve come across so far are softcover, so if
you lay them down on the table, they’ll close unless you keep a finger
inside all the time. (It seems most people are okay with this, as long as it has a bookmark.)

So I’m going to be on the lookout now for a compact
Shacharis weekday siddur with a built-in bookmark, but also hardcover,
so it stays open. I’ll try to remember to update this post if I’m
successful. Most pocket-size hardcover siddurs won’t stay open on their own, but on the other hand, I have a fairly small Kiddush booklet that lays open nicely on the table, so apparently it is within the realmo of possibility according to the physics of bookbinding.

Purim 5782 is now exactly one month away. Purim 5780 is when COVID-19 made it’s grand debut in Israel. Until then there was a popular single with the refrain, “Corona, corona/Corona won’t come to Eretz Yisrael.”

So with praise to the Almighty for watching out for us along the way, I thought I’d share a quick review of how COVID impacted our business.

Everyone on our staff contracted the disease at one time or another (some of us twice), with light to moderate symptoms. And all of us were in quarantine at least once or twice. It was quite a challenge when our shipping manager was in quarantine, since most of his work is hands-on. Our tzitzit tie-er usually works from home, but it wasn’t easy when he was in quarantine, because we had to shuttle orders back and forth across town at least once a day.

In most cases our suppliers were able to get orders to us. Early on in the pandemic the government quarantined the entire city of Bnei Brak. For about a week that led one of our suppliers to arrange something akin to a smuggling tunnel to get goods out of the city.

Obviously there were times when shipping was slow. For at least a few weeks First Class shipping to the US was really bad. Shipping to Canada was quite slow until a few months ago, and Israel Post had to stop all shipping to Australia for a few weeks because of their lockdowns (shipping to Australia resumed a few days ago). However, throughout these two years DHL Express has been performing just fine, since they have their own fleet of planes at their disposal, so that meant we had a fast, reliable option for customers who couldn’t afford to wait (wedding, bar mitzvah, etc.).

From a financial standpoint, we were severely hampered by the very poor USD/NIS exchange rate over the past two years, which has a very significant effect on profitability for Israel-based exporters. Over the past week we’ve started to finally see some improvement.

I suppose very few businesses have not been impacted by COVID. For us, probably the biggest change is that the two major tallit makers are now way behind on production. We have always had very good working relations with numerous suppliers in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, Beersheba and elsewhere which allowed us to procure almost any tallit or tzitzit product within 2-4 business days. If one supplier didn’t have it in stock, we’d go to another supplier.

But times have changed. (See Israel’s milk (and tallit) shortage.)

Supply-chain delays eventually affected the tallit industry in Israel so that today we’re often told by those same suppliers that it’s unavailable and the next production run could easily be months down the road. So to avoid disappointing customers, we increased our in-house stock in order to be less reliant on suppliers. And on most product pages we have made it impossible to place an order if a certain size is currently out of stock. 

Another big change we made is that now, instead of having the tying fee built into the tzitzit strings cost, on most product pages you will now see the cost of the strings and the fee for the tying separately. We had been considering this change for quite a while, but until recently didn’t have the staffing resources needed to reconfigure somewhere in the neighborhood of 50-100 product pages.

For our customers it means more transparency and more flexibility.

When each of my sons came of age (actually I still have one son well under bar mitzvah age), it was usually a bit of a challenge to explain to them what size tallit katan they should wear, because the minimum size for a garment to require tzitzit is very big on your typical bar mitzvah boy. Of course some of my boys were more receptive, some less.

Today I received an inquiry from a prospective customer asking about tzitzit sizing for his sons.

I’m looking to place an order for myself and my twin boys. I’m interested in getting wool tzitzit.

I’m 6’1″ and typically wear a XL shirt size. Can you advise which size tzitzit I should buy that will fit me?

For my twins this will be for their Bar Mitzvah so this will be for a 13-year-old, and they are average size.

     Thank you, Jeremy

I explained to Jeremy that according to halacha, there is a minimum size requirement for any tzitzit garment (shiur beged). This is a very complicated topic, and I’m not qualified to make any authoritative recommendations.

From
a practical standpoint, it’s somewhat problematic because the smallest
halachic sizes are typically quite big on a bar mitzvah boy. So a father
has to know what size the boy should be wearing, and he needs to know
his son, so that he has a feel for how much he can coax him into wearing
a big tzitzit garment and tucking in a lot. So if you ask a rabbi what
the minimum size is, you might want to ask him for guidance in how to
present that to a bar mitzvah boy.

According to some opinions,
the minimum size is what the Grach Na’eh holds: a Size 5 / US Size 20 in wool (which is equivalent to a Size 8 / US Size 20 in cotton).
Certain rabbis may be of the opinion that it’s okay to go down a size. And there are poskim, notably Rabbi Moshe Feinstein and the Chazon Ish zt”l, who hold you need to go up to a Size 22 or Size 24.

I spent Shabbos in Tiberius. Friday morning I went to HaRav Dov Kook’s shul for Shacharis. I noticed that most of the kehilah had he same tzitzit tying, and it began to pique my interest. They use Raavad strings and tie with five double knots with three, three, three and then four chulyot in between the knots, just like the understanding of Sefer HaChinuch, except that they do the chulyot not as simple wraps, but rather Rambam/Yemenite chulyot. I asked two people why HaRav Kook espouses this approach, but they didn’t seem to know. Both of them referred me to the person who does the tying for the entire kehilah ― and for HaRav Kook himself.

I got him on the phone, and he explained that this tying method has you covered for all of the main Rishonim. (Asking HaRav Kook himself seemed to be unrealistic, because I got the sense he spends much of his time ensconced in a side room, to which entry is barred to visitors most of the time.)

HaRav Kook follows many kabbalah practices and is known for certain eccentricities (the type of practices that only a talmid chacham of note can indulge in) so I sort of expected an unusual, highly original tying method.

But on the other hand, his talmidim include both Ashkenazim and Sephardim, and he himself is an Ashkenazi who adopted Sephardic tefilah, so it makes sense that his tzitzit tying would be somewhat universal.

Apparently he simply opted to adopt the opinion of the Ramak, with one departure: instead of following the Tosafot’s opinion that of the four strings on each corner, two full strings should be blue, Rabbi Kook holds that one full string should be blue. Rafael Hecht of Toronto told me that Rabbi Bentzion Twersky also ties Ramak with a full string of blue. We may be introducing this as a standard option in the near future אי”ה. Reader feedback would be welcome!

If you’ve ever seen photos of HaRav Kook, you may have noticed a whole lot of tzitzit. His talmid explained to me that he wears numerous tallit katans because every four-cornered garment with tzitzit is a separate mitzvah, so he can opt to fulfill numerous mitzvot. In the photo below, note that of the seven or more tallis katan garments he is wearing, at least two are not Ramak tying.

I also noticed that many of the talmidim had a navy blue lining on their tallit. Unfortunately I didn’t get the chance to ask about that.

Typically when referring to techelet strings, Ptil Tekhelet comes to mind. The organization (until recently a non-profit organization) has been in operation for decades, based in Kfar Adumim (between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea).

There is also an offshoot called Techeiles Chabura, run by Rabbi Toporovich, which is often considered “more yeshivish.” A colleague in Toronto writes, “The fact that one group is more ‘Yeshivish’ appeals to a certain crowd (though I personally never saw a snail with a black hat — though they do exist in California).

Both Ptil Tekhelet and Techeiles Chabura make the dye from the same snails. According to some opinions, the Techeiles Chabura strings meet slightly higher kashrut standards since the the production is done with “mitzvah intent” from an earlier stage, namely, from the carding stage (lashonot hatzemer) rather than the spinning (tevia).