There are various levels of adherence to Chabad
customs. Strictly speaking, there is only one type of tallit katan for
Lubavitch chassidim: wool, round neck, straight bottom hem, silk corners
and diagonally aligned holes. Apparently because some people really
find it hard to wear wool, there is also a cotton version, but again,
people who adhere closely to Chabad customs will stick with wool.
Also
note that we describe the tzitzit tying as "Arizal/Chabad." Chabad
holds that there should be two holes in the corner, the Arizal does not.
Chabad adopted the Arizal's method of tying tzitzit with chulyot. The
holes on the beged and the way the tzitzis are tied are really two separate issues.
The concept of two holes is similar to the two horizontally aligned
holes you find by other Chassidim, who do not tie in accordance with the
Arizal.
We
aim to provide talleisim and tzitzis to Jews of every description,
therefore we get all sorts of orders: a Yemenite tallit with Ashkenazi
tzitzit, a modern tallit with Yemenite tying, etc. We have had at least two
customers who repeatedly ordered the Cotton Comfort with Yemenite
tzitzit. The Rambam writes that you need a wool garment for tzitzit, so
it doesn't make sense for customers to order this, but they do.
Recently I had a customer who ordered this tallit katan
and asked us to make it super long, because he wanted to follow the
tradition of the Vilna Gaon to have a tallit katan down to the knees. He
ordered niputz lishmah tzitzit on it. And he lives in Singapore.
Putting these elements together is very incongruous, but I don't impose
my opinion on my customers.
To help make matters clear to Chabad customers, we organized strictly Chabad products in a separate category called "Chabad."
No comments:
Post a Comment