The other day, as I looked in the mirror, I took note of my tzitzis, which were hanging out. I started thinking (is there anything that doesn’t make me think?) about a post that I had written about why I stopped wearing a black hat. What, I wondered, was the difference between wearing the hat and wearing my tzitzis out? Were they not both expressions of “frumkeit”, an approach to Torah observance that no longer appeals to me?
When I wrote the article about the hat, I was rather surprised to see it go viral, well at least by my modest standards. A friend informed me that my article had been shared in a Jewish women’s group, where it was discussed in the context of women who are struggling with the issue of hair covering. Although I was pleased that something I had written had found an audience, I was a little uncomfortable with the context. After all, wearing a hat is not a halachic requirement, whereas covering hair is. In the end I recognized that once something is written and given over to the public, it no longer fully belongs to its author.
Which brings me to tzitzis. Although Jewish men are supposed to wear tzitzis, there is no obligation to wear them with the strings exposed. In the Mishna Berura, the Chofetz Chaim, writes that a “ba’al nefesh”, one who is exceedingly pious, should wear the strings hanging out. As a friend likes to point out, Rav Yehuda Amital zt”l said that in his generation everyone realized that the term “ba’al nefesh” did not not apply to them, while today, too many people thinks it does. While I once might have been impressed with my religious level of observance, I no longer have that level of hubris.
So now that I know that I am not a ba’al nefesh and am less of a ba’al gaivah, why do I continue to wear my tzitzis exposed? The truth is, that I did not start wearing them that way after learning the Mishna Berura. I began doing so 25 years ago in Israel, after something occurred that gave me reason to think that I had reason to do something external to better remind myself of who I aspired to be. I figured that any place where I could not go with my tzitzis exposed was not a place I belonged.
It seems to me that, for me at least, stopping doing anything that smacks of an earlier stage of “frumkeit”, just to show I’ve changed, is as mistaken as taking something on that is not real to who I am. Although forever is a very long time, I will not go back to wearing a hat, but, ba’al nefesh or not, the tzitzis are here to stay. They are part of my being real with my Judaism.
