Tags on tefillin

[hatam_soferet]

So – recently, someone sent me these tefillin, and as you can see, they have these little tags wired onto them. Funny, eh?

Here are close-ups. They’re little seals, stamped into blobs of lead. One side reads “כשר” and the other side reads “הרבנות הראשית ת”א-יפו” – kosher: chief rabbinate of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo.

I didn’t know one could do that to tefillin – put little tags on them like that and still have them be okay to wear. But this interests me very much.

Part of the reason I dislike checking tefillin is that when I put them back together again, they become non-kosher for non-egal Jews (i.e. mostly Orthodox ones) but indistinguishable from ones Orthodox Jews could wear. That is like sneaking lard into cookies labelled “kosher” and putting them out at kiddush – not something I want to do. But what if I made little tags that said “NOT KOSHER FOR ORTHODOXIM” or something?

Then maybe I could check tefillin for egal Jews without feeling bad about it?

(I really like these photos, by the way. Just as photos. Don’t you? I think they’ve got lovely composition.)

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.