Hatam Soferet

Been taking some photos of tefillin for a piece about how tefillin are made, creatively entitled How Tefillin Are Made. Can’t figure out how to get this image into the text, but I like it, so I’m sharing it here.

Or possibly like this.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Anyone want to tell me about their experiences with kids and tefillin? In particular:

If they lay tefillin, why you got them started doing it and when you started them
What you told them about why we do it.

If you lay tefillin and they don’t, how/why that works.

Whether they play tefillin.

Who in the family wears them.

If they’re still babies, what you plan to do when they get old enough.

If you have teenagers, whether they do or don’t, whether they’re boy or girl, and what they think about it. (Or if you’re actually a real teen and you’re reading this, hi! and tell me about it yourselves.)

Anything else you think is relevant to parents considering tefillin for their kid?

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

In short – the amount of time it takes to produce them. Every bit of a pair of tefillin is made by hand, and the longer it takes to do, the more it costs.

The biggest price factor of a set of tefillin is the parchments. They have a lot of writing on them, and the writing is very small, even in big tefillin like in the picture (see? Big tefillin have four lines of writing in a space narrower than my finger. BIG tefillin). Small writing is hard to do well, so a good set of tefillin parchments takes a lot of time and effort to produce, which makes good parchments expensive.

Cheap tefillin have been written faster. Often, they’ve been scribbled such that the letters are barely kosher. “No-one will see,” the harried scribe thinks. “What’s it matter if they’re a bit iffy?” and iffy they are. Also, the cheapest tefillin are written on parchment which has been treated to make it easier to scribble on – but the treatment hastens the decay of the letters. So even if you’re lucky and the letters are just about kosher, they’re going to decay in ten years. This is why it is possible to buy very cheap tefillin, and why it is not the best decision.

The issue of coated parchment aside, tefillin parchments vary in quality. You can buy parchments where the writing is kosher but nothing special, or you can go all the way up the scale and buy parchments which are miniature marvels, so there is a fair bit of variation in price there, say between $400 and $1000+.

The boxes are the other main factor. Tefillin boxes are quite complicated inside (more information here), and there are different ways of making them. The easiest way to make tefillin boxes is with a scissors-and-glue exercise, cutting and folding and sticking the parchment until you have a box. But you’re supposed to make them from “one piece” of leather, so the more folding and the less cutting and sticking, the better – and the best way of all is to mould one piece of leather into a box shape, so that there’s no cutting and sticking at all. These are tefillin gasot, sturdy tefillin. Making them takes a lot of time and needs heavy-duty presses, so tefillin made this way are more expensive. The cutting-and-sticking sorts are called peshutim; the better ones are called peshutim mehudarim. Here too, some gasot are just gasot, and some gasot are really beautiful – you get what you pay for.

Compare to shoes – cardboard flipflops will keep your feet clean for a while, Crocs count as footwear, but decent shoes look good, last a long time, and are worth investing in; so too peshutim with scribbly parchments are just about okay, peshutim mehudarim with kosher parchments count as tefillin, and gasot with beautiful parchments are good tefillin you can be proud of that will last a long time.

So what should you be paying? If you’re paying less than $200 for new tefillin, you’re probably buying an inferior product that may not even be kosher, and you’re probably going to have to shell out for another set in ten years’ time. Better to invest $600 in a good set that will last your lifetime and can be passed onto your kid after you.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

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.

I keep sets of tefillin for loaning to women. Women, because men have an easy time of it if they want to borrow tefillin. A woman who wants to borrow tefillin – because she wants to try the practice before committing a few hundred dollars to tefillin, or because she hasn’t got that sort of cash – she has a hard time. It is for these women that I started collecting spare sets of tefillin.

The tefillin I have – thanks especially to Rabbi Ben Kramer, hi Ben! and also to Rabbis Abby and Juan, hey guys! – all need checking before I can send them to people. The more decrepit sets need actual repair, also.

I prefer to get this done by men, for many and varied reasons, and this doesn’t always happen as fast as I’d like.* I’ve just started to make some progress on the most recent lot, and I’ll make more progress before very long, but at the moment, I’m in a bit of a checking-backlog.

But hopefully, before too many more weeks have passed, I’ll have some more nice kosher tefillin to loan to more people.

* Because. The men I know who are willing to work with me fall into two categories – the grasping sort, who insist that These Tefillin Cannot Be Repaired Let Me Sell You A New Set, and the accommodating sort, who will sort them out eventually but have other things on their plates and take their sweet time.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.