Is it allowed? · Judaism
זָנָבzanav · Hebrew, tail
Be a tail to lions.
The Torah has laws about what you eat, what you wear, what you carry on Shabbat and what you may mix with what. We went through them. A faux-fur tail breaks none of them, and a rabbi of the Mishnah practically recommends one.
I · Pirkei AvotBe a tail to lions
הֱוֵי זָנָב לָאֲרָיוֹת, וְאַל תְּהִי רֹאשׁ לַשּׁוּעָלִים
Rabbi Matia ben Charash said: Be the first to greet every person. And be a tail to lions, rather than a head to foxes.
Pirkei Avot 4:15
Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers, is the one tractate of the Mishnah with no law in it, only advice. It is read on Shabbat afternoons between Pesach and Rosh Hashanah, which means that for half the year, in synagogues all over the world, someone reads out loud: be a tail.
The usual reading: better the least among great people than the first among small ones. We agree with the usual reading. We would only point out, respectfully, that the word Rabbi Matia chose is zanav, and that it is not a metaphor for us.
Note also which tail. A lion’s. We make a fox’s, the animal you are told not to be the head of, and its tail is as far from its head as you can get.
Rabbi Matia ben Charash headed an academy in Rome in the second century, in a city that kept real lions, so he knew what he was talking about. (Some editions number the saying 4:20.)
II · KashrutNot kosher. Not treif either.
The laws of kashrut govern what you eat. Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 list the animals; the rabbis built the rest: slaughter, salting, meat and milk, separate dishes, a whole kitchen.
None of it reaches a thing you don’t eat. So a tail is not kosher, and it is not treif either. It is outside the system entirely, like a shoe, a lamp or a bicycle. You do not need a hechsher (a kosher certificate) for it, and if you saw one on a tail you should be suspicious of the tail.
In general, the Torah forbids eating a forbidden animal, not touching or using it. This is why a pigskin football is no problem for an observant player.
There are two famous exceptions where you may not even benefit from the thing: meat cooked in milk, and chametz on Pesach. Our tails contain neither. Please do not bake bread in one.
Hechshers do appear on aluminum foil and dish soap, because foil touches food and soap touches dishes. A tail should touch neither.
III · KilayimShatnez-free, by construction
לֹא תִלְבַּשׁ שַׁעַטְנֵז צֶמֶר וּפִשְׁתִּים יַחְדָּו
Thou shalt not wear a mingled stuff, wool and linen together.
Deuteronomy 22:11 · JPS 1917
Here is the one law that does apply to things you wear: shatnez, wool and linen in the same garment. It is a chok, a statute without a stated reason, and it is kept to this day: there are shatnez laboratories, real ones, where people bring new suits to be checked under a microscope.
And the Mishnah is precise about what counts. Only sheep’s wool and linen: “Nothing is forbidden on account of kilayim except wool and linen” (Kilayim 9:1). Camel’s hair mixed with linen is fine, if the camel is the majority. Hemp is fine. Silk is fine.
Our furs are synthetic. There is no wool in them and no linen. Ask us and we will tell you what the thread is, too. Shatnez-free, by construction. As far as we know, nobody has ever brought a shatnez lab a tail. Be the first.
The same verse in Leviticus (19:19) forbids crossbreeding animals, and Deuteronomy 22:10 forbids plowing with an ox and a donkey together. Our ears and tails come in matching animals. If you wear the bunny ears with the cat tail, you are not violating Deuteronomy 22:10, which is about plowing. Please don’t plow in them.
IV · ShabbatWith what may an animal go out?
Our commentary
With what may an animal go out. On Shabbat one may not carry from a private domain into a public one. What a person or an animal wears is not carried; what it bears is. So the Mishnah goes, animal by animal, through what counts as wearing: a camel’s halter, a horse’s chain. Gear that keeps the animal safe or under control is clothing. Anything else is a burden.
A tail on Shabbat
Rams may not go out with the cart. In the east there were sheep whose fat tails were so heavy that shepherds built little carts to carry them, so they would not be bruised (Gemara, 54b). Herodotus saw them too: tails “not less than three cubits in length,” and shepherds who “know enough of carpentering to make little trucks for their sheep’s tails” (3.113). The Mishnah rules that a ram may not go out on Shabbat with its tail on a cart, because the cart is a burden. It does not object to the tail. Our fox tail, all twenty-eight inches of it, needs no cart.
Tail up, tail down
Ewes may go out shechuzot and kevulot. The Gemara explains (53b–54a): shechuzot, with the fat tail tied up, so that the rams can mount them; kevulot, with the tail tied down, so that they can’t. The Mishnah permits both on Shabbat; only Rabbi Yosei objects. So the tradition has had, for eighteen hundred years, a ruling on a tail worn up for sex and a tail worn down against it, and it allows you out in either.
בַּמֶּה בְּהֵמָה יוֹצְאָה וּבַמָּה אֵינָהּ יוֹצְאָה. יוֹצֵא הַגָּמָל בְּאַפְסָר, וְנָאקָה בַחֲטָם… וְסוּס בְּשֵׁיר… וְאֵין הַזְּכָרִים יוֹצְאִין בַּעֲגָלָה שֶׁתַּחַת הָאַלְיָה שֶׁלָּהֶן… בַּמֶּה אִשָּׁה יוֹצְאָה וּבַמָּה אֵינָהּ יוֹצְאָה.
With what may an animal go out, and with what may it not go out? A camel may go out with a halter, and a she-camel with a nose ring… and a horse with a chain… But rams may not go out with the little cart that is under their fat tail… With what may a woman go out, and with what may she not go out?
Mishnah Shabbat 5:1, 5:4, 6:1 · our translation
So the tradition asks the question twice: once in chapter five, about animals, and once in chapter six, about women. A petplayer who wants to walk to a friend’s house on Shabbat in a tail must therefore first decide which chapter applies to her.
Chapter six is generous. A woman may go out with braids of hair, “whether her own, her friend’s, or an animal’s” (6:5). The Mishnah, in other words, lets a woman wear an animal’s hair on Shabbat. Ours is not even an animal’s.
And if you say
And if you say: she will take it off to show her friend. This is exactly why the Sages forbade certain jewelry on Shabbat even where wearing it is allowed: lest she take it off to show it to a friend, and carry it four cubits in the public domain: dilma shalfa u-machavya, lest she take it off and show it (59b). But a plug-in tail is not taken off in the street to be shown. It is shown while worn, which is the whole point of it.
The eruv
And in a city with an eruv, the wire strung around the neighborhood that makes it, for carrying, one private domain, the question mostly falls away: inside it you could carry the tail in your hand.
The clip-on
And the clip-on? A tail clipped to a belt can be unclipped in the street and handed around, which is exactly what the Sages feared. On Shabbat, the plug is the observant choice: it stays where it is.
Teiku is how the Talmud ends an argument nobody could win. A later tradition reads it as an acronym: the Tishbite (Elijah) will answer questions and problems.
V · MikvehThe one place it’s no
Before immersion in a mikveh, nothing may come between the water and the body: not a ring, not a bandage, not nail polish, not a knot in the hair. This is chatzitzah, an interposition, and the attendant checks for it.
A tail is an interposition. Take it out first. This is the one place on this page where the answer is no.
There is also tevilat kelim: new metal and glass vessels bought from a non-Jew are immersed before they touch food. Our plugs are metal, but they are not for food. They do not go in the mikveh. The attendant has enough to do.
VI · Makkot 24bAkiva laughed
The Talmud ends tractate Makkot with a fox. Rabban Gamliel, Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah, Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Akiva walk up to the ruins of the Temple and see a fox come out of the place where the Holy of Holies stood. The others weep. Akiva laughs.
He explains: the prophet who foretold this ruin was right, so the prophet who foretold that old men and women will sit again in the streets of Jerusalem will be right too. And they say to him: Akiva, you have comforted us.
So in the Talmud, a fox in a ruin is a reason to laugh. Our first tail is a red fox.
Rabbi Meir, the Talmud says, knew three hundred fox fables, and only three of them have come down to us (Sanhedrin 38b). We have three tails. We are working on it.
The same Rabbi Meir allowed people out on Shabbat with a fox’s tooth, as a remedy; the Sages forbade it as a superstition (Mishnah Shabbat 6:10). Nobody in the Mishnah mentions a fox’s tail, which leaves it, by the default, permitted.
VII · KashyotObjections, and answers
- “The Lord will make thee the head, and not the tail” (Deuteronomy 28:13). On Rosh Hashanah we even eat the head of a ram and pray to be the head and not the tail.
- That verse is a blessing for a people among the nations. Avot is advice to a person choosing their company. Be the head at Rosh Hashanah; be a tail among lions the rest of the year. And note whose head is eaten: a ram’s, the very animal whose tail the Mishnah takes such care of.
- “A man shall not put on a woman’s garment” (Deuteronomy 22:5).
- A tail is neither a man’s garment nor a woman’s. Both kinds of fox have one.
- Doesn’t a garment need tzitzit?
- Tzitzit go on a garment with four corners (Numbers 15:38, Deuteronomy 22:12). A tail has no corners.
- What about tzniut, modesty?
- Then wear the plug, which nobody sees, under a long skirt. The Sages left the details to you, and so do we.
- And “the customs of the nations” (Leviticus 18:3)?
- The prohibition is usually read as covering customs rooted in idolatry, or done for no reason at all. Our customers have reasons.
VIII · WordsA few words
- Zanav זָנָב
- Tail.
- Kashrut כַּשְׁרוּת
- The dietary laws. Not applicable: you are not eating it.
- Shatnez שַׁעַטְנֵז
- Wool and linen together in one garment. Our fur is neither.
- Chok חֹק
- A statute given without a reason. Shatnez is one.
- Eruv עֵרוּב
- A boundary that lets you carry on Shabbat inside it.
- Chatzitzah חֲצִיצָה
- Anything between you and the mikveh water. Including a tail.
- Kashya / teruts קֻשְׁיָא / תֵּרוּץ
- A difficulty, and its answer.
- Teiku תֵּיקוּ
- Let it stand. The question stays open.
Be a tail to lions. Be the first to say hello.
Other traditions, each on its own page
CatholicismOrthodox ChristianityIslamProtestantismHinduismBuddhismWritten with real sources and a straight face, by a shop, not a scholar. For a ruling that binds you, ask your rabbi, priest, imam, pandit, teacher or pastor. We did not ask ours.