Hillel Fuld

Hillel Fuld will tell you upfront: he comes from a family that sweats. Not metaphorically — actually, physically, chronically. And for most of his adult life, that was reason enough to skip the mitzvah of tzitzit almost entirely. One more layer under his shirt in the Israeli heat wasn’t happening. He’s said as much himself, calling it out as a kind of confession rather than dressing it up.

What changed it was a friend, Marc Tobin, who’d opened a techeiles production facility and handed Fuld a few pairs with the blue string included. Fuld read the gesture as a nudge he couldn’t ignore, put them on that day, and — by his own account — hasn’t skipped since. No dramatic turning point, no big epiphany. Just a friend’s factory output sitting in his hands, and a decision to stop making excuses.

The part of his story that actually stops you, though, happened at a cemetery. Fuld wears his tzitzit out, visible, the way plenty of guys do now that techeiles has gone from fringe practice to fairly normal. There’s a halacha that says you tuck them in before entering a cemetery — the concept is loeg larash, not mocking the dead with a mitzvah they can no longer perform. Fuld had heard that halacha explained more times than he could count over the decades, and it never landed. Intellectually he understood it. Emotionally, nothing.

Then he went to visit his brother’s grave.

Ari Fuld was murdered in a terror attack at the Gush Etzion Junction in 2018. Hillel has written about him with the kind of specificity that only comes from real memory — Ari never without his tzitzit hanging visible, showing up in photo after photo mid-prayer, wrapped in tefillin, all in. Standing at the grave, singing, crying, just being there with family, Hillel looked down mid-service and realized he’d forgotten to tuck his own tzitzit in. First time that had ever happened to him — which makes sense, since for most of his life he wasn’t wearing them at all, and once he started, he’d never worn them out in public the way he does now.

He tucked them away and, standing there, the halacha he’d learned a hundred times finally clicked. His brother’s name gets a specific treatment from Rashi — an Ari, a lion, is someone who rises in the morning eager to perform mitzvos, and Rashi’s own examples of that eagerness are tzitzit, krias Shema, and tefillin. Two prayer-related mitzvos and tzitzit, out of six hundred and thirteen options. Hillel’s read on it: that wasn’t a coincidence, it was practically written into his brother’s name. Ari really had lived that way — every photo confirms it. Standing graveside, forgetting to tuck the strings in, Hillel didn’t experience the halacha as abstract anymore. He experienced it as his brother, specifically, watching him do something Ari no longer could. He tucked them in and, in his words, said “my bad, bro” to the grave.

There’s a second layer to how Fuld talks about techeiles that’s worth pulling out on its own: he treats it as a mitzvah his own ancestors literally couldn’t access. The chilazon was lost for close to two thousand years — not deprioritized, not skipped, just gone, along with the knowledge of how to find and process it. Somewhere in that stretch of history, everyone wearing tzitzit was wearing white strings only, missing a component the Torah actually specifies. Fuld’s read is straightforward: living in a generation that gets to recover that piece is not a small thing, and paired with everything else going on in Israel over the last few years, he’s said it adds to a broader sense that this moment feels charged in a way most generations didn’t get to experience.

He’s not shy about the uncertainty either. There are still poskim who aren’t convinced today’s techeiles is the genuine Tekhelet described in Chazal. Fuld’s approach to that doubt is almost businesslike: if it’s not authentic, you’ve lost nothing by wearing it; if it is, you’ve picked up a mitzvah your grandparents never had the option to keep. He picked the Rambam’s tying method — the thirteen-knot version — when he went back for a second pair at a factory tour he brought his son Nadav along for, the same trip where Nadav apparently spent the whole car ride playing 80s music on Spotify, to his father’s visible delight.

None of this reads like a man defending a stringency. It reads like someone who resisted a mitzvah for decades over something as unglamorous as sweat, got handed a reason to stop resisting, and then had that reason turn out to be a lot heavier than “a friend gave me a gift.” Notable wearer isn’t really the right frame for Fuld. He’s more of a case study in how this mitzvah tends to catch people — sideways, personally, and usually a lot later than they expected.

To sum up Hillel:

“Proud Zionist/Jew, Global Speaker (50+ cities), Tech Columnist, Advisor (Google, Microsoft, Oracle), Dad x5. Banned from Australia. We will dance again! 🇮🇱💪” (X profile)