[Avodah] Mitsvat Sukkah is almost unique

[T613K at aol.com]

From: "Joseph C. Kaplan" _jkaplan at tenzerlunin.com_ 
(mailto:jkaplan at tenzerlunin.com) 

>>RAF  writes concerning whether mikveh should be included in the mitzvot  
encompassing the entire body: "The mitzvah isn't to be in the mikveh, but to  
abstain from certain activities while tamei, and perhaps also to be as tahor  
as can be. The mikveh is the facilitator, but not the mitzvah itself.  KNLAD."

But the woman makes a bracha "asher kidshanu bemitzvotav  v'tzivanu al 
hatevilah" implying that it is the tevilah -- that is, the  immersion in the 
mikveh -- that is the mitzvah.<<

Joseph Kaplan 


 
>>>>>
Of course tevillah is a mitzva in the sense that once you became nidah,  if 
you are a married woman and if you want to be with your husband, you  have to 
go to the mikva.  But you had no chiyuv to become nidah or to be  married.  Or 
if you're a man living at the time of the Bais Hamikdash, it  would be a 
mitzva to go the mikva /if/ you had become tamei.   But you  had no chiyuv to 
become tamei!  So there is no "mitzva" to go the mikva in  the sense of "universal 
obligation."
 
Whoever first said, "There are two mitzvos that are performed with the  
entire body" had in mind this definition of mitzva:  an obligation  incumbent upon 
everyone.  (Or, incumbent upon every Jewish man, to be  more precise.)



--Toby  Katz
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