[Avodah] Mayim Achronim

[Zev Sero]

On 21/12/2010 9:44 AM, Goldmeier wrote:
> moved over from an areivim thread due to content turning to a more
> torah-oriented point...
>
> On 21/12/2010 4:31 AM, Moshe Y. Gluck wrote:
>> I think it's fair to say that Chareidi/Yeshivish/Chasidic women don't, as a
>> rule, wash Mayim Acharonim either. Which (that at least 50% of religious
>> Klal Yisroel don't wash Mayim Acharonim) tells me that the Minhag is not to
>> wash, and that those who do are being Machmir.
>
> why not?
> if mayim achronim is a chova, as the SA says (not my minhag personally,
> but not the point), where is the exemption for women? Does mayim sdomis,
> or the chiyuv, not apply to women somehow?

And yet the fact is that the tradition of women is not to wash.  As RAS
said, the fact that his mother didn't wash is all the evidence he needed
that it's OK for women not to wash.

My point in the Areivim thread was that when a woman does everything her
mother and grandmother did, then when she doesn't wash MA she has a
perfect excuse - her mother and grandmother didn't do it, so why should
she?  But when a woman doesn't do everything her mother and grandmother
did, then she doesn't really have that excuse.  And so when she *does*
wash MA she doesn't need to have some special reason; the fact that the
SA says she should is enough.  And I think the same applies to Chanukah
lighting; when a woman who is modern in her ways, i.e. isn't relying on
"torat imecha", decides to light candles, all the justification she
needs is in the SA, and it's not appropriate to demand an explanation or
to impute motives to her.

-- 
Zev Sero                      The trouble with socialism is that you
zev at sero.name                 eventually run out of other people’s money
                                                      - Margaret Thatcher