[Avodah] Women and tefillin

[Micha Berger]

On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 06:01:30AM +0000, Elazar M. Teitz wrote:
: Indeed? Many women fulfill the mitzva of arba'a minim. How many of
: them fulfill the mitzvos of tzitzis and t'fillin?

In both of REMT's cases, there is actually strong reason for a woman
/not/ to fulfill those particular mitzvos:

Tzitzis are clothing, and once it wasn't in style for women to wear
tzitzis, for them to do so would violate "beged ish" ("Lo yihyeh keli
gever al ishah..." Dev 22:5)

At some point during the period of the tannaim (I think during the
Tosafists' era in particular), the time men wear tefillin was strictly
curtailed. Related to our recent discussion of how much kavanah our
rabbis think we are capable of today. Until then, men with desk jobs or
who learned all day were wearing tefillin all day as well. Since we lack
the necessary yishuv hadaas to think about tefillin for that many hours,
we now curtail our tefillin-wearing to the minimum necessary so that we
may say Shema without looking like a pack of liars.

For men, the minimum is during Shema, and we stretch that to the rest
of Shacharis. For women, the minimum is zero.

Thus, it is possible that Rashi's daughters really did wear tefillin, but
that still wouldn't reflect on what should be done today. Rashi himself
wore tefillin all day; this intellectual decay that made us unable to
have proper kavanah to wear tefillin all day hadn't reached us yet.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "The worst thing that can happen to a
micha at aishdas.org        person is to remain asleep and untamed."
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