[Avodah] Lehadlik Ner (on tefilin)

[hankman]

RAE wrote:
> The mitzva is to wear tefillin, but the brocho is 'Lehoniach Tefillin' - to 'put them on'. The 'putting on' is merely the process by which the mitzva is achieved, not the mitzva itself, unlike, say, 'Al Achilas Matza'.

RZS reponded:
Is it? The mitzvah is "ukshartam".

CM responds:
Well the pasuk could mean these things: 1) As RZS wrote: the mizvah is the keshira as the pasuk says (and not the subsequent wearing or perhaps that too) or 2) the Torah is telling us the mitzvah is to wear the tefilin derech keshira, ie., the way to wear the tefilin and keep them on is by binding them to your arm, but not that the mitzvah itself is the binding. This could be RAE’s interpretation of the pasuk. OR 3) We could consider the rest of the pasuk “l’os al yadecha” so that they be an “os” on your arm, which would then (also) imply a mitzvah of wearing them after they are bound to your arm. Perhaps both RAE and RZS agree with 3) in combination with either 1) or 2).

According to 1) you would seemingly be be better off not to wear the shel yad all day, but to bind them to  you and then take them off so that you could bind them to you once again doing the mitzvah once again, but there would not be much of a hidur in keeping them on all day since wearing them is not necessarily the mitzvah in 1).  2) and 3) do not have this problem.

On further thought, it would seem that as for the shel rosh there is no keshira thus there the mitzvah is only the wearing, and since we have a drasha of kol zeman shebein einecha yiyu shetayim therefore there must also be a mitzvah to wear the shell yad which would be consistent with 2) and 3) but not 1).

There is discussion in the meforshim if the mitzvoh of wearing tefilin the whole day is daureisa or if a keshira kol dehu is sufficient min hatorah (they bring an apparent  stira in the levush on this).

I have done a quick search on my computer and various meforshim discuss these different mehalechim in the mitzvah of tefilin.

On a tangent:
I also came across something new to me during this search. In the sefer Mishnas Chaim from R. Chaim Shteinberg he discusses whether in fact the mitzvah applied during the 40 years in the midbor. He discusses 3 different possibilities (based on different answers of a Rashba). The difficulty is that 2 of the four parshios do not appear until devarim 6 and 11 which is at the end of the 40 years. The Rashba discussing something else suggests in one answer that although the last two parshios were not yet written in the Torah until the 40th year, but  they were already ONLY available for derashos, in his other answer he writes that we must say that although they only appear in Devarim ALL FOUR PARSHIOS were already given right after leaving Egypt. So RCS describes 3 possibilities wrt to tefilin during the forty years. 1) they had tefilin like ours if the for parshios were already available at the start of the 40 years. 2) Their tefilin only used the two available parshios for most of the 40 years until the 40th year when the last 2 parshios were given, 3) Since tefilin require 4 parshios, they had no mitzvo of tefilin for the first 39 years until the final 2 parshios were given and then they made tefilin like ours.

Kol tuv

Chaim Manaster
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20120718/2cc1fa8f/attachment.htm>