Bread and Butter, Challah and Tefillin, and the “New Jew”

The following is an excerpt from Rabbi Dr. Haviva Ner-David's newly released book, Chanah's Voice: A Rabbi Wrestles with Gender, Commandment, and the Women's Rituals of Baking, Bathing, and Brightening, which is now available for purchase.

Whatever work in the home has now come to mean to me, I am still not willing to sacrifice my work in the world. I have come to value “women’s work,” but I also want to be involved in the work men have traditionally done. I want to bake challah and wear tefillin. Or, more accurately, I want both Jacob and myself to both bake challah and wear tefillin. And that is not so simple. It requires juggling, sharing, organizing, and compromise. Sometimes frozen spinach will have to do when we were both too busy all day to buy fresh; and sometimes the laundry will have to sit unfolded for days. And sometimes a meeting will have to be cancelled when a child is home sick; and sometimes the tefillin will have to lay, untouched, in their bag, when other more pressing responsibilities arise.

Rabbi Dr. Ner-David at prayer

But the mental and emotional switch I made as result of my journey into challah baking is that I now see all of these aspects of life as spiritual. Baking challah requires not only faith and submission to a process, but also patience and an ability to be present in the moment. Like all nurturing creative work.

When my oldest child, Michal, was born, my outer world changed and so did my inner world. To suddenly have a newborn to care for was a shock. Raising a child is a productive and grand endeavor, but day-to-day care-giving activities are not particularly intellectually satisfying. I would change a diaper only to have the baby decide that a clean diaper is an even better place to poop than the dirty one. Or I would finish nursing the baby and before I knew it, the baby was hungry again.

Despite the challenges of this consuming experience, I loved being the mother of a newborn. I loved nursing. I loved dressing my new baby. At first I tried to read books while nursing, but as Michal grew older, reading while nursing became more difficult and unnecessary. Instead, I spent the time watching her, playing with her fingers, or letting my thoughts wander. Caring for an infant prepared me for parenting in general. As time went by, I learned to let go, to enjoy sitting in the park with my kids, making them dinner, even folding the laundry. I became less goal-oriented, less achievement-oriented, and learned to just be, to be present and alive in the moment, and for that to be enough.

Is this state of being the end goal that the positive time-bound mitzvot—like laying tefillin and reciting the Sh’ma—are meant to achieve? Is this why women, historically the primary childcare providers, are exempt from these mitzvot? Did they learn the art of being present in the moment from their nurturing work and daily household tasks? The Mishnah tells us that women are exempt from positive time-bound mitzvot, but it gives us no explanation as to why. Fourteenth-century Rabbi David ben Joseph Abudraham explains that women serve their husbands; if they are obligated to perform time-bound mitzvot, they will feel torn between serving their master (“baal,” the Hebrew word for husband, also the word for master) and serving their Creator, and the result would be tension in the home. In the 13th century Rabbi Jacob Anatoly says that it is a woman’s God-given role to serve her husband. Therefore, it made no sense to obligate her to mitzvot that would take her away from the job God meant for her to do.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, writing in the 19th century, suggests that women are spiritually superior to men (both innately and due to their more cloistered existence away from the temptations and distractions of the world), and therefore do not need to perform all of the 613 mitzvot. Contemporary Rabbis Emanuel Rackman and Norman Lamm posit that women are more aware of the sanctity of time because of their monthly bodily cycles and therefore do not need the positive time-bound mitzvot, whose purpose is to make us aware of the sanctity and cyclical nature of time.

Another popular contemporary explanation for the exemption of women from positive time-bound mitzvot is that women’s time must be flexible so they can devote it to raising children and homemaking, which are as important as the mitzvot from which they are exempt. Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, the revered 20th century Ashkenazi posek, assumes this explanation for women’s exemption from positive time-bound mitzvot.

I doubt these contemporary explanations were the actual historical reasons for the exemption. Women in talmudic times did not live as cloistered an existence as women in 19th century Europe. Moreover, as in 19th and 20th century Europe, if the couple was not wealthy, neither would have had the time to lay tefillin in the mornings; and if they were wealthy and had servants, both the man and woman would have had the time. In talmudic times, wealthy women hired wet nurses and servants for most of the home-making and child-rearing work.

More likely, women were exempt from these mitzvot for reasons closer to those suggested by Rabbis Jacob Anatoly and David ben Joseph Abudraham back in the 13th and 14th centuries. Women’s role in Jewish society was to be subservient and enable the husbands to perform the important work, which included these most prestigious mitzvot. Another factor may have been the desire to keep these mitzvot in the hands of men to safeguard their sanctity and prestige. If women, second class citizens, began to perform these mitzvot, they would lose their value.

It seems from the Gemarah itself that “positive time-bound mitzvot” was a descriptive category rather than a prescriptive one. In the discussion on the mishnah which states the general principle that women are exempt from all positive time-bound mitzvot, the rabbis of the Talmud bring so many exceptions to the rule that they conclude that one cannot learn anything from general principles. Women probably did not commonly perform a number of mitzvot for the reasons stated above, and only later were these mitzvot lumped together and given a name so that the Rabbis could officially discourage women from performing them. This seems especially likely since there are so many mitzvot women are not only obliged to perform but that are even considered special “women’s mitzvot” that are just as if not more time-bound as those they are exempt from. I can think of no mitzvah more time-bound than lighting Shabbat candles, for instance, or all of the intricate internal vaginal checks required surrounding the menstrual cycle.

This means that when women’s exemption from the category of positive time-bound mitzvot was established, the issues were sociological, not spiritual. Women’s exemption preserved men’s power and kept women in their subservient role; it was not about women inhabiting a higher spiritual plane. There are too many derogatory statements about women in the Talmud for one to believe that the ancient rabbis considered women to be closer to God than they were. If the rabbis believed this, they would have told the women to make the rules! The rabbinic approach to mitzvot is not that they are a consolation prize. They are a privilege and an honor. They are humanity’s side of the covenant with our Creator.

Whatever the historical truth may be, however, it does not detract from the power of our own experience of mitzvot. Could caring for my children stand in for formal ritual acts? Could taking the time to steam organic carrots and mash them rather than buy baby food in a jar substitute for laying tefillin? No. Men and women need both: the everyday activities of family life, and the more formal mitzvoth, to connect us to our past, to our tradition, and to connect our children to that tradition and past.

Nevertheless, it may be that when we are caught up in nurturing, we do need these mitzvot less. Perhaps we can be easier on ourselves when we miss yet another morning of wrapping tefillin because we had to find our son’s shoes. Perhaps we can be more forgiving of ourselves when even on a more smooth morning, we, again, resort to a quick wrapping and unwrapping of the tefillin with only the most essential prayers thrown in. And maybe in the years when homemaking is at its most intense, we can even allow ourselves to take a break from some of the more formal mitzvot that take away from the time we need to spend with our children or spouses or in simply keeping afloat of household chores.

For instance, someone working a full-time job already has little enough time for family and communal life. How much time should he or she set aside for serious Torah study? Leaving home in the evening to study Torah makes sense if studying Torah is the highest Jewish value—and there are stories in the Talmud of scholars leaving home for years on end that would seem to support that position. But I would question the point of all that Torah study if it comes at the expense of other Jewish values including family, community involvement and making the world a better place.

I have come to the conclusion that the rabbis exempted women from certain mitzvot to ensure that men are free to serve God through mitzvot, and that the mitzvot not lose their status and, therefore, their power to inspire awe. The impact of this exemption on women’s spirituality and ability to serve God was acceptable, in their view—if the question of women’s spirituality was even considered.

Today, however, women are equal citizens in secular society (at least officially) and are not expected to sacrifice their self-fulfillment for men. The rabbinic model of women’s exemption from mitzvot no longer makes sense. Even as I have come to value homemaking and other nurturing activities once considered more feminine (such as communal work), I am still not willing to consider them “women’s work.” To be full, balanced human beings we all need to be engaged in both the public and private spheres, in nurturing acts as well as acts of self-fulfillment. Men, therefore, should take challah and women should wrap tefillin, and vice versa. If we value both of these experiences, and if we see neither gender as subservient to the other, we should settle for nothing less.

The growing presence of same-sex couples in our communities, who have joined together to sanctify their relationships and build families together, highlights how little it makes sense to divide roles along gender lines. Should the children of lesbian parents have no model for performing the mitzvah of tefillin? Should gay men not bake challah with their children? Should each member of the couple be assigned a traditional gender role? How much more sensible to share these mitzvot so that no one member of the couple loses out spiritually and no mitzvot are neglected!

Nevertheless, we should not take the rabbis’ concerns lightly. Will the mitzvah of wrapping tefillin lose its sacred aura if women begin to practice it? Not if we reckon women to be just as important as men. And not if we remember to value homemaking as akin to other, more formal spiritual acts. We need to shatter the hierarchical model altogether, not replace the current one with another.

But what of the concern that the family unit will suffer if we step away from homemaking to perform time-bound mitzvot? Will we all—men and women alike—be able to make time to perform the positive time-bound mitzvot daily and simultaneously give homemaking the attention it deserves? Perhaps not. But I am not suggesting that women strive to be men with all that the category entails in the halakhic rabbinic system. Rather, if it is impractical to expect everyone to lay tefillin every day at every point in their lives, perhaps we need to rethink the nature of this obligation for everyone—men and women alike.

Taking this notion seriously means creating a new halakhic category; rather than dividing Jews between “man” and “woman”, one obligated in time-bound mitzvot and one exempt, we can simply call a Jew a “Jew”. This new “Jew” will not be a member of a hierarchical, gendered Jewish society, and therefore, we need a new paradigm for how this new “Jew” should relate to mitzvot.

Perhaps the very notion of obligation is no longer the appropriate model for understanding mitzvot. In our day and age, religious practice stems more from personal choice than communal or even Divine obligation, and our understanding of what it means to be a mitzvah-observing Jew should reflect that. No longer are Jews born into a community which defines roles and sets religious expectations from which there is no escape. People choose to observe mitzvot who could just as easily ignore them. They choose to be part of a community of Jewish religious practice when they could just as easily walk away from their Jewish identity and observance. The theology that assumes obligation comes only from God is therefore no longer relevant for most of us.

Instead of an obligation imposed from without, Jews practice mitzvot because of a commitment from within. One might even make a commitment to a specific religious community or approach, or even make a commitment to God, and by so doing obligate oneself to observe mitzvot—but the option to not make that commitment is equally real.

I propose, then, that we accept this sociological reality as a new theological paradigm of religious practice. Between the traditional positions of inescapable obligation and unrelieved exemption, the model of commitment represents a middle way, a paradigm that combines these two rabbinic models. This new commitment model evokes the seriousness of obligation but suggests that the obligation comes as a heartfelt gift, a terumah, from the individual Jew.

As a gift to the merciful God, the commitment to mitzvot has limits. Built into it is the flexibility that the earlier system achieved through exemption. I do not believe that God wants us to dedicate ourselves in a way that brings too much turmoil into our lives on earth and too much tension in our relationships and certainly not in a way that removes us from nurturing work. Changing the baby’s diaper takes precedence over wearing tefillin, but the presence of a baby does not let us off the hook entirely from our commitment to God.

Within this model of commitment, prioritizing and balancing our commitments and values remains an ongoing responsibility. This is not as simple a matter as the traditional division of roles based on gender, but I see this as the only option in an egalitarian, non-hierarchical society.

The traditional model assumed there was an enabler in the picture to maintain the household. Therefore, if we rid ourselves of hierarchy, we must redefine what it means to perform these mitzvot “properly.” If we let go of the notion that mitzvot like tefillin must be performed every day and with total kavanah, performing them will not feel as impossible a task as it sometimes does when trying to balance this with other tasks of value. We may be committed to the mitzvah of tefillin, but not to its perfect performance. What becomes important is to keep the ritual of wrapping tefillin as an ideal, as a mitzvah that is important to us, even while remembering the inherent value of the work that is exemplified by the “women’s mitzvot.”

It is also important to remind ourselves that we are not missing out on the formal ritual experience completely even if we can’t do the actual wrapping every morning. Childcare, cooking, and making a home, when done with the right state of mind, can put us into that same state of living beyond time and beyond ourselves that is part of the experience of serving God through what the Mishnah calls the “positive time-bound commandments.”

By the same token, if we are too exhausted on Friday to bake our own challot, we can forgo the mitzvah of taking challah once in a while. Thankfully, Judaism blesses us with more than one ritual way to offer ourselves up to God. What is essential is that we, the new “Jews,” remain committed to both tefillin and challah and all they represent as integral parts of our religious practice.

If the goal of feminism is indeed for women to be changed by men and for men to be changed by women, and for society as a whole to be changed as a result, then we have no choice but to open ourselves to becoming the “New Jews” with a totally new, untraditional, relationship to mitzvot.

And yes, this will mean Judaism as we know it will be somewhat transformed. But we should not fear this inevitability; this is all part of using the broken pieces of the world to build a better place for everyone in it.

Rabbi Dr. Haviva Ner-David is the rabbinic director of Shmaya: A Ritual and Educational Mikveh. She is the author of Life on the Fringes: A Feminist Journey Towards Traditional Rabbinic Ordination (2000, JFL Books) and Chanah's Voice: A Rabbi Wrestles with Gender, Commandment, and the Women's Rituals of Baking, Bathing, and Brightening (Ben Yehuda Press, 2014). Rabbi Ner-David has also been an active board member of Women of the Wall and Rabbis for Human Rights and was one of the founders of Shira Hadashah, the first partnership minyan. She was the first woman to publicly receive Orthodox rabbinic ordination and now describes herself as a post-denominational rabbi. Rabbi Ner-David lives on Kibbutz Hannaton with her husband and seven children, where she runs the Shmaya mikveh and is working on workbook for engaged couples and a novel.