Jewish Feminist Luck and Choices

By Judith Rosenbaum

When I think about my Jewish feminist experience, most of the time I think about my luck. I had the good fortune to be born in the early 1970s just as Jewish feminism was unfolding, into the New York havurah community at the center of this development, to one of the young women (Paula Hyman) pioneering the movement. So Jewish feminism has been, for me, a birthright more than a choice – something I almost took for granted as a defining characteristic of my Jewish life.

Judith Rosenbaum (right) wearing tefillin in 1992.

One of the first independent Jewish feminist choices I remember making consciously was my decision to begin laying tefillin when I became a bat mitzvah. This was in 1986, and while I was lucky to be part of a community where this was an option, it was certainly not a given that I would choose to take on this practice. At my day school, there was one other girl who had just begun to lay tefillin around the same time, but it was still definitely seen as an odd thing for a girl to do.

Luckily – again – I was a spunky kid. I didn’t mind standing out. In fact, I liked being different. When I wrapped my tefillin, I felt bold. Though the practice felt strange at first, it was the strangeness of wrapping leather straps around one’s head and arm, not the fact of doing so as a young woman. In fact, I think I wore my tefillin more proudly and confidently than the boys in my class, who I recall as somewhat fumbling in their attempts to get the straps on tight enough that they wouldn’t slip down and bunch around their wrists, and loose enough that they wouldn’t cut off circulation in their arms. For me, laying tefillin was an active choice; for them, it was school policy.

When I began attending a non-Jewish high school, daily prayer – and therefore, tefillin – ceased to be a part of my schedule, and I missed them. My tefillin seemed forlorn, nestled next to my tallit, which still got regular use every Shabbat. Soon I was recruited to join the members of my congregation who volunteered to attend morning prayers on particular days of the week, to insure that there would be a minyan for those who needed one to say kaddish. My day was Wednesday, and though it was always hard to drag myself out of bed to make it to minyan so early in the morning, I was glad to have an opportunity to use my tefillin again.

There were many aspects of that early morning minyan experience that I treasured: feeling like a grown up who was making an important contribution to my community; feeling remarkably accepted by the other regulars in the morning minyan crowd, most of them men over 80 years old. It wasn’t inspired davenning, to be sure; it was quick, chanted hurriedly in low voices. But as we all sat there, swaying in our tallitot and tefillin (my tefillin shel rosh usually perched on top of hair still wet from the shower), I felt an incredible sense of belonging and pride. When I would take my seat in class an hour later, I often ran my fingers over the indentations on my left arm, a sweet reminder that I had already done something important that day.

Embracing tefillin was one of the ways in which I made feminism my own. I’m proud to hold the distinction of being one of the oldest women who has been laying tefillin since becoming a bat mitzvah, and for many of my friends, one of the first women they ever saw in tefillin. More than 25 years after my bat mitzvah, I remain in the minority as a woman who lays tefillin. Though I feel some disappointment that this mitzvah still feels inaccessible or unappealing to many women, I am proud to be able to model not only how to wrap tefillin but also how comfortable a woman can feel in those strange leather straps.

Judith Rosenbaum, PhD, is a writer, educator, and historian, and the incoming Executive Director of the Jewish Women’s Archive. She also serves on the faculty of the Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel.

No Animals Were Harmed in the Making of These Tefillin

Eden, right, prays with her father.

By Eden Farber

Growing up in an observant household, taking on new mitzvot has always been exciting, part of initiating and personalizing my Jewish
journey. When I was seven, I started keeping Shabbat. When I was eleven, I started fasting on fast days. When I was twelve, I started davening every day. When I was fifteen, I started studying daf yomi (admittedly not a mitzvah, but certainly a significant practice). When I was sixteen, I had my first truly inspirational prayer experience at a partnership minyan in New York City. And when I turned seventeen, I began laying tefillin.

Of all the reasons that I took a long time to start wearing tefillin, I’d like to address only one here: frankly, I was grossed out by the idea of wrapping a dead body around my arm every day. It just felt uncomfortable. As a person who is very conscientious about what I put in my mouth and on my body—I adhere to a vegan diet, make my own toiletries, and more.—this mitzvah felt unnatural. How can I perform a spiritual ritual that can only be completed through the untimely death of a fellow creature?

This issue quickly became more than just a theological question: it became an ethical dilemma.

I’d like to bring a halachic concept to the table. It’s called a mitzvah haba’ah b’aveira, a mitzvah that comes from a sin. Recently, my chavruta and I came across this concept in our Talmud shiur. Our scenario involved using a stolen lulav on Sukkot—which is forbidden, for this reason. We don’t want to do mitzvot, which are inherently good, by doing aveirot, which are inherently bad. It would seem obvious that stealing to fulfil the mitzvah of lulav would be wrong—why even give an explanation? It’s unethical. Doing something good in the world by doing something bad in the world cancels the good deed out; it’s basic mathematics. A negative plus a positive gets you nowhere—especially when they don’t have the same weight. Killing for the sake of fulfilling a mitzvah didn’t seem to add up. I didn’t want my prayer to become a mitzvah haba’ah b’aveira.

Despite my feelings about the ethics or lack thereof of leather, however, I still really wanted to take on the practice of tefillin. As a halachic Jew, I simply couldn’t not. Tefillin are part of the deal. I didn’t know how to balance wanting to fulfill my chiyuv, my obligation, and sticking to my ground about not supporting the killing of animals. I asked questions and did research until I finally heard of something that seemed to be the perfect solution: tefillin shel shlil. Tefillin shel shlil are tefillin whose leather is made from an animal that died of natural causes. There are sofrim in Israel who ask kibbutzim to tell them when a cow dies naturally, and from that hide and that hide only they make the tefillin.

This way, no one is killing; there is no prescribed death for the purposes of human benefit. It’s natural, it’s recycling. It’s like giving the cow another life, without touching its first one. I can’t say if this is objectively so or I’ve just sunken into a deep level of cognitive dissonance—I can only tell you that I’ve never once felt gross putting on my tefillin shel shlil.

Finding a comfortable solution was not easy, but Judaism is not about ease. There are questions—very difficult questions—and there is no one answer for every person. Not picking and choosing my halachic practices or my ethical ones is difficult, but worthwhile when I can say that my halachic lifestyle compromises neither my integrity nor my ethical commitments.

Now, every day when I put my tefillin on, knowing that they are a product of nature and not of industry, I daven proudly. I am happy to have taken another step in my Jewish journey.

Eden Farber, age seventeen, is an unschooler and an alumna of Drisha's Dr. Beth Samuels High School Programs and BIMA at Brandeis. She is a columnist for the Atlanta Jewish Times and has written for  theFBomb.org, JOFA's The Torch, the JOFA Journal, the New York Jewish Week's Fresh Ink for Teens, and Modern Hippie Magazine.  Next year, she will be attending Midreshet Ein Hanatziv's Hesder program, which combines Torah study and military service.