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.