Kippah, Tefillin and Standing Out

By Kohava Mendelsohn

Tefillin often feel foreign or strange initially, especially for women.

I am a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl who grew up in a feminist house. I attend a Jewish school that supports egalitarianism, where girls are allowed to wear kipot, tallitot, and tfillin. However, girls in middle school wear doily kipot at the bottom of their hair and boys wear “normal” ones. In the lower grades, boys and girls wear the same type of Bucharian kippah, one that is large and stays on their heads without clips. I felt that wearing a doily hanging from my hair would not feel to me like wearing a kippah. I always wore a regular kippah at shul, and I felt like a doily didn’t cover my head. If a kippah is hanging from the bottom of your hair by a bobby pin, it is not serving its purpose--kippot are supposed to cover the head to remind the wearer that there is a something greater above you. When I entered middle school, I asked to wear a similar kippah to the younger grades, one that I had worn before at my previous Jewish day school. I was allowed to, and I was the only person that wore that type of kippah.

Once a week, the upper grades gather to pray together. This is when we put on tfillin. Male teachers put their tfillin on, and some of the boys who have had bar mitzvahs do as well. While girls are allowed to lay tefillin, they just didn’t, nor did the female teachers. One week, a male teacher asked a group of girls if they wanted to put on tfillin, so they did, and one of the female teachers also did. The next week, only one girl layed tefillin, and the next week it was only boys again. I did not put tfillin on at that time because I was one of the younger people in my grade and was not a Bat Mitzvah yet.

Later, the first week after bat mitzvah, when I could wear tfillin, I left my tfillin -- which my parents gave me -- at home the first time because I was embarrassed to put them on when no other girls were. I eventually took them to school and one of the male teachers who put them on every week showed me how. The teachers were very friendly and made me feel more at ease. A few people gave me weird glances but nobody really cared. I felt different and a little on edge. The tfillin helped me feel like a Jewish adult, but I felt a little unsure of what to do. The next time I put them on I still needed help tying them, but I remembered more. I was more comfortable wearing my tfillin because I had done it before.

I wanted to wear tfillin because I never have heard a valid reason why I shouldn't put on tfillin, and if there is no reason why I shouldn't, then I should; I am obligated as a Jewish adult.

Kohava Mendelsohn is thirteen years old. 

Committed but Conflicted

By Shoshana Michael Zucker

I began praying with a tallit when I was in high school in the early 1970s. Active in NFTY, it was not a gender issue but rather an affirmation of a more traditionalist stance. I didn’t think about tefillin, I don’t think anyone knew at the time did. Both tefillin and the gendered-ness of certain mitzvot were ideas that I knew existed somewhere, but not in my life.

Shoshana Michael Zucker

Several years later, I landed up on the upper West Side of Manhattan, in the orbit of JTS but not formally affiliated with it. I joined the West Side Minyan and the greater Ansche Chesed community that was just beginning to come back to life. Becoming more committed to halakha but still firmly egalitarian, I bought a pair of tefillin. The discourse about “equal obligations for equal rights” that accompanied the debate about accepting women to the JTS rabbinical school was very much in the air but my personal decision was not based on extensive learning. I taught myself from the NCSY Tefillin book and prayed with tefillin for several years, mostly in private but also with the weekday minyan at Ansche Chesed. The few times I wore them elsewhere, I found the feeling of being stared at unbearable.

Then we made aliya, founded Kibbutz Hannaton and had three children. I was on an emotional roller coaster and couldn’t maintain the practice. The tefillin got put aside.

Fast forward. When my daughter was nearly Bat Mitzvah she asked in the most natural way, “Why aren’t you buying me tefillin? Are they too expensive?” It had never dawned on her that she wouldn’t put on tefillin and I never dawned on me that she would want to. At the time, none of the girls or women in her TALI school or the NOAM youth movement prayed with tefillin, but she knew I had a set (and probably didn’t know how little use they got) and her brothers each lit a Shabbat candle. Although she was raised in a very different religious environment than I, she also had little concept of mitzvot being gendered. I gave her my tefillin. She used them faithfully, even in the IDF, despite some nasty feedback. I felt that the tefillin were being put to good use, and was content to be part of a transitional generation.

More years passed, my children grew and left the nest. I began to feel that I was now “using someone else’s exemption;” there was no reason why my life obligations could not accommodate tefillin, especially because I prayed every morning and my synagogue community was accepting. Just when I was on the verge of starting again, a friend was threatened in a public place by a man who found the tefillin marks on her arm objectionable. I felt embarrassingly weak, but that scared me.

The dissonance of reciting Shema without tefillin, “bearing false testimony against myself” (see TB Brachot 14b) continued to nag. Since I work at home, I began using my husband’s tefillin “on a second shift” after he left in the morning. Slowly my commitment strengthened and I bought my own set. Thankfully, the seller didn’t ask who would be using the tefillin. Most of the conversation revolved around the scarcity of Ashkenazi sets. I didn’t want to wait, lest I lose courage. I bought a Sephardi set, and retied the arm knot so I could wrap inward. With an Ashkenazi knot and Sephardi parchment, my hand tefilla represents the ingathering of exiles.

Laying tefillin remains primarily a private practice for me, limited to home and few “safe places.” External expressions of piety feel brazen. Not as a matter of gender, but rather of faith and theodicy. So much in the world is broken, how dare I declare myself committed to God and mitzvot beyond the minimum required for communal identification? Some days, I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that laying tefillin has strengthened my discipline for prayer. I miss far fewer mornings now. Afternoons and evenings, too. Like moving from being in a relationship, to being engaged and then married.

Indeed, when wrapping the tefillin straps around the hand it is customary to say, “I will betroth you forever: I will betroth you with righteousness and justice, with goodness and mercy…” (Hosea 2:21-22), which I also said to my husband at our wedding. Before doing this, I move my wedding ring from its usual place to my forefinger (so it doesn’t come between my finger and the tefillin strap), returning it to where it was originally placed when we stood beneath the huppah. For me, it is a moment of recognizing the balancing acts and adjustments we must all make between multiple commitments. It is one of the most significant pieces of my tefillin puzzle. Sometimes I think the world-to-come will be a time when all of our commitments fit together without juggling. May it come speedily and in our day.

Shoshana Michael Zucker is an active member of the Masorti congregation Hod veHadar in Kfar Saba. She earns a living by translating and editing but would rather teach Torah.

Text and Textile

By Maya Rosen

In middle school, I fell in love with Chazal. After a teacher gave me a copy of Massechet Pesachim, I spent hours thumbing through my English-Hebrew-Aramaic dictionary, slowly teasing out the linguistic and textual puzzle. It was through the Talmud that I first experienced the feeling of an intellectual heritage. As I pondered legal principles and fanciful legends, I became aware and appreciative of the gift of books, language, and culture. The rabbinic engagement with every aspect of life taught me to feel both love for and responsibility to the printed word.

Maya Rosen ties tzitzit.

More than just another text, the Talmud introduced a host of characters into my inner world. I encountered figures who view learning as an all-encompassing life orientation, and I loved them. I marveled over Rabbi Akiva’s logic, Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai’s conviction, and Ben Azzai’s intuitions. Reish Lakish always made me smile, and I admired Rav Huna’s character. These rabbis became constant figures in my life, and I thought regularly about what they would think or how they would act in the situations in which I found myself.

At the same time, I was convinced that Chazal would have hated me. I regularly encountered misogynistic stories and statements in rabbinic texts, and I imagined Chazal’s disappointment that I, a young woman, was learning Talmud. I didn’t want to stop, but I felt that my learning affronted the very system I loved so much. I spent my days in public high school wishing I had the opportunity to learn Torah seriously, and it pained me to think about what Chazal would have thought of my secular studies, my Western dress, and my liberal politics. I wanted Chazal to approve of my life, but my female body was a source of resentment and shame every time I opened a new daf.

Around this time, I acquired my first set of tefillin and tzitzit. At the time, it felt like an impulsive decision, though looking back on it, I realize I had a strong conviction that Torah was speaking to and demanding something of me. I wanted desperately to be a full and active citizen in the world of Torah. I no longer believed that the mitzvot I spoke of twice a day in the Shema were speaking only about men. In the same way that Chazal had become real people for me years earlier, I wanted the words of the Torah also to become real. Beginning to lay tefillin and wear tzitzit was, in a literal sense, the materialization of my prayers.

Happily, my relationship with Chazal has changed considerably. As I have learned more Torah, I see the change inherent to the system; also, I now understand better how history generally is constructed. I now think, or at least hope, that Chazal would have thought that I’m worthy of living within the same history as their system.

Perhaps it is ironic that by beginning to observe what many consider particularly “gendered” mitzvot (tefillin and tzitzit), I finally improved my angst-ridden relationship with Chazal. I found that these mitzvot combined the physical and the transcendent in a way that ultimately felt beyond gender. I started counting the seven wraps of the tefillin strap around my forearm with the seven words of Psalms 118:5: “min hametzar karati ya anani bamerchav yah," "Out of the straits I called upon God, who answered me with great spaciousness.” As I tucked the corners of my tzitzit into my clothes, I would smile thinking of the Sifre’s comment: “‘v’asu lahem tzitzit’—af hanashim b’mashma," "‘they should make for themselves tzitzit’—this includes women.” Sometimes I would think of Rashi’s comment that compares the four corners of tzitzit to the four verbs God uses in promising redemption. Often, I recited the words of a baraita in Menachot: “chavivin yisrael she’sivavan ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu b’mitzvot: tefillin b’rosheihen u’tefillin b’zeroteyhen, v’tzitzit b’bigdeihen." "Beloved is Israel for the Holy-Blessed-One surrounded them with mitzvot: tefillin on their heads, and tefillin on their arms, and tzitzit on their clothing.” Putting on my tzitzit in the morning before school and remembering that, indeed, "chavivin yisrael" became a gentle act of tikkun with Chazal.

Wearing tzitzit and laying tefillin remain the most sincere ways I know to portray to God the identity to which I strive. When I put on tzitzit in the morning, I am putting on the uniform of the person I want to be. The words of the Shema and the tassels on each corner under my clothing remind me to try and live a life that is surrounded by and enveloped in mitzvot. For this reason, tzitzit are the best example I know of the linguistic link between “text” and “textile.”

There are still problems. I am vain about not allowing my tzitzit to peak out of the shoulders of my favorite dress, and I often wake feeling that laying tefillin is only a task to be checked off my morning to-do list. One thing that has been helpful is finding peers, teachers, and communities who think seriously about mitzvot, gender, and their intersection. When I started wearing tzitzit, I thought that doing so would isolate me from the Jewish community. My work this past year to create Netzitzot, an initiative to sell tzitzit designed for women (www.netzitzot.com), has shown me that my fears were misguided. At the Netzitzot launch party in New York a few months ago, the dozens and dozens of people in attendance proved to me that tzitzit are fringe in the literal sense only. We tied tzitzit onto fifty garments that night, and as the party came to a close and we gathered together to doven Maariv, there was a certain buzz in the air as each person got to the phrase in Shema: “v’asu lahem tzitzit," "you should make for them tzitzit.” This we had done, and I knew Torah approved.

Maya Rosen is a rising sophomore at Princeton University and the founder of Netzitzot.

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.

Finding a Group of Likeminded Women

By Lauren Tuchman

There has been quite a firestorm in the Jewish blogosphere of late with regards to ritual and gender, and the ways in which gender is tied to, or not tied to, religious obligation and donning of ritual garb. The discussions are tremendously multilayered and complex and I cannot address them fully here. Though debates of this sort have been going on for quite some time, the latest round began after several Orthodox day schools began to allow female students to lay tefillin, black boxes containing pivotal passages from the Torah that are worn during morning prayers on the head and arm. I have found these discussions deeply frustrating and it often feels to me like we are spilling more virtual ink derailing and attacking instead of relating and accepting. As a Conservative egalitarian woman, tefillin are an incredibly important mitzvah for me. I yearn to live in a world in which mitzvot are not gendered, a world in which religious obligation is accessible to all who wish to take hold of Torah. I believe we need to radically rethink obligation and implementation of such, and I believe this is a sacred task.

Lauren Tuchman

One of the most unique aspects of the rabbinical school at JTS is that it is the only rabbinical school in the world of which I am aware that requires women to lay tefillin. My tefillin journey began several years ago, and although it had its ups and downs, laying tefillin is a mitzvah I deeply cherish today. When I expressed interest to a friend of mine in learning to lay tefillin, I was incredibly fortunate to receive unqualified support for this. I began laying tefillin while a graduate student exploring my relationship to mitzvot and observance more broadly and was incredibly fortunate to have been taught and encouraged by a variety of women, each of whom was very excited that I wanted to take on this mitzvah. I must say—at first, though I always knew intrinsically that laying tefillin was the right thing for me—I found them incredibly overwhelming and not a little strange. No sooner would I finish laying my tefillin in the morning than Shacharit would be nearing its end, requiring me to quickly master the art of speed davening. Since tefillin have been and in many communities still are traditionally a men’s thing, it can be hard for women to find the support and resources they need. For me, finding a group of likeminded women was incredibly comforting.

Though tefillin is a mitzvah that I deeply cherish, I have experienced feelings of isolation as one of the few women I knew who laid tefillin in my community, and I often wondered why I, unlike so many other women I knew, never felt uncomfortable with the prospect of laying such a typically or traditionally masculine ritual article. Whenever I would be asked about this, particularly by more liberal friends of mine—women who, though raised in egalitarian communities still felt a visceral discomfort with tefillin—I began to be unsure of myself. Why didn’t I feel the same discomfort, and in fact felt the exact opposite, that tefillin was the absolutely right thing for me? What was their experience that I was totally missing and couldn’t relate to? And how can I relate to it? I believe that this is emblematic of the fact that the gendering of ritual garb has been something I have always struggled with. After all, if Michal, the daughter of Saul and Rashi’s daughters, according to legend at least, laid tefillin, why not me? 

I was thrilled to participate in a class this summer at the National Havurah Committee’s summer institute taught by two women all about tefillin and encouraging the mostly female audience to take on the mitzvah, if they felt it was the right thing for them.

Although I am now at a place of complete comfort with my own Jewish choices and mode of Jewish expression, I look back on those moments when I felt like tefillin was the weirdest, most overwhelming thing I had ever tried to put on and feel incredibly grateful that I managed to find a community of supportive women who helped me along my journey. It is my hope that I can pay it forward.

Lauren Tuchman is completing her first year of rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where she previously earned a master of arts in Judaic studies. She is a contributing scholar at State of Formation, a platform for emerging religious thinkers from a variety of traditions.

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.