I grew up as a beneficiary of the historic 20th-century shift that invited women into the world of Talmud Torah. It has been an amazing and complicated gift. As women learn Torah for the first time, we often encounter passages that force us to confront our position as outsiders.
In the Talmud (Eruvin 54b), Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahmani expounds upon a verse in the Song of Songs that makes an analogy between the Torah and a gazelle. He explains that just as each act of intercourse with a gazelle, renders the gazelle as beloved as the first time because of its narrow anatomy (rm vnjr), so, too, the words of Torah are always as beloved as they were when one first studied Torah. I read this unusual phrase as a woman who fell in love with learning Torah. I identified with the role of the “male” learner of Torah, but I struggled with the description of the female as the object of male desire rather than a subject who actively and passionately approaches the text. Perhaps most disturbing in this analogy, the male’s experience of pleasure could be understood to be a result of the female’s discomfort. Absorbing such a passage places the reader both inside and outside the text.
One of my responses to this paradox of feeling both inside and outside the text was a decision to wear tefillin. A comment by Ulla, an early talmudic sage, will help to illustrate what I mean. Ulla makes the rather harsh statement that anyone who recites the Sh’ma but doesn’t wear tefillin is bearing false testimony. (Brachot 14b) In his view, reciting the Sh’ma becomes meaningless, even hypocritical, when one does not fulfill its words — “to bind these words of Torah onto your body.” Because I learned Torah and recited the Sh’ma each day, I felt the cognitive dissonance underlying Ulla’s statement. How could I recite these words but not fulfill them?
I decided that if I did, in fact, believe that Torah was speaking to me — if I was inside the text as I longed to be — then I could no longer ignore this mitzvah. Wearing tefillin signified consistency in my sense of being totally committed to a life of learning and living Torah.
To complicate my decision, modesty practices in many Orthodox communities define a woman’s upper arm as ervah — nakedness that must be covered. One of the first times I rolled up my sleeve to put on tefillin, it felt like a clash between the sacred and the sexual. How could I expose my arm in order to do a mitzvah?
In that moment, I realized that something was wrong, the same thing that felt wrong in the Talmud’s analogy between Torah and the gazelle. Why should I see my upper arm and immediately think “ervah”? Why not see my upper arm and immediately think “tefillinshel yad!” I decided that my sense of self as an embodiment of mitzvot had to be more central than my sense of self as an object of attraction. I couldn’t imagine continuing a relationship with Torah, halakhah, or God if the balance would be otherwise.[1]
More than a decade later, I still don’t feel that wearing tefillin is an entirely comfortable mitzvah. But if we view the comparison between Torah and the gazelle from the female perspective, then we might expect each of our encounters with Torah to include some discomfort; learning suggests an awareness of our limitations and our ability to stretch ourselves. When I wear tefillin, I am reminded of what it means for a relationship with Torah always to be as beloved as the first time: a passionate and loving quest toward growth.
1 This essay does not deal with halakhic sources that directly address women and tefillin. The Tosafists in medieval Ashkenaz permitted women to wear tefillin. The Shulhan Arukh sees no problem with women wearing tefillin, but R. Isserles brings a tradition based on the Maharam of Rothenberg that restricted women’s fulfillment of this mitzvah based on the requirement for a clean body (guf naki). This issue has been discussed at length, and I direct the reader especially to Zev Farber’s discussion at morethodoxy.org. As to the issue of ervah specifically, it is addressed in Mishneh Halakhot, where it is asserted that there is no problem with ervah and women wearing tefillin.
email print