ON GIRLS AND TEFILLIN: Roundup
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When a story like this comes around, secular media — and some politically-driven Jewish media — are apt to seek an exploitive angle, to “sell papers,” drive web traffic or, ominously, poke fresh holes in our already fragile communal unity. more …
The fact is that there is no halacha forbidding women from this religious ritual that I am aware of. But there is a religious principle that women are exempt from observing certain mitzvos (positive commandments like tefillin that are time bound). more …
What would the Rema -- the main rabbinic authority quoted who states that we should ‘protest’ women who want to wear tefillin -- say if he were alive today? Might he not perhaps be as radical as the poskim at the time of the Crusades, who threw the book out of the window when faced with the unimaginable horrors of their time, and the agonizing choices of life and death? more …
In my opinion, the practice of these families has support in halakha. It has basis in the Rishonim (רמב״ם, רשב״א וספר החינוך) and R. Yosef Karo, the מחבר שולחן ערוך, seems to follow that opinion. more …
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