Sunday, January 18, 2009
Women & Mitzvos
The title is a link to an article that I read and greatly enjoyed over Shabbos. Rabbi Gidon Rothstein gives an entirely different take on the exemption of women from מצוות עשה שהזמן גרמא from those I have seen in the past. In supporting his thesis, he also uses it to explain the ברכה of שלא עשני אשה. His analysis emerges naturally from a close reading of the sources, and manages to be compelling without apologetics. Especially for those of you in my Halacha classes, who know how underwhelmed I am with the explanations we discussed in class, I highly recommend reading this (it reads shorter than it looks). He references other writings on similar topics that I look forward to reading. Faculty & students alike, I'm curious what you think about it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I just read Rabbi Rothstein's article about women and mitzvot, and it definitely made me think. This is an issue Iwe've all dealt with, specifically my class, an the twelfth grade as a whole as we learn the issues of women and halacha. I definitely think some parts of the article should be included in the part of the curriculum as another view on women's roles in Judaism. It seems wierd to me to say that we can figure it all out based on the reason we're exempted from tefillin and from that to talmud torah, but i guess it's an accepted way to learn that. Also it feels really strange to me to say that women's inherent rejection of defined roles that makes them exempt from certain mitzvot, bcause the point of mitzvot is that we have to do them just because we have to, and even if you're a person who doesn't like being told what to do, well you have to anyway. It seems to me like in Judaism women have had to figure out their own role because their is not defined by the Torah, not the other way around. Also I found the whole discussion of the mitzvah of talmud torah very interesting (and relevant to the issue of bitul torah we were discussing today, rabbi) but in the end I was even more perturbed by the fact that women are excluded from it. If the whole mitzvah is really about transmitting torah to the next generation, that makes me sad that women are not chosen to participate in it or receive it, especially because the one realm everyone agrees women rule in is the "raising children" category, so it's interesting that here specifically they're not obligated. I have to think more about this because there are so many issues involved, but I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed the article and I think more people should read it.
Thanks for posting it,
Rachel Weber
Post a Comment