Dec 10 2007
This weekend I/we received an e-mail with the following question from (I’m guessing) a regular JewsByChoice.org reader.
Note: although the person’s name and blog URL were included with the original e-mail, I’m not going to post them here, just in case the person prefers to remain anonymous. However (to the email author) please do feel free to disclose/share your name and blog address in a comment if you are up to it.
I don\’t know if you all take requests here at JBC, but I was wondering if someone might write about the mitzvot of kippot and tzitzit. (Please forgiveme if I am not using the correct forms of these words… I am still very new!) As a woman, I would like to hear a woman\’s perspective but I am very interested in hearing about both male and female convert experience in this
area. Thanks!
Regarding your first question, apparently we do take requests here at JBC.org. As for the rest of your questions, I’m not an expert or scholar but here’s my personal two cents on the subject.
I myself have been wearing a Kippah (more or less daily) since before I converted and began wearing a Tallit Katan (Tzitzit) last Chanukkah. In the spirit of full disclosure I should point out that I did stop wearing my Tallit Katan for several months but have recently taken it up again as part of my daily regiment of observance.
Wearing a Kippah is not actually a commandment but rather a Minhag (custom) and therefore is not something any Jew is halachickly bound to do. Typically (at least based on my experience) Reform Jews only wear them while attending a religious service or event in a synagogue. Conservative Jews are more likely to wear them both in and outside of the shul but many seem to only wear them when attending synagogue events, just like there Reform counterparts.
Also because it is a Minhag there are no laws prohibiting women from wearing them. However this as a practice is (usually)only found outside of the Orthodox world and will vary from community to community. Last but not least, Orthodox men pretty much always have a Kippah on the while they are awake. In fact some ultraorthodox men even go to sleep wearing a Kippah. But like I said it’s a custom and not a commandment, so it technically should be up to the individual.
As for wearing Tzitzit this is indeed a commandment. Actually it’s a time bound commandment and means that it only applies to the Jewish men. You see, in both the Orthodox and conservative world’s, women are exempt from all time bound Mitzvot because (again as I understand things) their priority is maintaining a home and raising children. I’ve also been told that another reason for this, is that women are more spiritually elevated than man is, and therefore, they don’t need to do all of the mitzvah work, we less spiritually evolved men do.
It’s important to note that this is an exemption and not a prohibition. And although Orthodox women do not where Tzitzit (I have however heard of a few extremely rare cases, where they do), conservative women are allowed to wear them if they choose to end in recent decades this has grown as a practice within the conservative movement.
Because both the Reform and Reconstructionist movements identify as being non-halachick, neither men or women are actually required to wear Tzitzit. But of course, both are in theory free to do so should they choose to and there are indeed men and women from both streams who regularly wear them.
As someone who wasn’t raised Jewish both of these practices are extremely important components of my Jewish ritual observance. They allow me a way of connecting to Jewish tradition both culturally and spiritually. For men wearing them is a visceral and kinesthetic way, of connecting to the rest of the tribe.
As for women wearing them, I have my thoughts on the subject however, maybe Tamara can chime in and share some of hers because she is after all a woman and that might be more what you are looking for.
Oh also, although you didn’t directly ask about Tznius in your email, it was (sort of implied) in the subject line “Clothing Related Mitzvot”.
Tznius pertains to Modesty and although it deals with a variety of behaviors, it certainly does deal with what appropriate dress for Jews is.
Here is a snippet taken from the ConJ Site:
Tzeniut (or Tznius or Tzniut) (Hebrew: צניעות), “modesty,” is a virtue required of Jews. The imperative to conduct oneself with tzeniut is, according to the prophet Micah?, central to God’s commandments:
He has told you, O man, what is good,
And what the Lord requires of you:
Only to do justice
And to love goodness,
And to walk modestly <hatzene’a> with your God.(Micah 6:8, NJPS Translation)
The last of these commands is generally understood in Jewish tradition to command that a person should be humble and should not be self-aggrandizing.
Anyhow I hope the above helps and again please remember this is just my personal opinion. I’m far from an expert on the subject. So bearing that last point in mind, you might want to fact check things for yourself in case I’ve gotten something wrong.
Be well.
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Since my “chiming in” has been suggested I thought I’d respond…here are just a few of my thoughts on the topic…a little longer than intended.
Let me say that if a woman desires to wear a talit or a kippah, so be it. It’s just not for me. I hope that when a fellow Jewish woman sees me in synagogue they don’t raise a brow at my not wearing these articles just as I don’t cringe (although in the past I went through the stage when I sort of did) when they wear them. I’ll try to explain.
I’m a woman who grew up in a family where my gender was never really shoved down my throat. I liked helping my dad i n the garage, I liked gardening, I liked doing arts and crafts, I played soccer and was on our neighborhood drill team. I hated skirts and wasn’t so much into the color pink. In many ways I was a tomboy that wasn’t. Huh? Yeah, I was a non masculine tomboy. You know, I don’t know if my family would say that. I was after all the youngest and a big cry baby.
Now I’m thirty-four. I enjoy wearing skirts. I like wearing pants. The color pink looks good on me. I own an electric drill and know much more about cars than many men I know. I believe women truly can be ANYTHING they desire; regardless of gender lines. However, for myself, I like to know that there are gender roles that I can fill. I like knowing that there are things G-d has given women that he hasn’t given men. First and foremost, the ability to carry, nourish, and grow a child within. What a crazy amazing thing really!
In synagogue, I like knowing that men wear kippahs and talit, and women don’t. I don’t feel cheated of anything. I see that we each have our roles. In a way, men and women in Judaism are like a fine tuned machine, each having a specific gear and role to play. According to JewFaq.Org, “Women’s obligations and responsibilities are different from men’s, but no less important (in fact, in some ways, women’s responsibilities are considered more important…)”.
I know that the tradition of a woman not donning these religious items was not a way to “oust” women, it just was one of the ways in which men connected with G-d. Women connected differently. Men are required to pray in a minyan, women weren’t because women were considered on a higher spiritual plane by nature. As it stands, I’m fine being counted as, or as not a minyan. Perhaps women will speak out and say I’m wrong or a hypocrite; but it works for me.
Of course, we all know that there are points in the Torah where women don’t seem revered; however, I did find this interesting take on it, also from JewFaq: “Women are discouraged from pursuing higher education or religious pursuits, but this seems to be primarily because women who engage in such pursuits might neglect their primary duties as wives and mothers. The rabbis are not concerned that women are not spiritual enough; rather, they are concerned that women might become too spiritually devoted.”
Interesting no?
My husband wears a talit, he wears a kippah. I light Shabbos candles. G-d willing, when we have children, my role as a mother teaching her children values and manners, being a foundation in their spirituality, learning their first prayers, is as significant as my husband’s role in guiding them the way a father does.
Not sure if that was just a long ramble, but hope it helped.
Hi all,
I have a couple of observations about this question and the associated posts:
Tamara,
I really liked what you wrote about gender roles. I find that the traditions… men being obligated to the time bound mitzvot, women not, etc…. are nice. I am not saying this to exclude women, but just that I appreciate the system in that it recognizes different needs. Most men like to feel duty bound, especially to one another (ie, show up for the minyan). and as a husband and father I recognize the inherent power women have in their ability to carry, deliver, and feed their children, and why for many, lots of the rituals traditionally observed by men would seem, well, redundant. Thanks for your comments!
Avi, et. al.,
I wear a kippah most days, but when it’s winter, some days it’s just a nice looking tuque all day (Avi, you know what that is, eh? ;)). My office at the university is chilly enough, and the combination of balding and my closely shaved hair makes a hat all day a necessity when it’s really cold, like the -20F we had a couple of days ago. ANYWAY… most days it’s a kippah. As far as tallit katan goes, I wear one once in a while, and I think I would more often if I were in a more densely Jewish area, but we are few and far between here, and a kippah on its own already makes me stick out. But the mitzvah of wearing tzitzit is minimally fulfilled by putting on the tallit gadol to daven Shacharit, according to Conservative interpretations (if you’re not wearing a “four cornered garment,” you don’t wear tzitzit), so most days I am content with that. Now, if I moved to Israel, or even a large metro area in the USA, I’d start wearing it more regularly, I imagine.
There’s my two shekelim!
Yair
I just wanted to say that I’m completely of the sentiments that Tamara is, so ditto!
Sorry I can’t offer more, but I think she pretty much covered it
Thanks Chaviva
And Yair, thank you for the acknowledgment.
Happy Chanukah to all.
I don’t know how to say what I want to without sounding like an “angry feminist,” – (I’m not the former and most certainly am the latter.) I am a woman who doesn’t wear a Kippah and who lights the Shabbos candles in my house, who bakes Challah every week, and who loves the Mikveh. Still I think this conversation on women is troublingly . . . under-thought. I don’t want to attack anyone – I like the respectful tone of this site and enjoy reading it every day. And so far all opinions about what women should or shouldn’t do has been couched in the disclaimer that they should do what is right for them. But I feel like I need to speak up.
First of all, the assert that men and women are somehow endowed with certain innate spiritual abilities – that divide neatly on gender lines – is essentialist. To say that women and men observing the same rituals is redundant is as ridiculous as arguing that if a father lays teffilin, a son need not learn how because someone in the house is fulfilling the obligation.
This is not to de-value the mitzvot “given” to women. I think someone like Blue Greenberg does a poetic job re-valuing traditional roles, and obviously I participate in many of them. Rather, I’m trying to say that who we are spiritually doesn’t always neatly line up with who we are sexually, or gender-wise.
We can argue about Minhag – if we aren’t comfortable with a certain person doing a certain thing, fine – we can have our opinions. But when it comes to Halakah, we don’t have the option of a vague “this feels right to me!” sort of conversation. We are talking about, OUR laws, OUR story, OUR way of making a life in this world. And that should be something that reflects the needs of the whole community, not just those of us who are lucky enough to be comfortable with traditional roles.
As women, if we just accept what has been handed to us – accept the interpretations and decisions of men in previous generations uncritically – we betray a fundamental part of our identity. It would be like a Jew just deciding, “Well, I’m American now, so I guess I’ll accept that I’d be happier if I went out on Friday and ate ham and put up that Christmas Tree.” We know that’s not right – that accepting plurality in our identities means struggling to be ourselves within both. For some women that most definitely means filling the tasks and parts women have done for generations. But I think for all of us there is a valuable conversation and struggle that if we decline to have we are privileging our own comfort over the dignity of many members of our community.
I hope I’m sending you to a book you have already read (and perhaps rejected), but I would definitely recommend Rachel Adler’s “Engendering Judaism.” Adler, like members of this website, believes that an error of “progressive” Judaism is the de-valuing of Halakhah. She writes against “fragmented Jewish communities in which only the merest threads of a communal praxis have survived,” and certainly doesn’t believe in getting rid of mitzvot in the name of sexual equality – she doesn’t want Jewish women to end up with “one-half of nothing.”
She also doesn’t think the answer is uncritically allowing women to participate spiritually in places they have been historically excluded without doing some real theological and legal work. The problem with this approach – seen in many a reform and even conservative shul – is that is makes them “honorary men,” and therefore “deviant men” – she adds, “an equality predicated on ignoring the differences that constitute distinctive selves both conceals and legitimates injustice.” I think this is why many have a discomfort with a woman in teffilin. Somewhere we sense that it is an avoidance of a problem – what Adler calls a “band-aid” on a deeper and more serious philosophical, theological and legal problem, that is the historical sexual and spiritual in-equality of women in Jewish life.
So the difficulty, of course, is that while the answer is clearly not making women and men “the same,” it also isn’t deferring uncritically to the past.
And as a side note, the whole “women are on a higher spiritual plane” thing is dangerous. If women can be contained in this sort of symbolic realm, they can be excluded from the material one – it’s the old “women are the subject of poetry, they don’t write it” thing. Its one way to deflect an argument – to tell us “oh, it’s not that your not as good as men that you don’t have to do this . . .it’s because your better!.” I don’t buy it.
I’ll just finish my way-over-long comment by saying that whether or not the decision not to count women in the minyan was designed to exclude or not, that is the result. Letty Cottin Pogrebin speaks movingly about her own youthful rejection of the Orthodox Judaism she was raised with. It started on the day when a stranger from her shul was counted in the minyan to say Kaddish for her beloved father and she was not. I have heard her story echoed by many other now-dedicated feminist Jewish women. They understood that in the eyes of their community at that crucial moment of grief, they literally didn’t count. Luckily, somehow, they found their way back to the faith.
One last story: my Bubbe, now in her 70’s, grew up in an Orthodox family with immigrant parents and six children. In her middle age, she talked with her aged father, who had been a Hebrew School teacher and had spent years teaching Torah and Talmud to her younger brothers. She asked him why he never took such time with her when she so desperately wanted to learn. He sent her a letter vehemently denying any wrongdoing and telling her how wrong she was to criticize him. At the end, he offered to start teaching her. He died before he got the chance. He didn’t mean to exclude her – he was just following tradition. But what a missed opportunity for both! What a loss to the Jewish people that a willing scholar, a person eager to pass knowledge to other generations was never given the chance.
Hi Chana,
You wrote a well-thought-out and interesting post above. You had many important things to say, and it is a great read for all of us. I think that there is sort of a tight-rope routine that happens around these issues, and the middle road is hard to find sometimes. It is still possible though to have an egalitarian approach without expecting women to practice Judaism like female men (and I think you wrote to this point as well). It is possible to have women count in a minyan and for women to study Torah and bring their own viewpoints and voices in to Judaism in a way they have not been allowed to historically, while at the same time not expecting women to do everything traditionally done by men. The Conservative movement’s own approach to halakha supports this; women are STILL not obligated to take on the time-bound mitzvot, but they are not prevented from taking any of them on either, which is the big difference with Orthodoxy. I think, at least for me, it comes to this: just as women should not be prevented from engaging in meaningful Jewish observance, study, prayer, etc., which were historically male practices, women who choose not to engage all of these practices shouldn’t be looked down upon as somehow not living up to the potential egalitarianism places before them.
You wrote:
“To say that women and men observing the same rituals is redundant is as ridiculous as arguing that if a father lays teffilin, a son need not learn how because someone in the house is fulfilling the obligation.”
I didn’t say it was redundant because men already do them, but that for many women it would FEEL redundant, because they don’t relate to the practices. Doing them for the sake of doing them might feel redundant… especially if one comes from the halakhic perspective that women are not obligated to do these things. Here’s my (current) thought on it: Any time a woman lays tefillin it is a good thing, especially if it connects her more deeply to Judaism. But not all women WANT to, and in many progressive communities there is at least an underlying feeling that if women don’t wear tallit, kippah, tefillin, etc., they are falling down on the job, which, from a halakhic point of view, isn’t the case. In creating egalitarian space, we are not binding women to practices to which they’ve never been bound. So your example of the father and son with tefillin doesn’t correlate to men and women with the same mitzvah, as I read it, because both the father and son ARE bound by the mitzvah of tefillin, while women are not.
Here’s my short hand
—>
egalitarianism does not mean obligating women to all of the mitzvot to which men are bound, it means valuing and inviting female voices and perspectives as much as male ones. Within that setting, women have the freedom to take on more traditional “female” roles, or “male” ones, without pressure from others to fill either.
I am not a posek, not even a rabbi…. just an observant Jew trying to figure things out :).
Great post!
Yair
Hi Chana K:
Thanks for sharing your thoughts and especially for the kind words regarding our blog.
I suspect that much of your comment, isn’t actually directed to me , so I will let others (should they choose to) address the points you have brought up.
However I would like to chime in on the following.
First of all, the assert that men and women are somehow endowed with certain innate spiritual abilities – that divide neatly on gender lines – is essentialist.
I for one, am not asserting anything other than (right or wrong) our tradition has, at least historically, made clear distinctions regarding gender roles (as they pertain to Tzitzit), spiritually speaking that is. I felt it was important to mention this point, in answering the question asked. As I see it, this is part of the history that goes along with those two practices and therefore is worthy of consideration, in an informed choice sort of way. As are the points brought up by you in your comment.
Anyhow thanks again for weighing in on this subject and I hope that you continue sharing, here on our blog.
OH and Yair, have you thought of just keeping your Tzitzit tucked in? This way they are out of sight (which means you don’t stick out in the crowd anymore than you already do) and the mitzvah is fulfilled!
Problem solved, my good man!
So go and Jew it up a notch! LOL
Yair, Thanks for your patient response - Looking back I didn’t mean to use the word ridiculous - I apologize - its a subject I get emotional on, thats all, and I am thankful you answered generously.
I completely agree that women who choose to participate traditionally - not to participate in practices that have been historically limited to men - shouldn’t be looked down on. Of course not. But that has not been, leagally or culturally speaking, the problem. Leaving women out has.
I guess I would equate it with a conversation in American Feminism right now. There are groups of young women who are very publically asserting their rights to be highly educated (ivy league) and then make the choice to be “stay at home moms.” They articulate this choice in the language of feminism - sort of “it’s my right to do this.” I agree with them. What occurs to me is that no one is tellling them they can’t.
Anyway, thanks again for the great conversation!
Hi Chana,
No problem! I didn’t think that you were being trite or anything. This is an emotional issue for anyone who cares about Judaism, and so the fact that our tradition is important enough for you to argue strongly about is good! I just wanted to make sure I made my point more clearly than I had in my reply to Tamara above.
Here is a question about which I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking: How would Judaism look if rituals and all were observed from a female perspective? If women, who have never had the opportunity before to craft their own approaches to some of the mitzvot, took the freedom to do thie, how would they look different from the male-oriented versions we’ve inherited? Lots of egal women I know are not in the least bit interested in laying tefillin (as one example), but how could that mitzvah be reassessed from a female perspective while upholding the spirit of halakha? I think such questions are interesting ones, and as an observant Jewish man, I hope to see how my sisters deal with them in the future.
kol tuv!
Yair
Chana:
Thank you so much for your post as it brings up some very important questions.
“And as a side note, the whole “women are on a higher spiritual plane” thing is dangerous. If women can be contained in this sort of symbolic realm, they can be excluded from the material one – it’s the old “women are the subject of poetry, they don’t write it” thing. Its one way to deflect an argument – to tell us “oh, it’s not that your not as good as men that you don’t have to do this . . .it’s because your better!.” I don’t buy it.”
Thank you so much for saying this because I don’t buy it either. Let’s be real about this. Halacha was made by men at a time when women were by and large no better than property. This was not only true of the Jews of that time but pretty much everyone else of that time too. This “higher spiritual plane” stuff is just a way to gloss over the fact that women from of old have been devalued spiritually in the Jewish tradition:
In a culture that valued learning, women were barred from learning. In a culture that valued mitzvot as the path to spiritual perfection, women were excused from many mitzvot to better perform biological roles. In a culture that valued communal worship women, by being barred from the minyan, were barred from meaningful participation in that worship. In a culture that valued children, boys were the crown jewels. All this, I’m sorry to say, is a self-evident fact.
And that is why I am so uneasy with halacha, and especially with the Orthodox belief that halacha, except for the novel situation that comes up seldom, was set and sealed for all time when the Talmudic period closed. If we choose to live within the halachic framework drawn up by those brilliant (and I mean that, they were brilliant) Jewish men of old, what can be done to rectify that part of their framework that, with time, has become stultifying and destructive? As you yourself said, “when it comes to Halakah, we don’t have the option of a vague “this feels right to me!” sort of conversation. We are talking about, OUR laws, OUR story, OUR way of making a life in this world.”
If that is the case, how do we, how can we pick, and choose from the Law? Both the Reform and Conservative movements have proposed answers to this question, but those answers seem to create as many problems as they solve.
I’d be interested in knowing what Blu Greenberg has to say about this. Can you suggest a book?
And just one other point. You said,
“There are groups of young women who are very publically asserting their rights to be highly educated (ivy league) and then make the choice to be “stay at home moms.” They articulate this choice in the language of feminism - sort of “it’s my right to do this.” I agree with them. What occurs to me is that no one is tellling them they can’t.”
I know the answer to this from personal experience. Who is telling them they can’t? Their own mothers. Those pioneering 70s and 80s feminists who told their daughters that they can be anything they want to be are sometimes very disappointed, and do little to hide their disappointment, when their brilliant, articulate girls choose the kind of lives that they themselves fought so hard against when they were their daughters’ ages.
Just wild estimates here, but in the Reform shul I attend regularly, I would guess about 3/4 of the men wear a kippah to Shabbat morning services and maybe almost 1/2 the women do, as well. Most of the men wear a tallit, too, and we have a very high percentage of women who do so as well.
I think it is worth noting that, as I understand it, a non-Jew should not wear a tallit, but it is perfectly acceptable for a non-Jew to wear a kippah and in more traditional shuls (of whatever denomination) any man entering the sanctuary would be expected to put on a kippah.
Personally, I have worn the kippah, but usually only at services, since I started attending services (more than a year before I “formally” became a Jew). However, while I bought a tallit early in my exploration of Judaism, I did not put it on till the day I was formally accepted into the Covenant.
Hi Yankel,
After reading your comment I was a bit perplexed. I was wondering if perhaps you could shed some clarity for me. As someone who sincerely does have true respect for you as a friend, as a Jew, as a kind person in general, there is something I don’t quite understand.
As you’ve shared here, you first and foremost attend a Chabad shul. You love the rabbi, a friend to us both. You love the community, as I do. You love your buddy Avi (not the same way I do ha ha).
So my questions are: If you truly don’t believe in halacha as it stands, how can you daven at Chabad without being distracted by the fact that the women are on the OTHER side? As you and I know, the new mechitza may match our new ark, but it’s truly a wall. How do you feel every day you are there and heads are being counted for a minyan, yet no women are considered? How do you feel when on Simchat Torah, men dance while women are on the “other” side and can’t see the Torah? How do you think it feels to listen to a service when one can’t even see the Torah? Sure, women can study with our rabbi there. Sure, women can do many things…but are they reached out to and included? Not usually. And of course never for a minyan, and not to say Kaddish, etc.
You see, it confuses me because I do know that you’re torn. I too was torn in similar ways when Avi and I met and I had to reevaluate my feelings about similar issues that came up. However, if it truly causes you to question living within an halachic framework, as you put it: “If we choose to live within the halachic framework drawn up by those brilliant (and I mean that, they were brilliant) Jewish men of old, what can be done to rectify that part of their framework that, with time, has become stultifying and destructive?”
If you see so much of this as destructive and stultifying, how do you feel knowing you support this, not only socially by being a committed and involved community member (which for the record is an amazing trait in you and something I fully respect) but financially? I wonder if money shouldn’t be spent towards things you fully believe in. Please know that I am not questioning you, or your judgement. However, I truly am trying to understand how you console this within yourself. How do you find it within you to say, “Hey, I love this rabbi and these people, therefore I will contribute because it’s a good deed”. However, at the same time, the structure, the philosophy, the format seem to not mesh with you at all?
Looking forward to your answer, and looking forward to spending Shabbat with you Saturday.
Tamara:
Thanks for the question. The answer to it comes in parts. About the mechitza, the woman not counted as a minyan, and all the rest, that’s easy. Everyone who goes there, including the women, go there because they want to. There are plenty of places in LA to pray, and a lot of styles of Judaism to choose from. I personally don’t mind all that stuff because it is no disadvantage to me as a man and because nobody is forcing the women to be congregants. They are there, I assume, because it suits them, and when it stops suiting them they’ll go somewhere else.
As for the larger question of how I can go there when I am so ideologically other, well, that gets a bit schizophrenic. So here is my schizophrenic answer, as it has evolved since joining the Chabad shul 2 1/2 years ago.
We experience the world, I’m sure, on very many levels. I, however, am aware of only two: an objective level and a subjective level. The objective level is a 3rd person view, an actuarial view. I am a man of a certain age, born in a certain place at a certain time in a certain cultural milieu with a certain level of education. Given all that, from an objective, actuarial point of view, certain assumptions can be made about me: how much longer I will probably live, how I might vote on certain issues, what kind of car I most likely will drive, what I’ll eat for breakfast, etc. Most of these assumptions will be right on the mark, and some of the biggest corporations in the world make billion dollar decisions based on what they can glean from the actuarial view of the world. In that view, in that world, we are all pretty much alike, no one is really special, and people go from cradle to grave in fairly fixed and predictable patterns. All that is for the good.
The subjective level is where magic happens. It is the intimate space where we, as individual awarenesses, encounter God himself through his creation. On this level the world, if we look for it and seek it out, is imbued with great and awesome significance. It is the avenue through which God makes his individual presence known to all of us in his individual and idiosyncratic way. The subjective is the portal of meaning. In the objective world we are cyphers, dust in the wind, and that is a profound truth we’d all do well to think about. But in the subjective world, the world of experience, all life and every second of it is a unique and unreproducible encounter with God, with meaning, with the transcendent.
So objectively, I disagree vehemently with the Orthodox view of Jews, of Gentiles, of God’s plan for the world, of what people should do in the world and how they should do it. I disagree with it all. But on the subjective level it feeds me, nourishes me, and inspires me to come closer the the Great Mystery.
Schizophrenic, no? That’s life.
Yankel,
Thanks for the answer.
I’m still working through it, but thanks 
The first time I wore a tallit was when I was honored with an aliya. I hadn’t considered purchasing one before but almost two months since, I still remember how it made me feel more connected with Shabbat morning services.
I still have a sense of awe from standing there and watching and hearing as the Torah was read. There was a sense that I was truly connected with the thousands of past generations.
All of the links, keeping Shomer Shabbos to the best of my ability, keeping kosher when the nearest place to buy kosher meat is a an hour drive, saying Sacherit(sorry for the sp), mincha, and ma’ariv, and teaching my son, connects me in a vital way. But the tallit and the aliya touched something very deep.
It is a spiritual connection that I feel women should not be denied. It is one of the reasons I choose a Conservative conversion as opposed to an Orthodox one.
I’m still trying to understand why half of the Orthodox world is denied this spiritual connection and why kol isha is seen as a bad thing in that world.
I understand the arguements that women have many responsibilites for raising a family and that women’s voices may be distracting. But is denying women a public spiritual connection to Torah the correct thing to do?
After my river mikvah, one of the greatest joys in my congregation was the fact a new member could now be counted as part of the minyan.
Books worth reading on the “woman question”:
Blu Greenberg - On Women and Judaism
An Orthodox perspective on how to re-imagine and appreciate traditional women’s roles/ mitzvot from a feminist angle.
Standing Again at Sinai by Judith Plaskow:
Takes a less halakhic, more philisophical approch to expaning women’s faith roles
Engendering Judaism by Rachel Adler:
A radical engagement with Halakhah from a feminist perspective
Women and Jewish Law by Rachel Biale:
An older but very interesting book on the subject.
There’s also a good chapter on the subject in Linda K. Shires “Coming Home” - a book by a Jew by Choice about the differect philisophical and spiritual struggles of her conversion. Worth reading for other reasons as well.
Does anyone have a comment on the prohibition against cross dressing? Traditionally, a yalmulka and tzitzis have been defined
(by practice) as men’s garb. Not that I oppose women wearing these items of apparel, but how does one reconcile the more current practice of redefining men’s only as ‘unisex’, especially in light of the tradition (or is it halacha) that an honored tradition has the force of halacha?
Interesting question you ask here Schvach.
Well first what exactly is the prohibition against ? Because I don’t think it’s as clear cut a case, as some might like it to be. Second any prohibitions that may exist don’t apply to Reform and/or Reconstructionist, Jews because both movements clearly reject the binding nature of halacha.
As for Conservative Jew’s I don’t think women wearing Kippot come anywhere near what might be called “Cross dressing” and as for Tzitzit well lets look at the commandment which is found in the Vayomer.
Seems to me that Children in the most literal sense of things, should indeed include females and if not one would expect it to read as “Boy’s of Israel” or something similar. Now of course women are “exempt”, (not to be confused with prohibited from fulfilling) from performing time bound Mitzvot but that does not mean forbidden. Now although some within the Orthodox world may not agree with this, I would suggest that this makes it clearly not a case of cross dressing from a Conservative POV and therefor not part of the Deuteronomy 22:5 prohibition “A woman shall not wear that which pertains to a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination to the Lord your God.”
I guess all that, just to say, I don’t believe it’s a problem for anyone here on this blog, or rather for whom this blog is intended.
Hope that makes sense!
One reason that I decided to convert Conservative was the opportunity to choose whether or not, as a female, I would don tallit, kippah, and/or tefillin. Personally, I see it as a choice for women and I respect women who choose to participate in wearing these articles and those who choose not to participate.
Personally, I feel more connected to G-d when I don these articles. For awhile I wore a kippah and tallit katan everywhere but due to some internal reasons I stopped wearing them. I feel the need to begin wearing them again as a sign of my observance. I have layn tefillin and tallit and I plan on doing so again.
As a Conservative Jew, I believe that women have the freedom to choose whether or not they wear tzitzit/tallit or kippot. I respect them no matter what their choice. For me personally, I have been known to wear a kippah, tallit/tallit katan, and tefillin but I understand that this is not what every woman wishes and that is fine. What bothers me is when I see men not donning them.
Dec 10th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
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