Q&A: On Women's Obligation in Tefillin
On Women's Obligation in Tefillin
Question
Good evening,
In the passage “And it shall come to pass, if you surely listen”: “And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days may be multiplied,” etc.
The Talmud in tractate Kiddushin 34a derives that women are obligated in mezuzah from the juxtaposition of the verses: “Do men need life, but women do not need life?” Seemingly, “And you shall place these words of Mine” is one unit, and if so, based on that reasoning we should also have to obligate women in the laying of tefillin. Tosafot addressed this point regarding Torah study, but the question still remains in place. And however we explain it, it comes out that the verses are split into two units: the first unit, which is not conditional,
(18) “And you shall place these words of Mine upon your heart and upon your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be frontlets between your eyes. (19) And you shall teach them to your sons, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk on the road, when you lie down, and when you rise.”
and the second, which is conditional:
“And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (21) So that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied on the land that the Lord swore to your forefathers to give them, like the days of the heavens over the earth.”
Answer
First, one must ask why a source is needed at all to obligate women. Why should they be exempt? On the face of it, with mezuzah there is no basis for exemption, but with tefillin there is (it is a time-bound commandment), and with Torah study there is as well (“your sons” and not “your daughters”). If so, it is possible that the time-bound aspect split the verse because of these constraints: where women are exempt, the juxtaposition is not enough to obligate them, and so the juxtaposition is applied only to a law where there is no reason to exempt them, namely mezuzah.
After writing all this off the top of my head, I decided it would still be worthwhile to look at the Talmud itself. There, some of the matter is clarified, and the line of reasoning is not as you described.
The basis is that women are obligated in mezuzah simply because there is no reason to exempt them. They are exempt from Torah study, and from that we also derive the exemption from tefillin. The Talmud then asks why we should not also compare tefillin to mezuzah, and to that it answers that tefillin is linked to Torah study in two verses, whereas for mezuzah there is a logical distinction: men and women both need life. This is not a source obligating women in mezuzah, but rather a logical argument for rejecting the comparison to tefillin. The remaining question is why they did not invoke the reasoning about life also regarding tefillin and Torah study; the answer is that in those cases the exemption is already known from a positive textual source, whereas in mezuzah the rule that women are obligated is straightforward simply because there is no reason to exempt them.