On the Obligation of Women to Wear Tefillin

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asked 9 years ago

Good evening
In the parsha, “And it shall be heard”: “And you shall write it on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days may be prolonged,” etc.
The Gemara in Tractate Kiddushin, page 34a, teaches that women are obligated to put on a mezuzah by affixing the verses, Men are my life, women are not my life? Apparently, you have put this statement into one unit, and if so, on this basis, we should also obligate women to put on tefillin. The Tosafot emphasized this point in Talmud Torah, but the question still remains. No matter how we interpret it, it turns out that the verses are divided into two units, the first unit which is not conditional.
(18) And you shall lay up these words in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as frontlets on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes: (19) And you shall teach them to your children, to talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.

And the second is eighty:
And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates: (21) That your days and the days of your children may be multiplied on the land which the LORD swore to your fathers to give them as the days of heaven upon earth:

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מיכי Staff answered 9 years ago

First, we must discuss why there is even a need for a source to obligate women. Why should they be exempted? On the face of it, in the mezuzah there is no side to the exemption, but in tefillin there is (Grama time) and in the OT there is (your sons and not your daughters). If so, it is possible that the Gramma split the verse because of the constraints: since women are exempt, the inference is not sufficient to obligate them, and the inference is placed only in the law that there is no reason to exempt them (mezuzah). After reading all of this from Kofia, I decided that it’s still worth looking at the Gemara. Some of the things are explained there, and the process is not as you described. The basis is that women are obligated to wear a mezuzah simply because there is no reason for exemption. And those exempted from the Tetz and Mesothelioma also learn to wear tefillin. Now the Gemara asks why we should not also wear tefillin to the mezuzah, and for this reason, they cite tefillin to the Tetz as a derogatory term in two verses, and in the mezuzah there is an explanation for the division of men and women in life. This is not a source for obliging women to wear a mezuzah, but rather a reason to reject the requirement for tefillin. The question remains why they did not cite the explanation regarding life also for tefillin and Tetz, and the answer is that in them the exemption is known from a positive source, and in the mezuzah the ruling that women are obligated is simply because there is no reason for exemption.

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