Q&A: Tefillin Like a Sukkah, and Tefillin of Earlier Times
Tefillin Like a Sukkah, and Tefillin of Earlier Times
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to suggest two lines of reasoning to solve the difficulty regarding the Ben Ish Hai and his grandson, on the topic of round tefillin that were put on by mistake. And when they discovered the mistake, the Ben Ish Hai claimed that they had fulfilled their obligation. This is based on an earlier discussion here, and also on your lecture about the legal opinion they asked you to write regarding a product in which leavened food was discovered.
1. That the law here is like a round sukkah: if it has an area that can contain a square sukkah, then the sukkah is valid.
2. In the past, the equipment was not as advanced as it is today, and the results of making something square would not come out as perfect as they do today. So it would seem that they did fulfill their obligation. Today, after the fact, tefillin like that would be invalid.
Answer
- Very unlikely. In a sukkah there is no requirement that it be square. You only need to make sure it has an area of seven by seven handbreadths, and that each wall is seven handbreadths. So there the shape really does not matter, as long as the required area (or length) is there. But with tefillin the requirement is not area but shape. That line of reasoning does not help here.
- That too is unlikely. Otherwise one would have had to validate them even ab initio, and not invalidate the tefillin because of their roundness at all. But he did invalidate them, meaning that even by his own standards (and not only by today's standard) they were invalid. And nevertheless, since their intention was good and they were under compulsion, he wrote that they had fulfilled their obligation.
Discussion on Answer
You can insist as much as you like. The grandson tells a story about his grandfather. His grandfather himself invalidated the tefillin. And the grandson adds (I don't remember whether in his grandfather's name, but that doesn't matter) that they fulfilled the commandment.
Beyond that, there was no breakthrough at all, but that doesn't matter for our purposes.
From Tosafot on Menachot 35a it seems that round tefillin are fundamentally permitted, and only the stitching to the base needs to be square:
"Tefillin must be square. There are those who do not make them square except at the place where they rest, and perhaps the compartments of the head-tefillin need to be square when all four are attached, and likewise the hand-tefillin. And it somewhat appeared that squareness is required only in their stitching and in their diagonal, as Rav Pappa explains. Our teacher."
Maybe the grandson invalidated them according to the standards of his own time, while in the grandfather's time it was fine? (I don't know how much of a breakthrough there was in the development of equipment between the grandson and the grandfather; it could be that there was such a breakthrough, and in a significant way.)
Or did the Rabbi mean that he invalidated them according to the grandfather's standards?