In recent decades, women have been re-examining their roles in many areas of life, including religion. Some of what they have found, areas into which they have fought to be included, have redounded to the good of all, enriching society as a whole. In Judaism, that process has uncovered areas of sensitivity, where the religion seems to relegate women to a role they find restrictive or dismissive. One particular such area has been the unequal levels of obligation between men and women, the fact of women having been exempted from many mitzvot. Those exemptions in turn prevent them from serving in certain public roles, such as blowing shofar for the congregation, since helping others fulfill a mitzvah requires that the agent be equally obligated in that mitzvah.

Even leaving aside the question of participation in the public community, which is complicated by other factors, many women feel excluded by the very fact of being exempted from mitzvot such as the study of Torah, wearing tefillin, hearing shofar on Rosh haShanah, or sitting in a Sukkah on Sukkot. So many men experience these observances as central to their religiosity, that many if not most women see them as ineluctably central to religiosity, period. If so, the exemption can send the message that Judaism either cares less about women’s relationship with God, or does not imagine that women are capable of building such a relationship as well as men.

A Different Lens: A More Autonomous Religiosity

In the light of previous posts and what they have shown about the role of personal decisions in a religious life, I think we can look at women’s exemption from manyמצוות עשה שהזמן גרמא– positive commandments with a time element to them– with new eyes. Doing so will, I hope, further our understanding of how important personal input is to the religion while also rejuvenating our recognition that Judaism values women’s religious development as much as men’s.

The first step is noticing that we have already seen that the Torah itself does not always value specificity of obligation as the highest value. Not being included in certain obligations excludes women in one way—they cannot be agents of fulfillment of that mitzvah, as we mentioned—but might leave them with an equally valuable result, a greater autonomy to shape their service of God as they see fit. Especially if some examples of God’s commanding us were responses to the human failure to develop the proper type of autonomy, women’s reduced heteronomy need not carry the bite it otherwise might.

This suggestion differs, I hope, from the well-known, roundly rejected argument that women did not need certain mitzvot because of their greater innate spirituality or because other mitzvot already trained them sufficiently. As I have argued elsewhere, there is no obvious evidence that women are naturally better at serving God, or reason to believe that a woman’s obligations regarding her monthly cycle should teach her about seasonal mitzvot such as sukkah or shofar.

My argument instead is that the category of positive time-related mitzvot, מצוות עשה שהזמן גרמא, establishes specific acts of worship, not general categories of religiosity. Since those acts all support broader goals—goals in which women are equally obligated—women’s exemption does not leave them out of anything of significance to the religion. Rather, while men are guided more specifically in how to achieve a proper religiosity, women are left with greater freedom as to how to shape their religiosity.

Exemption is Not Exclusion: The Availability of These Mitzvot

I should also pause to stress the difference between exemption and exclusion. Women often feel that they are “left out” of these mitzvot. That impression is accurate in the realm of helping others fulfill their obligation and in the level of reward we assume each person receives for that particular mitzvah; someone obligated in a particular mitzvah does, indeed, receive greater reward for that mitzvah than someone not obligated. Were the mitzvot in question essential to the religion, or were there no other way to secure reward, exemption would in fact equal exclusion. If not, the difference remains crucial; women may use these acts to foster a relationship with God, but need not see them as the only path to that goal.

Jewish men do experience these rituals as definitive of their religiosity, seemingly justifying women’s feeling that the exemption discriminates. For men, acts such as saying Shema twice a day, wearing tsitsit and tefillin, shaking a lulav on Sukkot, and counting the Omer between Pesach and Shavuot are the markers of their religiosity, how they define themselves as observant. Judging from men, truly serving God necessarily involves these acts.

There are at least three simple errors in this view. First, even men overemphasize the centrality of these mitzvot; most of them are, in fact, specific expressions of broader religious ideals, acts by which the Torah hopes to inculcate less exactly delineated ideas. Rather than ends of their own, these mitzvot are tools to achieve a broader goal. Women, in each case, were exempted only from the specific acts, not the general ideals.

That only leads to another question, why the system required these acts of men but not women. The Talmud’s derivation of this exemption, it is already interesting to point out, makes no broad claims about women, their nature, or their lack of appropriateness for these mitzvot. Rather, it cites verses, leaving to us the task of teasing out the implicit messages of those verses.

When we turn to those verses next time, I hope to be able to articulate a valid and reasonable understanding of the assumed distinction between men and women that underlay this separation. Deciphering that distinction and its underpinnings will provide the deep comprehension of the exemption that we seek, and will, I hope, lead us to a better understanding of the role of religious autonomy for women and in the religion generally.

Defining the Exempt Category

When the Talmud mentions positive time-related mitzvot, it provides a list we can use as the basis for our discussion. The Talmud says:

ת”ר: איזוהי מצות עשה שהזמן גרמא? סוכה, ולולב, שופר, וציצית, ותפילין; ואיזוהי מצות עשה שלא הזמן גרמא? מזוזה, מעקה, אבידה, ושילוח הקן. וכללא הוא? הרי מצה, שמחה, הקהל, דמצות עשה שהזמן גרמא, ונשים חייבות! ותו, והרי תלמוד תורה, פריה ורביה, ופדיון הבן, דלאו מצות עשה שהזמן גרמא הוא, ונשים פטורות! אמר רבי יוחנן: אין למדין מן הכללות ואפילו במקום שנאמר בו חוץ, …

Our Rabbis learned: What are positive commandments with a time element? Sukkah, lulav, shofar, tsitsit, and tefillin; And what are positive mitzvot without any element of time? Mezuzah, ma`akeh [building a fence around any elevated platform], avedah [returning lost objects], and shiluah ha-kan [sending away the mother before removing babies from a nest]. Is it a general rule? Look at matsah, simhah [celebrating on holidays], and hakhel [the national gathering on Sukkot after the shemittah year], positive commandments with a time component, and women are obligated! In addition, look at Torah study, procreation, and redeeming a first-born son, which are not positive commandments with a time component, yet women are exempt! Said R. Yohanan: We do not rely [completely] on general rules, even where the rule was stated with some exceptions…

Aside from the list itself, oddities in the presentation also help guide our analysis. First, calling these mitzvot, “commandments that time causes,” is problematic, since the time component of some of them is extraordinarily difficult to identify. The time aspect of sukkah or shofar is clear—they come around once a year—but less so for tsitsit and tefillin.

Indeed, the Talmud recognizes that some opinions would exclude tefillin from this list, because they hold that tefillin can be worn on Shabbat and at night. In the general opinion that includes tefillin in the category—and, as we will see, uses it as the source for women’s exemption—the Talmud assumed that the fact that it could not be done on Sabbaths and holidays sufficed to consider it “caused by time.” So, too, tsitsit make the list because the mitzvah applies during the day but not at night (although it does apply every day). The Talmud does not explain how that justifies the term “שהזמן גרמא, that time caused.” Deciphering the term would seem crucial to understanding what the Talmud meant by this category.

The whole interest in categorizing should itself raise questions, since there are so many exceptions– mitzvot in which women are obligated despite their being part of the category, and ones from which they are exempt despite their not being time-related. We continue to think of the category as useful because it does guide our assumptions about practices not specifically mentioned in the Torah or Talmud; faced with a new mitzvah that has a time component, we would assume that women are exempt.

I suspect, though, that the positing of this category captures some truth about what the Torah meant in terms of women’s observance as well. If I am right, though, it is not immediate obvious what that would be, since there are no clear commonalities among all these observances.

The Subsidiary Status of Time-Related Mitzvot

Almost the only clear connection among them is their all being explicitly phrased by the Torah as an adjunct to a broader religious idea. Sitting in a sukkah and taking a lulav on the holiday of Sukkot, for example, are properly seen as contributing acts that help create and fortify the holiday, not as independently important.

One way to note their contributing status is how minimal a time commitment these mitzvot tend to require. A few seconds suffice to shake the lulav; even its use as part of the prayer service is done by the end of morning services. Living in a sukkah sounds time-consuming, except that it only addresses itself to those hours when one is ordinarily home—eating meals, sleeping, relaxing. People can feasibly spend all day away from the sukkah, returning there only for those activities normally pursued at home. (Not incidentally, this aspect of these mitzvot would also seem to refute the frequent claim that women’s traditional child-care responsibilities are what led to the exemption—it is simply hard to accept that the need to take care of children would prevent women from shaking a lulav for 30 seconds).

I have already argued that שביתה, rest, means more than just avoiding certain acts; that should prepare us to realize that the מצוות היום, the commanded practices, are there to provide substance to the day. The Torah makes this explicit at least for the requirement to live in sukkot, which it says is “למען ידעו דורותיכם כי בסכות הושבתי את בני ישראל בהוציאי אותם מארץ מצרים, so that your generations should know that I caused the Jews to reside in tents when I took them out of Egypt.”

This verse does not mean that the Torah wants us to remember the Exodus only when actually inside that temporary residence; it wants the day as a whole to inculcate and fortify that awareness and commands these practices as obligatory avenues to that goal. Even for men, the Torah could have set up the holiday without such practices and still expected us to remember these aspects of the Exodus.

This same analysis applies to other such mitzvot, as we will see next time; once we have demonstrated these mitzvot’s role in our religiosity, we can get back to understanding how the exemption from them shapes a different religiosity for women.

(i)And which I have discussed elsewhere, such as in “Women’s Aliyot in Contemporary Synagogues” Tradition 39;2, Summer 2005, 36-58.

(vii)Vayikra 23;43. The plainest sense of the text seems to apply that reason to the taking of the Arba Minim, the Four Species, as well, although many explain that obligation as related to the harvest aspect of the holiday. Either way, lulav is almost always seen as reflecting a deeper idea, not an end of its own.