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.

R. Shimon would say: Three who eat at a single table and do not say words of Torah are akin to those who eat from idolatrous offerings as it says “For all tables are full of filthy vomit and no pace is clean” (Yeshayahu 28:8). However, three who eat at a single table and say words of Torah are like those that partake from God’s table as it says: “This is the table that is before God” (Yechezkel 41: 22). (Avot 3:3)

Just as he did in explaining the previous mishna, Tiferet Yisrael minimizes the scope of application, arguing that certain factors may justify a meal without a dvar Torah. He explains that R. Shimon specifically selects a case of three eating together because a larger group coming together for a joint meal indicates people with some leisure time at their disposal. People with time should feel obligated to converse about something of a substance. However, those wolfing down a sandwich to run back to the office can justifiably skip the Torah discussion.

Tiferet Yisrael adds added resonance to R. Shimon’s message explaining that introducing Torah into the meal clarifies how human consumption is not an end in itself. He cites the famous adage: “Man eats to live but does not live to eat.” It would be interesting to research when this adage, usually associated with Moliere but already appearing in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers, first made it into rabbinic literature. By studying Torah at the table, we emphasize how a good meal enables us to approach service of God with renewed vigor.

Rashi and R. Ovadia Bartenura state that we fulfill R. Shimon’s mandate by saying birkat hamazon. Thanking God for our food redeems the status of the meal so that we can not compare it to a pagan feast. Tosafot Yom Tov disagrees based on the important methodological assumption that Avot focus on acts of special piety rather than on basic obligations. Since Avot would not be addressing people who shirk the biblical commandment of birkat hamazon, R. Shimon’s directive must call for more.

What evidence does Tosafot Yom Tov have for his assumption? A Gemara in Bava Kama (30a) states that fulfillment of Avot leads to piety. Moreover the content of many of the mishnayot does not seem to revolve around concrete obligations. Yet even if so, this does not minimize the importance of our tractate. Numerous Issues of ethics and character ate not pinned down on a detailed level by halacha but this certainly does not reflect lack of significance. By their very nature, questions of character do not lend themselves to precise application on a universal plane. Indeed, the search for piety and excellence of character manifest in Avot should constantly energize us.

The Personal Element in the Holidays, Charity, and Honoring Parents

In many senses, the holidays are all the same. For example, all the holidays have a similar rule about desisting from creativity, differing from Shabbat in that the holidays allow for several kinds of labor, known as מלאכת אוכל נפש, activity that sustains the soul.

While in that sense they are all the same, other components distinguish them from each other; Pesach celebrates the Exodus and the beginning of the harvest season, Shavuot reminds us of the offering of the שתי הלחם, the two loaves of bread that are the first sacrifices given from that year’s grain harvest and occurs on or around the anniversary of the Giving of the Torah at Sinai, and Sukkot marks both the completion of the harvest and commemorates God’s protecting us in the desert.

Separate Commandments, Separate Rests

Interestingly, Rambam counts the commandment to rest on each holiday as a separate commandment, instead of grouping them as one, “to desist from creative labor that is not soul-sustaining on the various holidays.” Yet he does not do so for the seventh day of Passover, since it is part of the same holiday. It is not that each day of holiday rest gets a separate mitzvah, it is that each holiday’s rest is separate; I claim that this differentiates the kind of rest expected as well.

Some but not all of the differences of the holidays are revealed by the מצוות היום, the special commandments of each day. The requirement to sit in booths on Sukkot, for example, tells us something about the day, but does not cover all of one’s actions over the course of the day; it would be mistaken, therefore, to see the sitting in the Sukka or the telling of the Exodus story as the entirety of the import of the day, but it perhaps provides information as to what the day itself is supposed to look like.

The traditional liturgy offers a complementary avenue to fleshing out the content of these special days, in the descriptions we give the days when we name them in our prayers. In both the Amida, the standing prayer, and the Grace After Meals of these days, we find Pesach calledזמן חרותנו, the time of our freedom, Shavuot זמן מתן תורתנו, the time of the giving of the Torah, and Sukkot זמן שמחתנו, the time of our happiness.

In my post on Shabbat rest, I suggested that rest is actually a stepping back from creativity to absorb the lessons learned and prepare for the next burst of creativity. Applying that here, presumably the experience of desisting from creativity should differ on each holiday as well. How we absorb the lessons of stepping back on a holiday of freedom would likely differ from how we learn from similar refraining in the context of receiving the Torah (or renewing our Godly service in the Temple), and yet again for how it might differ from that same rest in the context of remembering how God can protect and provide for us.

Once again, though, the laws provide only a basic and universally applicable guideline for the kinds of experience being sought; the task of fleshing that experience out fully is left up to the autonomous choices of each person.

To Give Charity

There are many ways to show the role of personal insight and understanding in shaping one’s fulfillment of the mitzva of giving charity, but I will focus only on two. First, common parlance might lead us to believe that donating money to any worthy cause qualifies as צדקה, charity, but the Talmudic sources and their resulting codification in the Shulchan Aruch concentrate more directly on the poor and their needs.[i]

There are many other good causes as well, such as Jewish education, building synagogues and houses of study, supporting medical research, visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved, and a host of others. Some of those also fit the rubric of helping the poor, such as by noting that the poor can certainly not pay for their medical care, and especially not for diseases whose cure is still unknown or experimental. Supporting medical research, in that context, might qualify as charity in the helping-the-poor sense as well.

Too, the common custom to give at least ten percent of one’s income to charity might not be restricted to charity in the technical sense, charity for the poor. Nonetheless, the plethora of causes and their relationship to essential charity show some of the challenges of using our money appropriately, even when all good will is involved. Some will choose to give ten percent, some more, some less. Within those monies, too, there will be a range of choices to be made about apportioning; while traditional sources offer some guidance, much is left to the individual.

Similarly, Rambam famously lists eight levels of charity, collated from various Talmudic discussions.[ii] The highest of those levels, the best fulfillment of the obligation, is to support another Jew or righteous non-Jew before that person’s financial situation deteriorates so much as to need actual alms.

The possible ways to accomplish this support include giving a gift, making a loan, forging a partnership with the needy person, or finding him some other source of livelihood. Each of these strategies, though, involves complex calculations of how to best steady a person teetering on the edge of the underclass. Since Rambam assumes that the mitzvah applies to the near-poor as well as the already-poor, the number and kinds of choices to be made are multiplied and are not in any clear way answered by codified halacha.

The person intent on giving charity in the best way possible, we now find, must make significant personal decisions at each stage. First, he or she must decide whether to give to the poor or other worthy causes. Within the amount being given the poor, the donor must identify recipients, choosing among the candidates and deciding how to divide the funds. Even once those decisions have been reached, the donor must further decide whether to give it by outright gift, loan, partnership, or finding the person employment. None of these choices is simple, each of them is largely a personal and autonomous matter, but the end result will change the quality of one’s charity considerably.

Honoring and Fearing Parents

While the commandments of honor and fear are obviously related, the Torah separates them, placing כבוד, honor, in the עשרת הדברות, the Ten Utterances at Sinai known as the Ten Commandments, and leaving יראה, fear, for the beginning of Leviticus 18. In seeking the balance between the well-defined and that left to the individual conscience, I will also try to explain both why the Torah would present them so separately, especially when works such as the Sefer haMitzvot and Shulchan Aruch[iii] juxtapose them.

Although כבוד is always translated as “honor,” the Talmud defines it by delineating specific services the child must perform, מאכיל ומשקה, מלביש ומכסה, מכניס ומוציא, giving (the parent) food and drink, covering and clothing, taking in and out. The list implies that “honor” refers to taking care of a parent’s physical needs.

The obligation of יראה, awe or fear, complements “honor” in a way that explains both of a Jew’s responsibilities to his or her parents. The Talmud defines “fear” as not sitting or standing in the parent’s place, not speaking before, contradicting, calling by his/her first name (or, if the name is unusual, calling someone else by that name), and not wading into a debate in which a parent is partaking, even to support the parent’s point of view.

All of these suggest that a child is supposed to view the parent with a certain amount of fear or awe, simply stated; indeed, Rambam says that the mitzva is to act towards the parent as towards someone with the power to administer meaningful punishment. It should be obvious that the fear is not in and of itself the Torah’s goal, so that here, too, we are prodded to look deeper into the mitzva.

Representing the Divine

A couple of Rabbinic statements clarify the Torah’s goals. The Talmud notes that Scripture uses the same terms for these mitzvot as for the attitude one should have towards God.[iv] Thus, the verse warns kabed parents, and elsewhere says kabed God; so, too, it warns איש אמו ואביו תיראו, every one of you must fear his mother and father, andאת ה’ אלוקיך תירא, fear the Lord your God. The use of similar terms, the Rabbis imply, indicates that one’s attitude towards parents should parallel the attitude towards God. As two of the three partners in a person’s creation, parents have standing akin to that of the third partner, the Creator.[v]

Recognizing that these commandments stem from parents’ role as creators also fits the Sefer haChinuch’s assertion that this mitzva inculcates gratitude, which he explicitly assumes will increase the person’s gratitude to God as well. The honoring of parents thus only partially cares about securing them their due; they also serve as a convenient vehicle to personalize our relationship with our Creator.

Rambam’s phrasing of two more rules supports this idea. Halacha prohibits restraining one’s parent (verbally or physically), even if the parent is embarrassing or otherwise causing distress to the child. In an extreme example, a child may not stop a parent from throwing a bag full of money into the ocean.[vi] Rambam highlights the relationship to God, by ruling that the child seeing such a parent throw the money away must “sit silently and accept the decree of Scripture.” Similarly, he writes that the child may not answer back if the parent embarrasses him publicly, but must maintain his fear of the King of Kings.

Note that his justification in both cases relies on the child’s obligations towards God, not towards the parent. In both situations, the goal is to see this physical person as in some way parallel to God, to use that as a stepping-stone to inculcating a more full honor and fear of God. If so, the parent’s actions must be seen as close to those of God.

This perspective of the commandments of honor and awe also shows us where the personal element enters the picture, completely unguided by specific laws. Alongside the codified laws, the Talmud gives numerous examples of admirable respect or fear of one’s parents. Perhaps most famously, Dama b. Netina is commended for refusing to wake his father, who was sleeping on the key to a cabinet that held merchandise he could have sold right then for an extraordinary profit.[vii] Since Dama was not even Jewish, the Talmud could not have meant his example as halachically instructive; rather, it meant it as evincing an ideal each Jew must strive to actualize in his or her own life.

Kibbud expresses this aspect even more fully. While a child could treat the obligations completely technically, insuring only that the parent eats, drinks, is clothed, and gets out regularly, the responsibilities of kibbud seem to call for a broader involvement in assuring that the parent’s needs, broadly speaking, are met. If so, the Torah places the more easily and exactly defined obligation, awe or fear, in a legal section of the Torah. Honor, the broader and more personally defined responsibility, is placed in the Ten Commandments.

Thus, eight mitzvot show us how poorly an over-reliance on codified halacha serves the Jew trying to fulfill the Torah. While mitzvot define a set of goals, they often give only general guidelines for how to achieve them, sometimes even when the guidelines seem very specific. In each of these cases (and I could have added others), full success requires the individual Jew to build off of halacha’s guidelines in defining how he or she fulfills the obligation in question.

I believe our failure to recognize the importance and value of autonomous religiosity has hurt us in another way, our struggles with the role of women in the religion. Next time, I will take up the topic of women’s exemption from certain commandments, and try to show that the Torah was actually suggesting a more autonomous form of religion for women, granting them a greater freedom to define their approach to God. If so, the flight to well-defined roles, the desire to be able to fit more and more into well-recognized forms of religiosity, might be not only a technical question, but go to the core of our understanding of what the religion wants of us.

[i] For some examples, see bBaba Batra 8a-11a and שו”ע יו”ד (Yoreh Deah) 247ff.

[vii] bKiddushin 31a.