Posts Tagged ‘Tefilin’
Tefilin – Ignorance and Arrogance
1. The boy who caused a security alert by wearing tefilin on an aeroplane clearly had no common sense. Worse than that, he was reflecting a prevalent communal attitude that for non-Jews not to know instinctively all about us is culpable ignorance on their part, an attitude which of course in reality merely reveals monstrous arrogance on our part.
2. I have always wondered why Rashi finds it necessary, when the word “totafot” is used in the Chumash to describe tefilin (Shemos 13:16), to quote a Talmudic opinion that it is a compound word formed from two foreign words including an African one. Why is this thought worth telling us? (One might even wonder why the Rabbis thought able to attribute a word of Loshon Hakodesh to a compound of two pre-existing foreign words; something for another time.)
3. As the Rambam discusses in Moreh Nevuchim, many of our mitzvos have their counterpart in other religions, while some are exclusive to Judaism. And it is important to know which is which: apart from anything else, knowing whether one of our strange rituals is in fact sufficiently common to other religions to be likely to be recognised and understood by others can help to avoid misunderstandings, not to mention security alerts. So perhaps Rashi wants us to know that this particular ritual had a rough equivalent in at least two other cultures of the time. Nowadays, of course, there is no equivalent of tefilin in any of the religions of which most of us have heard (although it would not surprise me to learn that there is an equivalent in some religion somewhere).
4. There is good Biblical precedent for the idea that we should go out of our way to ensure that our religious practices and ideas will be understood by others in their own terms. When Moshe Rabbeinu describes our history to the King of Edom (Bmidbar 20:15) he says that Hashem sent an angel to bring us out of Mitzrayim. We spend half of seder night each year saying that Hashem took us out personally and not by angel – so why does Moshe change the story? Again, perhaps because the King of Edom could reasonably be expected to understand and accept the notion of an angel intervening, that being within the sphere of his own religous ideas, but would not be able to understand the notion of a single, infinite God.
5. Common sense is always useful, and never common. It behoves us to remember that we are a tiny minority of the people of the world, and that we should have the humility to remember that if we want our strange practices to be tolerated and even appreciated we should be prepared to take a few moments to explain them in terms that other people can understand and accept.
The Jewish All-Blacks – double-sided tefilin straps
- Before the new fashion for double-sided tefilin straps (black on both sides) takes hold, it is important to try to squash it, on a number of grounds.
- First, these will certainly be more expensive than the single-sided straps. So this is just one more attempt to raise the stakes in the observance game, making it an increasing burden on those of limited income to feel that they are doing justice to their religious obligations and providing unnecessary extra opportunities for those who wish to play holier-than-thou games of one upmanship.
- The Torah was given on the smallest mountain – Mount Sinai – to teach a lesson: if we all set out to climb Everst, most of us will fail, and only one or two of the fittest will be able to dance around on the top looking down on the rest. But if we all set out to climb a small hill, we can all get there: some of us will need to help others, and we will proceed at different paces – but soon we will all be able to stand there together and draw on each others’ strengths and weaknesses in worshipping God as a united whole community. So we should always be suspicious of anything that purports to set the standards of religious observance in a way designed to exclude – or likely to have the effect of excluding – being beyond the easy reach of everyone who wishes to be part of the Jewish community.
- Secondly, since we have a principle of yeridas hadoros – that the further we get from Sinai the less our religious instincts are to be trusted – we should be suspicious of anything that implies that the religious observance of former generations was lacking. If a new technological development enables us to achieve standards not available to our fathers or grandfathers, we should welcome it as they would have. But our grandfathers had black ink – if they had wanted to colour both sides of the straps they would have done.
- Thirdly, it is a halachic requirement that the straps be straight at all times when I am wearing my tefilin. At present I can quickly see when they are crooked, because the raw leather shows: with two black sides it will be more difficult to notice.
- Devotion to mitzvos is the essence of our religion. Endlessly seeking to make religious life more difficult for ourselves and others is not. (Personal chumros – stringencies – that do not impinge upon others, directly or indirectly by making them feel inadequate, are a wholly different matter.)
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