Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I think about
starting a second blog called Jewish Mama. It would chronicle my efforts to
raise Jewish children as a single Jewish parent in a small city with a small
Jewish community. I envision writing about the time my son laughed out loud the
first time he heard the creation story at Hebrew school. He turned to the
Hebrew school teacher and asked in his little five year old voice, “Haven’t you
heard about science and evolution?” My Jewish Mama blog would also include an
entry about the time the rabbi explained to my sons that our Torah was from a
congregation in Europe that no longer exists because of the Holocaust. I cringe
each time the H word is said aloud in my sons' hearing and wonder how I’ll explain
something I’m still grappling with myself.
I could also write a few posts on my
anxiety about teaching my boys about yet another holiday detailing Jewish
oppression. Yet mostly I’ve discovered the things I struggle with, my kids take in
stride. Violence in the Torah? They love it. A story where Jews are trying to
be killed again? To them, Jews are Superheroes.
I really don't have time to start another whole blog, so today instead of a blog about books or reading, "Jewish Mama" will be guest blogging. So here’s my current Jewish anxiety. And no
surprise, it’s all about gender.
Last night I tried on my brother’s tfellin.
These are small ritual objects, phylacteries in English, that have a scroll in
them containing one of the central prayers in Judaism, the shema. The prayer
proclaims God’s oneness, and then goes on to say that you should teach this to
your children and mark it on your doorposts, and keep it close to your head and
your heart. The tfellin are two small boxes that attach with long black leather
straps. One goes around your head, with the box on your forehead. The other one
attaches to your upper arm, close to your heart, and then you wrap the strap
around your arm and hand forming the letters Shin, Dalet and Yod, one of God’s
names.
I tried on my brother’s tfellin because I
wanted to teach the kids at Hebrew school about them since we’re learning the
shema. My brother has tfellin because we were both part of a Hebrew school
program called Tallis and Tfellin when we were twelve. Students and parents met
for prayers and the boys got a tallis (a prayer shawl) and tfellin when they
became bar mitzvahed. The girls didn’t. And I didn’t care about this. In fact,
I never thought about it until I was faced with wrapping my brother’s tfellin
around my arm, alone on a Thursday night, praying my (non-Jewish) husband
didn’t come home early since it would be a lot to explain.
I suppose there’s a lot of things I could
feel badly about being a Jewish woman, but mostly I’ve been spared the
exclusion Judaism can impinge on women. I grew up in a synagogue with mixed
seating. Other women (including my mother) fought for women to lead prayers in my
childhood shul. I had a bat mitzvah where I said the same prayers as the boys.
Yet wearing tfellin felt different. I felt like an invader, like I was doing
something reserved for men. And then, as I struggled with the leather straps, I
felt badly, like I had purposely been excluded from a covenant with God.
If you google images of tfellin, you come
up with some interesting pictures. On popchassid.com there are
pictures of Santa wearing tfellin, and Batman, and a rabbi in a flooded street after
Hurricane Sandy teaching a young man how to wrap tfellin. There's a beautiful picture of a group of
Holocaust survivors in their 80’s, all men, wearing tfellin in a synagogue. Behind them, their
wives peer through a tiny window looking on. They're the only women in the
blog post photographs, and guess what, they aren’t wearing tfellin.
My husband didn’t come home to find me
wrapped in leather with little boxes attached to my head and arm. He found me
flat on our bed, deep in thought. He (unhelpfully) tried to remind me of all
the other ways orthodox Judaism excludes women, but that’s never been my
experience. If there’s something I don’t like in Judaism, I change it. If I
find a prayer or word exclusionary or offensive, I leave it out. If there’s a
ritual I think is outdated, then I dump it. I tell my friends I practice
“Make-Your-Own-Judaism.”
I’m trying to
flip my tfellin experience around, to get over the feeling of exclusion and to
make myself part of the Jewish story. For example, none of my Hebrew school students
will have ever seen or heard of tfellin. Next Saturday morning I will be the
first person, a woman, to show them how to wear them. That’s got to count for
something. And then, if you search online for pictures of women wearing
tfellin, there’s a raft of pictures, many of them of women praying at the
Western Wall in Jerusalem. Best of all, there’s a picture of Rosie the Riveteer
wearing tfellin. Something about the look in her eye tells me she’s part of the
story, that she won’t be excluded. 
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