Reply To: Women and Grace

Let’s backtrack a bit. Let’s assume that a woman’s chiyuv is d’oraisa. Why then is it “??? ????”? She is just as chayev as he is. Ella mai, the “??? ????” is like the first half of Rashi – there is a tayna on the guy for not learning how to bentch. But what about Tosafos who explains and wants to apply Rashi’s second half to the braisa of Birchas Hamazon? So I would say that Tosafos understood that Rashi was explaining the braisa in accordance with the view that a woman’s chiyuv is only d’rabanan. Thus, I would ask my question that if the braisa’s goal was to tell us that a man should know how to bentch, it should have done so without misleadingly paralleling a woman to a katan.

Alternatively, you could explain Rashi’s second half differently from how Tosafos does and say that it’s simply inherently “demeaning” for a woman/katan to be motzi a man, and then combine this with your suggestion that the braisa’s goal is to tell us this.