(TS)oomis,
It’s very dangerous to say that women should not do optional stuff before they finish doing required stuff. Firstly, who are we to determine what they should or shouldn’t do?
Secondly, do you shake lulav and esrog? Eat in a sukkah? Listen to Shofar?
“
No, it’s not. If I have a certain achrayus to fulfill and I am not fulfilling it, because I am trying to fulfill someone ELSE’S achrayus, then I am wrong. Women SHOULD do optional stuff (when in fact it IS optional and they are doing it for the right reasons). Putting on Tefillin is not OPTIONAL for women. They were never commanded to do it at all, even if they had the time to. It might be permissible, according to some poskim, but that is not the same as being “optional.” Lulav and Esrog are a mitzvah for all of us, and since (from a woman’s standpoint)it can be done anytime of the day during the weekday part of Sukkos, that is not the definition of an optional mitzvah. It is our mitzvah. Hashem determined what we should and should not do. Eating in a sukkah is a mitzvah incumbent on men, that women may fulfill as well. We don’t get an aveira for not doing it, but we should do it, because ALL of klal Yisroel were freed from Mitzrayim, not just the men. I listen to the shofar because I feel great emotional connection to Hashem when I hear it. When my babies were young, I did not go to Shul. Nowadays, people will come to blow the shofar for shut-ins, or they will have a special shofar blowing later in the day for women while the husbands stay home with the kids. It wasn’t like that in the shtetl, perhaps. Where we are ABLE to be mekayeim a mitzvah, we should. Tefillin are a mitzvah specific to men, as is the wearing of a tallis. Are these women keeping strict kashrus and Shabbos? (If they are, kol hakavod, but someone who has no derech eretz for the Kotel, probably is lacking in other areas, as well).
(TS)”Why? Do you do everything you’re supposed to do?
And I’m not a big fan of WOW, I think most feminists are wackadoodles, but if this brings them closer to Hashem, then I really don’t see the big deal of having them daven in the women’s section. Politically as well, it does not make sense to fight this. It’s a losing battle and is just causing more animosity, which will cause more people to actually not give in to charedi demands. It’s the classic case of biting your nose to spite your face”
I am not such a tzadeikes that I do everything I am supposed to do. I wish I were, and I work on myself for that reason. But I work on mitzvos that are incumbent on me, not on the one that someone else has to do. I am not a Kohein (though I am a bas kohein). Should I try to duchen? The wackadoodles as you call them, are not coming closer to Hashem. they are distancing themselves (and others) FROM Hashem, and are extremely misguided. Let them sit and learn some real Hashkafa (not kabbalah, not feminist propaganda, not stuff that attempts to make them feel bad about Torah values in an effort to stroke their egos.
I repeatedly saw this in the late 60s when I was in college, and I can tell you for an absolute certainty,they were UTTER phonies then, and these ladies seem to be following the same types of gurus as those of the past. Not one of the ladies who made a big deal out of having their own minyan and putting on Tefillin (And no one stopped them then), actually became frummer, and several went REALLY off the derech, as I recall vividly.
Dayeinu.