When someone asks me “Why do you wear a tallit katan?” There are at least five questions they may potentially be asking.

1)Why would anyone do such a thing, ie, why is it done, stam?
2)Why do you deliberately wear a 4-cornered garment in order to put fringes on, when there is no requirement to have a 4-cornered garment in the first place?
3)Why do you choose to wear a tallit katan in light of the fact that most Conservative Jews don’t?
4)Why do you wear a tallit katan in light of the fact that you are a woman, and women have not traditionally worn this garment (whether or not this is to imply that a woman shouldn’t)?
5)Why would anyone do any mitzvot?

When I’m caught on the spot by this question, it is difficult to know how to answer. The person asking usually has a clear single meaning to their question, and is unaware that there are other possible meanings, especially if their meaning is number four… and usually it is. The problem is that my instinctual answer is to 2/3. The answer to 4 is an afterthought that should follow logically from 2 and 3, given that in egalitarian Judaism, women are not a different category of Jew from men, that is full participatory members of the covenantal people, who should in theory do the same things that they would be doing were they men. Why should women be full participatory members of the people is the underlying question and that is something that can’t be addressed adequately in a 10 minute conversation.

Why might a woman not be satisfied with the woman’s traditional separate role? For a variety of reasons:

It is marginal and marginalizing.

It assumes a hetero-normative paradigm.

It assumes definition of the self in relation to others and not independently.

It negates motivation for broad education.

It is inherently unequal and implies inherent inequality of the sexes.

It is inherently a role of invisibility. It includes no outward expression of observance or identity other than covering and hiding.

Etc. The list goes on and yes, it is informed by relatively recent social and scholarly developments with regards to gender paradigms. That is not a bad thing. I believe that the developments precipitated by, and that precipitated feminism and gender scholarship more accurately reflect our reality than the paradigm set up in the times of the rabbis and previously. What has changed? A lot. Birth control has a lot to do with it. The discovery in times of need (e.g. WWII) that women were able to do things previously not thought possible. Economics, the rise of the middle class, technology, and the resultant advent of leisure as a societal norm. The study of psychology. Free access to information and education. The changing realities of the world in which we live necessitated that women begin to view themselves as beings capable of roles outside the home which would previously have been unimaginable due simply to the structure of the family and the economics of home management. Chaza”l did not anticipate the reality in which we live today, which is why we have no precedent for halachic equality between men and women. In a previous age, to place the same obligations upon women as upon men would have been utterly disastrous. That is simply not the case today and it is more likely to be far more damaging to a woman, to the family, to the social dynamic, and to the community for women to continue to see themselves as limited to the roles they held in a bygone era. The woman of today is a fundamentally different kind of person than the woman of the age of Chaza”l.

So where do we draw the line? At biology.

To be continued, hopefully…