THE END

We set out, about a year ago, to study the list of sixty positive commandments that Rambam sees as obligatory on all male Jews, in all times and places, 46 of which apply to women as well. As we bring that project to a close, I found it worth one more summing up, to put the entire picture together. We found, on the male side of the equation, that more than half of the mitsvot focused either directly on building a relationship with God or on more clearly human endeavors. In the first category, there were two subcategories, the constant mitsvot and the occasional ones. The constant ones sought to insure that we remember God throughout our lives, with such mitsvot as believing in, loving, and fearing God, studying Torah, and praying. Another group of mitsvot also worked to focus our thoughts on God but by instituting special days, which were generally accompanied by mitsvot that further strengthen the message of the day. Fully half of universal positive Judaism revolves around two ways of focusing on God, those that apply in our daily lives and those that crop up periodically for especially concentrated attention.

The mitsvot of food, building a society and building a family are also everyday mitsvot, with a slightly different focus. Since Jews,need to be human beings along with being Jewish, they would have to engage in ordinary human activities. In food, the positive mitsvot were primarily to be aware of the once-living creatures we were eating, to remind us that the permission to use this world came from God. In building a society, the mitsvot we saw had to do with accepting the necessary hierarchy in a well-constructed polity, and making sure that it was a place where people could live safe, productive lives. In family, the need to engage in building families of continuity and stability found expression in specific mitsvot of the Torah. In each area of life, God provided us ways to serve Him as well as reminders of the need to direct even our everyday, human activities towards the goals set by the Torah.

The Torah also required continuing reminders of a lost world, so that, regardless of where a Jew is, the memory of the Temple and its officiants will necessarily be with him or her. These mitsvot might easily have fit in other categories as well—teshuvah, for example, is also related to remembering God on a regular basis—but Rambam places them in the Sefer haMitsvot in contexts that suggest that he was focusing on their mikdash aspect. So, too, the continuing commands related to priests also fit our concept of building a proper Torah society, except that their right to any role in that society depends on our continuing memory of the invaluable role they have played and will play in the future. While we keep our hands firmly in reality, then, we also make sure to hearken back and forward to the world God originally envisioned when giving the Torah to the Jewish people.

Moving over to women for a moment, note that they are included in the central mitsvot of each of the categories we have suggested-- building a proper human society, insuring that God is a part of one’s life on both regular and special occasions, and remembering the Mikdash and its officiants. Within those categories, the Torah exempted them from some mitsvot, but, other than the need to build a family, there were no categories from which they were left out. To me, that suggests that the Torah saw women as equally part of the big picture of service of God, but envisioned a different path to achieving that big picture.

The common element of the mitsvot from which they are exempt—other than the four related to building a family, which we just discussed last week and need not rehash—is that they are more specific than others. The mitsvah of loving God, for example, is fairly amorphous; while we know what the end point should be, there are numerous ways of getting there. The mitsvot of Talmud Torah, tefillin (2 mitsvot), tsitsit, keriat shema, shofar, lulav, sukkah, and counting the Omer (which is the set of mitsvot we are discussing) share the significant characteristic that they all define fairly rigidly how one should express one’s service of God. All of these were actions that the Torah insisted a person do either at a very specific time or in a specific way. It is that rigidity, I believe, from which the Torah wanted to free women, to leave open to them wider options in how to achieve their optimum avodat Hashem.

Before I close these sheets, I will allow myself a moment to reminisce about the evolution of this forum; it started out as an Halakhic Update, in which I tried to clarify (all right, correct an error I made in) a shiur I had given at the shul, (the possibility of using dishwashers on a timer on Shabbat or Yom Tov). After a while of writing such Updates, the name changed to Halakhah in Brief, in which I took up halakhic topics at random and summarized them. Then, about a year ago, this sheet became Mitsvah of the Week. While we have reviewed mitsvot `aseh that are obligatory in all times and places, there are still those that are potentially obligatory in our times, those that are only applicable in different sorts of times, and then there are the various prohibitions. For now, however, other pressing projects force me to take a lengthy break in producing these, so I bring this to a close with great thanks for all those who have read these, commented on them, and generally made this the productive experience that it has been.