Tfillin and Marriage Symbols

[debka_notion]

Just noticed this morning that not only do we recite psukim (verses) about being bethrothed to G-d while wrapping tfillin straps around our fingers, we then go on to wrap the strap around the ring where people contemporarily wear wedding rings. I wonder if there was some influence, although I very much doubt it. But it was a striking sort of coincidence.

I wonder if that affects how married Jews feel about their rings and/or about their tfillin. (Input, anyone?)

Comments

[chinchillama.livejournal.com]

Hmm I wonder. I'll have to ask Adam about this one (him being the one with tfillin in this house.

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

That finger being the ring finger, or at least identified with love, goes back to at least the 3rd century B.C.E. in Greece (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedding_ring#Post-wedding_customs), so it's entirely possible that there was some influence.

[tovah623.livejournal.com]

[nuqotw.livejournal.com]

I don't wrap tefillin on my left hand either! There are numerous customs for how to wrap them on one's hand, so at a guess plenty of folks in fact don't wrap them on that finger at all.

I believe that one is supposed to remove rings, watches and other interference when wearing tefillin.

Also, as you move further "right" an increasing number of men simply don't wear wedding rings at all.

[fleurdelis28.livejournal.com]

I'm confused - who wraps tfillin around their ring finger? Or do you just mean the wrapping afterwards, rather than the betrothal part? That would seem to be less significant.

[naomichana.livejournal.com]

I wrap tefillin straps first around my middle finger, but then I do wrap around the outside half of my hand which includes my ring finger and wedding/engagement rings (I wear them together, since neither is thick and I'm not a multi-ring person). My engagement ring has a diamond sticking out (it was my husband's great-grandfather's idea), so I usually turn it inwards to make the strap fit smoothly. I don't think about it too much anymore, but it's a nice moment of remembering that I've got the rings on and am therefore, astonishingly, married. Another kind of binding, certainly. (Mind you, nine times out of ten my husband is next to me putting on his own tefillin, so it's not like I'd forget, but still.)

Now, about Hosea... I don't usually say those verses. They're not required, and as it happens I don't like those verses -- I mean, they're fine on their own, but in context they give me a pain. Significant parts of Hosea's view of marriage -- and hence his metaphor for the relationship between God and Israel -- are utterly incompatible with how I understand marriage and for that matter gender roles in Judaism. If I were Hosea's Israel, I'd be checking into the domestic-violence shelter instead of betrothing myself again to Hosea's God. Also, the metaphor pretty well assumes that the speaker is male (as a woman, can I betroth?). While all of that is an interesting discussion for another day, it's not really the one I want to be having first thing in the morning as I tie off my tefillin. So I usually say something else -- sometimes a mishmash of waking-up prayers, sometimes the short form of the blessing for studying Torah if I'm going to have a little time before the minyan starts up and I'm planning to look over the parsha, the beginning of the Psalm for Elul in Elul, and so forth. I'd like to come up with a few equally appropriate but different lines for all occasions, actually, but I haven't yet.

[margavriel.livejournal.com]

The recitation of the "betrothal verses" while wrapping tefillin around the middle finger is a custom of relatively recent innovation (300 or 400 years old), and probably due to Kabbalistic influence. (In fact, my own practice is not to say those verses.) Yet the practice of doing the actual wrapping around the finger is much older. In fact, there's a passage in either the Bavli or the Yerushalmi (I forget which, and am too lazy to check right now) which defines the minimum length for the tefillin-strap as "long enough to reach down to the hand and wrap around the middle finger three times".

Anyway, I would hazard to guess that the Kabbalists noticed the similarity between this practice and that of wedding rings, and that it was this association that led them to institute the recitation of the verses. (Not that it's a bad association-- it makes sense in light of the earlier ideas that the tefillin "show" the nations of the world that Israel is the people "belonging" to God.)

[shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com]

I wore my wedding ring on my right hand for a while, out of convenience. It didn't get in the way of the strap (which can be uncomfortable, at least with my hands and ring) and wasn't exactly countercultural since European men wear their wedding rings on their right hands. Eventually I was made aware that it was really bothering my mother in law, and decided it wasn't worth the argument. Now I just move it to the other hand when I put on tefillin.

I've thought quite a bit about the symbology of having the ring on one hand and the tefillah on the other. Not that I've come to any conclusions, mind you.