A female student has apologised for misleading a Chabad outreach worker into thinking she was a man and allowing him to lay tefillin on her.
Jewish student Baci Weiler, currently studying at the University of Chicago, posted a picture on her Facebook page last week of the man from Chabad putting the tefillin on her in New York’s Union Square.
Weiler wrote: "This happened last friday at a chabad table. Apparently, buzzed hair + baggy t-shirt + charedi lack of any concept of fluidity in gender expression = egalitarianism. Tefillin with a bracha [blessing], administered by a chabadnik! bimheira beyameinu [Hebrew for ‘it should come speedily in our time]’."
A rush of angry online responses to this post implying that Weiler was mocking the Chabad representative, led her to admit on Tuesday that she had been unfair and regretted “[allowing] him to do something he presumably would have been uncomfortable doing given complete knowledge of the situation... despite our ideological differences, I owed him this basic level of respect as a fellow Jew and as a human. For that I am sorry.”
She went on to say however that laying the tefillin in public made her feel religiously ‘validated’: "Being seen as a man, despite being a woman, was paradoxically validating: for just a minute, I was no longer an Other — the mechitza that has frustrated me for years dissolved". She also revealed that she owns her own set of tefillin.
One response on Facebook said: “The idea of gender sensitivity and fluidity seems to be of importance to you, but the concept of being honest in your interactions are not?... Baci, I don’t know the boy's name but he deserves an apology. Fast.”
While a commenter called ‘Shmuel’ on the Failed Messiah blog, said: “This was no political statement. This was just cheap deception. And while we all can chuckle that he thought you were a guy, well, you aren't, and you took advantage of his naivite. Don't be proud. You got some splainin to do.”
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