Bais HaVaad on the Parsha, Parshas Eikev

Not Right

Excerpted and adapted from a shiur by Dayan Yosef Greenwald   

August 18, 2022

And you shall place these words of Mine upon your heart and upon your soul, and you shall tie them as a sign on your arm (yedchem), and they shall be as ornaments between your eyes.

Devarim 11:18

The Torah does not explicitly say on which arm tefillin are to be placed. There are two sources for the halacha that they go on the left. The first is that yadcha (in Parshas Va’es’chanan, referring to tefillin) alludes to “yad keiha,” the weak arm. The second is that the pasuk says tefillin go upon the heart, which is on the left side.

What about a left-handed person, whose right arm is the weak one? According to the Me’iri (Shabbos 103a), he puts tefillin on his left, just like everyone else. (He notes that this is different from other halachos that require the right hand, where a lefty uses his left.) A similar position is taken by the mekubalim (Sha’arei Teshuvah O.C. 27:11). This is very difficult to understand, as the Gemara (Menachos 37a) explicitly states that a lefty places tefillin on his right arm, his own yad keiha.

Perhaps one must explain the Me’iri and the mekubalim to be referring to an ambidextrous man, who does not have a yad keiha, and saying that he should follow the secondary source and  place his tefillin opposite his heart, on his left.