The return of the minim

Twenty-first Century Tefillin: LoVid (Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) reminds us that the iPhone generation needs phylacteries too.

Comment:

Megilla 24b

העושה תפלתו עגולה - סכנה ואין בה מצוה.

One who makes his tefillin round - there is danger, and there is no mitzvah.

Rashi explains that the reason for this is that round tefillin could more easily injure someone (if they were somehow hit while on the person's head) than square tefillin. 2) One does not fulfill the mitzvah, because the tefillin must be square.

נתנה על מצחו או על פס ידו - הרי זו דרך המינות.

ציפן זהב ונתנה על בית אונקלי שלו - הרי זה דרך החיצונים

If he put it on his forehead or the palm of his hand - this is the way of heresy.

If he coated them with gold and put it on his sleeve - this is the way of the outsiders.

Rashi (s.v. harei, on the 10th to last short line):

This is the way of heresy- that they denigrate the explications of our Sages and go after the plain meaning - "between your eyes" (Devarim 6:8), literally and "on your hand" (ibid.), literally. And our Rabbis explicated in Menachot through a g'zeira shava "between the eyes" - this is the skull, the place where the brain of a baby pulsates, and "on your hand" the upper part, the biceps on the top of the arm, so that the placing will be opposite the heart.

Comments

[Yehonasan]

It seems to me that these ersatz tefillin might be okay for women, since they aren't obligated in the mitzvah anyway. However the risk might then be that men might think they are okay for them too.
What we are seeing here is the result of people who are lost in externals, appearance, ornamentation, thereby cutting the shoots -- cutting the mitzvah away from its root in the Torah and tradition.