As the “Black Death” plague decimated Europe, Christians accused the Jews of causing the plague by poisoning the wells in an effort to wipe out the Gentile population.
On the 23rd of Kislev 5109 (Nov. 15, 1348), Rudolph of Oron, bailiff of Lausanne, sent a letter to the mayor of Strasburg informing him that certain Jews of Lausanne had “confessed” under torture that they together with their coreligionists had poisoned all the wells in the Rhine valley. This resulted in the masses persecuting and killing tens of thousands of Jews throughout Europe.
Look deeply and you will see that the Torah does not know of man and woman as separate beings.
Each act is performed once through a single body—a body that in our world may appear as two, but which the Torah sees as one.
On the contrary, for both to be assigned the same mitzvah would be redundant, for why should one half of the body do that which the other has already accomplished?
Just as a man fulfills the mitzvah to be fruitful and multiply through the agency of his female counterpart, so does a woman wrap tefillin or wear tzitzit on the body of her male counterpart.
For just as man and woman were first created as a single form, so too, before each soul descends below, they begin as one.
It may be at times that only half a soul must descend for its divine mission, while the other half waits patiently above. And when it will return, they will merge once again.