I don't think a Barbie with tefillin raises troubling questions. There are already dolls with tefillin, they just happen to be male. There are toy sifrei Torah. Plush lulavin. 1000-dollar High Holy Day seats in the synagogue. The questions were there long before Barbie laid her tefillin. This image makes people uncomfortable, for the same reasons it makes people laugh, and people seem to prefer citing commercialisation or trivialisation of the sacred to exploring the idea that the discomfort stems from seeing a female figure in tefillin.
I don't think a Barbie with tefillin raises troubling questions. There are already dolls with tefillin, they just happen to be male. There are toy sifrei Torah. Plush lulavin. 1000-dollar High Holy Day seats in the synagogue. The questions were there long before Barbie laid her tefillin. This image makes people uncomfortable, for the same reasons it makes people laugh, and people seem to prefer citing commercialisation or trivialisation of the sacred to exploring the idea that the discomfort stems from seeing a female figure in tefillin.