Why I lay tefillin
Or: It took awhile, but now I’m too scared to stop
It’s been many years since I rode to elementary school on the back of a Vespa motor scooter. I was in the eighth grade at the Yeshiva of Flatbush that year, and fall, winter, and spring, no matter the weather, I had to be at minyan every morning. I rode holding my kippah down on my head with one hand (it was then that I truly understood the reason why men should wear bobby pins to hold their kipot on their heads), and clutched the driver’s belt with the other hand. My tefillin were under my arm.
My zeide bought those tefillin in Israel for my bar mitzvah in 1959, and I davened with tefillin every morning (except not on Shabbes, Yomtov or chol hamoed, obviously).
The summer of 1960 was going to be my last year up at Camp Bayview, a camp in St. Donat, Quebec, about 75 miles north of Montreal, and I put tefillin on there as well. The campers, although predominantly Jewish, were not religious, and they watched me perform this daily ritual quizzically.
In the fall of 1960, I left the yeshiva world and went to Stuyvesant High School. Even though my relationship with Judaism changed, what I felt in my heart and in my guts didn’t. I still laid tefillin, but then I stopped after my sophomore year.
My reconnection with wearing tefillin came about Pesach in 2008.
I grew up in a four-and-a-half-room apartment in Brooklyn, and we had a seder there both nights of Pesach. I can’t remember any seder in our apartment with fewer than 25 friends and relatives there.
All the furniture in the living room was either pushed to the side or moved into my parents’ bedroom, and we lined tables up end to end all the way into the den.
When my parents were in their 60s, celebrating Pesach at home became a real chore. I’m sure that many of you relate to shlepping all the dishes, silverware, and pots and pans down from the various closets where they were stored, changing the contact paper on the shelves that housed our everyday stuff, and schlepping the everyday stuff into a closet.
Emptying and scrubbing each shelf of the fridge, covering the newly cleaned shelves with wax paper, and, as you know, that list goes on and on.
In 1976 we looked for Pesach programs away from home. They had to be under strict rabbinical supervision, where there were things for both kids and adults to do. We particularly liked the way one of them looked, and we went.
There are places all over the world now that host these programs, but that wasn’t the case 50 years ago. We spent every Pesach in different locations. We celebrated on different Caribbean Islands, in Florida, in Arizona, in Mexico, and in Israel, ending up with more than 30 of us traveling together each Pesach.
Those trips stopped in 2008, when our middle grandson was born.
He came into this world about a week and a half before Pesach, and our kids weren’t going to travel with a newborn, so we made both seders in their house. On the first day of chol hamoed, we flew down to Cancun, Mexico, where our extended family was spending the holiday. We had a beautiful villa on the beach and enjoyed our friends’ company for the rest of the chag.
Well, the rabbi there heard that I was a chazan and asked me to daven Musaf on the holy days: “I’ve got you penciled in for Musaf,” he said.
“A chazan?” I replied. “Nope, you heard incorrectly. I am a scallop shucker.” He was puzzled. “I work on a scallop boat, I’m at sea for 90 days at a time, and I shuck the scallops. What would ever make you think that I’m a chazan?”
One night I led the crew in Birkat HaMazon (grace after meals), and one of the guests went over to the rabbi and asked who the chazan was at my table. That was my ruination. He hounded me until I agreed to daven Yizkor.
C’mon now, do bus drivers take the bus when they go on vacation?
Pesach ended, and a guest came over to me at breakfast. “You did a beautiful job davening Yizkor, but I didn’t see you at minyan this morning,” he said.
“You never saw me at any minyan because I never went,” I replied.
He introduced himself. His name was Ralph, and he was from Southern California. “I left my tefillin in the minyan room,” he said. “Please, go, put on my tefillin and daven. You have to lay tefillin.”
I shook my head, no, but he was adamant, continuing his plea.
He was about 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed more than 300 pounds, so I said: “Here’s the deal. I’ll go lay tefillin and daven if you promise to go on a diet.”
A young woman standing next to him threw her fists up in the air and screamed “YES!!!” It turns out that she was his daughter.
“Okay,” he said, “I’ll go on a diet, but you have to promise me that you will daven with tefillin every day, and that doesn’t end when you get home.”
I nodded okay, we shook hands, and I went into the minyan room, put on his tefillin, and davened.
I have no idea what happened to Ralph and our deal, but I’ve been laying tefillin every day since then. It’s been 17 years. My relationship and connection to Judaism hasn’t waned, but my observance level is left wing Conservative (take that as you may).
I told this story to Rabbi Debra Orenstein a few years ago. She looked at me quizzically, knowing which traditions I keep and which I don’t, and asked why I continued davening with tefillin every day.
My answer was five words: “I’m too scared to stop!”
Cantor/Rabbi Lenny Mandel, who left the wilds of Manhattan almost 50 years ago and lives in West Orange, has been the hazan at Congregation B’nai Israel in Emerson for the past quarter century.
comments