Tefillin Plainview

Plainview, NY, 1967

You shall put these words of mine on your heart and on your soul; and you shall tie them for a sign upon your arm, and they shall be as totafot  between your eyes.
— Deuteronomy 11:18

One summer afternoon, as I emerged from the subway at Times Square, I was accosted by two young, bearded members of the Lubavitch sect, an Orthodox/Hasidic branch of Judaism. With unerring “Jew-dar,” they knew I was of the tribe. The men peppered me with questions about my life, my career, and my relationship to the Jewish religion. Then they thrust a pair of tefillin in my face.

“Let us put these on your body! Affirm your Judaism!”

Tefillin come as a pair; they consist of two small wooden boxes holding the scripture above, and long leather thongs with which to wrap the boxes around one’s head and arms. These were given to at my bar mitzvah, at age 13. In my opinion the wearing of tefillin is one of the strangest of Orthodox Judaism’s rituals. And though I love many Jewish rites—like the beautiful Passover Seder, and the deep introspection of the “Days of Awe” that fall between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—putting on tefillin seems utterly ridiculous to me. I said so.

“Listen to you,” one of the men said derisively. “You call yourself a travel writer? If you were in India or Peru, and were invited to take part in a local ritual, would you refuse? Of course not! Yet here we are, in the city where you were born, and you won’t honor a ritual from your own religion!”

They had me there. Yet I continued to resist. They did not relent. Ultimately, I realized that my only escape route was to let them affix the tefillin to my body. I stood there near the entrance to the subway, wrapped up in these things, feeling like a fool. My taskmasters beamed with delight, and asked if I wanted a photograph. I did not.

There is a difference between being invited to join a ritual and being coerced, by mockery and manipulation, to do so. I’ll never wear tefillin again. But if you feel a connection with the Divine when you strap these wooden objects to your body, please, take them home—with my blessing.