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As a child of maybe seven,
while exploring the basement of our suburban home, I found a curious item, a velvet bag
containing little boxes with long black leather straps attached to them. Hauling
them upstairs I asked my father if I could use the straps for a craft project.He took the package from
my hands and drew the objects out tenderly. "I have not used these since the
beginning of the war," is what I recall him to have said. He continued: "I used
to keep kosher, say the Shema every night, and pray with these every morning."
I regarded this latter statement with surprise. We went to Friday night synagogue
together occasionally, lit candles, had a Hanukkah menorah and a seder, not much else.
"These are called tefillin," he
explained. "They contain hand-written scrolls with verses from the Torah about love.
During my term of service in World War II I lost my sense of a loving God. I stopped
keeping kosher, praying and using these." He was in the Signal Corps, I later
learned. He helped lay communications lines which found him given leave to the nearest
town, which was the just liberated site of Auschwitz. He was gravely injured, evacuated
and spent six years in the hospital, wounded for life, leg crushed, marrow infected.
His continuing survival remains a modern miracle.
My father wandered off with the tefillin. We did
not discuss them again.
A year later my yiddish-speaking Grandfather
Benjamin came for an extended visit. Every morning he would go to the dining room
and mumble for an hour, putting on a similar set of boxes and straps (his boxes are much
tinier than my father's) and a tallit prayer shawl. My mother says at first I would
watch him intently and after some weeks she found me beside him everyday, with a ribbon
wrapped around my arm and a towel over my shoulders.
One day "Pop Pop" turned to me for the
first time in the midst of his prayer, took off his tefillin and wound them properly onto
me, uttering urgently in to me incomprehensible Yiddish. He went home the next day and
enter a "rest home" not long thereafter. Often I've wondered, given my pixie
hair cut in those times, did he think I was a little boy? Or sensing his mortality
and knowing I was the only family member drawn to Judaism religiously, had he made a
strategic decision?
Pop Pop's tefillin became my own. One day they
even returned to the Ukraine with me, their and his place of origin. The spiral of spirit
continues.
At an Ohalah Conference (Association of rabbis and
cantors dedicated to cultivating Jewish spirituality) my friend and roommate, Rabbi Shefa
Gold, taught me how to meditate on sacred relationships while putting on tefillin.
Here is my version of that remarkable idea:
One of the most powerful of the tefillin
prayers is from the prophet Hosea and the same prayer often used as a commitment statement
at Jewish weddings. V'eirastikh li l’olam V’eirastikh li b’tzedek U’v’mishpat U’v’khessed U’v’rakhamim v’eirastikh li b’emunah v’yahdaht et Adonai.
With or without the actual tefillin, you might try this: 1) Do your tefillin hand windings and address each part of the verse set above to God.2) Do the verse set again, checking each of the statements in regard to your relationship with your committed partner, friend, parent or child. 3) Do the verse set again, do it about your relationship to yourself. 4) Repeat the verse set and again address each part to your relationship with God. What do you notice having done this? What changes for you with each step? If a friend, partner or relative of yours lays tefillin also, try putting on your tefillin and doing this spiritual experiment together! For extra Reb Goldie tefillin stories (humorous) #1 or #2. |
