Power Tefillin

So this biker guy parks his hog outside my Kabbalah Lab one day and stomps in saying he's looking for Kabbalah and I take one look and say, "Hey, you'd look great in black leather!"

He says, "Yeah?"

And I say, "Sure, just roll up your left sleeve."

I mean, how could he resist? Next thing, I'm tightening the knot on the first leather box around his bulging, tattooed biceps brachii and he's repeating after me, "Baruch….Atta…"

But then he blurts out, "Wait a minute! Why am I doing this? What's the point?"

I answer, "Thought you'd never ask."

"I asked."

"Okay, but first, let's wrap. Then we'll talk."

He's okay with that, wrapping, then saying Shma, then I play him this tv ad you just watched--and he still doesn't get it. So I show him The Tefillin Booth. Nope, still lost on him. So I try reading him my favorite episode of the Heaven Exposed series, The Tefillin Files. He's starting to get it. But it's tough. Tougher than the leather those boxes are made of.

Can't blame him. Wrapping tefillin has to be the weirdest thing we do. Who else would imagine tying leather scrolls in black leather boxes onto their head and arm? Scrolls are for reading, not for wearing, right?

Yet in those tefillin is everything there is to know about Kabbalah, in hard, physical form. The World of Atzilut crystallized in three dimensions. The closest you could come to touching the Ein Sof.

That's what happened when Tefillin came down to earth: G‑d took His thoughts and extended them into the physical domain of the World of Assiah (that's our world, in Kabbalistic terms). He contracted His thoughts into a tangible action that we humanoids can perform. He condensed the Cosmic Mind into words on parchment, so that we can read them, comprehend them, and even wear them. And black leather looks cool, too.

Check out The Tefillin Files. Everything's there.