First Person Tefillin Accounts

I was at my father's side in the empty prep room. The room was silent; just the two of us. Suddenly - this could only happen in Israel - someone swung open the door and jabbed his head in. "I'm looking for my friend..."

The death of a thousand cuts would have been preferable. I briefly considered crawling, until I realized that everyone would be able to see me anyway.

I suppose every twenty-year-old should have an eighty-eight-year-old friend

He told me that I hadn't come to Las Vegas to sell playpens...

I started to pray everyday in the only way one can do such a thing: religiously.

As I turned to walk away, he announced, "Wait a minute! I got more Jewish stuff too!" Then he said,"This is special," he grinned, "no?"

Almost in tears, I apologized to G-d and admitted that I just couldn't get myself to wear my tallit and tefillin in public.

"When a Jew in Miami," the Rebbe said to me, "sees pictures of Jews at the Western Wall wearing tefillin, he gets an urge to put on tefillin himself."

The rabbi finally got me to agree that I would put on tefillin at least once in my lifetime. I went home and never kept my end of the deal - I never put on a pair of tefilin...

I had been a seeker for many years by the time I knocked on the door of Lubavitch House...

The Rebbe had called for an intensification of the campaign to get Jewish men to put on tefillin. I thought of taking advantage of the regional B'nai Brith Youth Convention. What a statement that would be — close to two hundred B'nai Brith boys performing the mitzvah of tefillin! But could it be done?

An Israeli public figure who couldn't refuse a request to put on tefillin, and the emotional chain of events that followed...

I wanted a set of tefillin, the black ritual boxes donned on weekdays. I wanted to feel the binding on my arm and the weight of the tefillin on my head. I wanted to be reminded that G‑d is above me. But at Nahal Yam there were no tefillin.

While I was deployed to Iraq, a lone Jewish Marine Corps Officer among hundreds of Iraqi soldiers in a remote region of the Syrian border, I had to live with keeping my religious identity to myself. I couldn't even have "Jewish" on my dog-tags

"Go find someone else to bother," he shot back at me. "I want nothing to do with you!" My head was spinning; I was hurt inside, yet knew I had done nothing disrespectful. Obviously, what I represent—being a religious Jew, wearing a beard and a kippah on my head— upset him so.