We were on a busy street corner helping an Israeli tourist put on tefillin. Suddenly, I felt a tap on the shoulder. I spun around and came face to face with a wizened old man. After I had finished with my first "customer," the old man told me that he was born in Romania, had subsequently moved to Philly, and now lives in Israel.
"Today is my birthday, and I want to celebrate it by putting on tefillin. You know, I have not done this since my bar mitzvah. I am seventy-nine years old today, so you can do the math and figure out how long it has been…"
We happily complied.
The other day, we were hanging out in the ancient synagogue of Dubrovnik—a great place to meet people—and we offered a gentleman the opportunity to put on tefillin. He refused.
Five minutes later he came back and told us that he changed his mind. After donning tefillin, reciting Shema and the Amidah prayer, he told us his story:
"I grew up in Baltimore, and my parents did not get along with the members of the neighborhood synagogue. When I was eleven, my parents traveled to Brooklyn to meet the Lubavitcher Rebbe. The Rebbe told my mother the he sensed something bothering her. She replied that she was worried about where her son would celebrate his bar mitzvah. The Rebbe suggested that they hold it in his own synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway.
"And so it was. A year and a half later, we came back to Brooklyn. I got the second aliyah (since our family is Levite), and the Rebbe had the third!"
