Tel Aviv, in the weeks after the Yom Kippur War. Rav Yisrael Meir Lau tells in his memoir, Out of the Depths, what happened on one of his visits to the wounded at Ichilov.
Twelve Noon
A woman stopped him in the corridor and asked if he was a rabbi. He said he was, and asked what he could do for her.
Nothing for her, she said. For her son.
She brought him to the neurosurgery ward. The young man on the bed had his head wrapped so thoroughly that only his nose, his mouth and a sliver of his eyes showed. A sheet covered the rest of him, so there was no telling what else had been hit. He was just coming out of the anesthesia.
When his eyes found the rabbi, he asked what time it was.
Twelve o’clock, Rav Lau told him, and thought the man was still not himself. Noon or midnight, the man wanted to know. Noon.
Then came the real question. If a person hasn’t laid tefillin yet today, can he still lay them now?
The Arm Alone
He could, Rav Lau said, any time during the day. It wasn’t enough. What if the bandages make the head tefillin impossible — is the arm alone any good?
Rav Lau had seen that question answered once already, in Buchenwald, where he was a child. A Jew there kept an arm tefillin hidden under the floorboards and laid that one alone, day after day. So he told the wounded man yes. The arm alone.
The man pulled his left hand out from under the sheet and asked him to put it on.
They said Shema together. Somewhere in the middle of it he fell asleep. Rav Lau slipped the tefillin off his arm and went out.
His name was Yehuda, and weeks later, when he was stronger, he told the rabbi how he had come to be so worried about a mitzvah he had never kept in his life.
Beside the Canal
On erev Simchas Torah he had been sitting in a command car near the Suez Canal with five other officers, all of them older than he was, waiting for orders that hadn’t come. A truck pulled up beside them with a sukkah built on the back of it. Two Chabad men called down an invitation: come up, make a l’chaim, have some cake, say the brachah on the lulav.
The officers begged off. They didn’t keep Sukkos at home, they said, and they certainly weren’t about to start in the middle of a war.
The Chabadnik wasn’t moved. “What do you care?” he said. They were sitting there doing nothing anyway. Ten minutes, that was all he was asking.
They looked at each other, shrugged, and climbed up. Cake, a little sweet wine, and they were taking the lulav in hand when the blast came. They went flat on the floor of the truck, feeling along their own arms and legs to see what was still there.
Then they looked outside. The command car they had been sitting in a minute earlier had taken a direct hit. There was nothing left of it worth the name.
I Owe Him Something
When it was quiet again, Yehuda said to one of the Chabad men that he supposed they would call a thing like that a miracle.
“What would you call it?” the man answered.
Yehuda looked at him a long moment and pointed up. He owed Him something now, he said. His life had been saved because this man wouldn’t take no for an answer. The Chabadnik suggested tefillin, every day.
Yehuda wanted to start that minute. It was Yom Tov, so he couldn’t, and he had no idea where the army would send him by the time it was over — and anyway he owned no tefillin. There was a pair somewhere in his parents’ closet from his bar mitzvah, untouched since. The Chabadnik took down his name and his unit number and told him he would have his own within days.
Two Urgent Questions
He did. Yehuda crossed the canal into Egypt, and the tefillin found him there, army stamp and all. He laid them every morning.
Then he was hit in the spine at Fayid and flown to Tel Aviv for surgery on his head. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he thought of was that he had missed a day, and maybe more than one, and he sent his mother to find a rabbi.
The Famous Midrash
The famous midrash divides Klal Yisrael four ways through the arbah minim, down to the aravos, which have neither taste nor smell — neither good deeds nor a good attitude. Nevertheless the arbah minim are not complete unless all four are taken together as one.
The Chabadnik on that truck had ten minutes and no way of telling which of those six officers was which. He never found out. All he got was a name and a unit number, from a man who had just finished telling him he kept nothing.
May Hashem bring all of Klal Yisrael back to Him, and bind every one of us into the same bundle, b’mheirah b’yameinu, amen.
Download this article as a PDF →
Follow on WhatsApp → for new articles as they go up.
A Short Thought Each Day
We have begun Peeking Into Olam Haba, a short daily WhatsApp audio based on Rav Avigdor Miller’s teachings about the World to Come — and how thinking about it can change the way we live today.
Join Peeking Into Olam Haba on WhatsApp →
Leave a Reply