Tefillin, Failure and the Marks We Make©
Rabbi David Baum, Congregation Shaarei Kodesh
Yom Kippur - October 9, 2019/5780
*A special thank you to Camp Ramah Darom, where I serve as rabbi in residence over the summer, for bringing this incredible program to our children.
I received my first set of tefillin from my grandfather when I was 13 years old. He insisted that he alone buy them for me After I put them on for the first time with him, he took me aside, put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eyes, and said, “There’s a special gift for you inside.”
Like many bar mitzvah boys, I took off my tefillin, I put them back in their bag, and didn’t open that bag for a long time. His words stuck with me though: a special gift inside, for you. What were the profound life lessons I was supposed to learn from these tefillin? What are mystery lies inside these boxes?
Three years later on my way to a USY convention, I grabbed my tefillin bag, and when I opened it up, I finally realized what my grandfather meant - there was a check for $200 inside the bag; unfortunately, it was expired so I couldn’t cash it.
But there are gifts inside of tefillin, and this special mitzvah has been a part of who we are, our prayer uniform, for thousands of years. In Israel, we have found evidence of tiny pairs of tefillin that Jews would wear all day during the second Temple period.
This summer, at Camp Ramah Darom, I helped 45 teens make Tefillin, by hand, as part of an innovative project called Kesher Tefillin created by Rabbi Noah Greenberg. Today, I want to share the life lessons I learned from making tefillin, all day, almost every day, for two weeks, during the summer of 2019.
Lessons about the blessings of failure
Lessons about the marks or impressions that we leave on our loved ones, and the world
Failure is a bad word in America. I know, every college graduation speaker says fail often and embrace failures. They will tell you that Thomas Edison failed 3,000 times to make the light bulb, and succeeded only once, and yet, as a society, we are allergic to failure; we want perfect people. Even if we succeed, how do we live with our failures?
Imagine if you woke up every day and you were reminded of your greatest failure - how would you feel? In fact, this is what we as Jews do every morning when we put on our tefillin. If you look at the top of the tefillin shel Rosh, the tefillin that are on your head, you will see little hairs that stick out of the box. They are there for a reason.
There are various passages from the Torah written on parchment, mini pieces of the sefer Torah, that are tied together with calf hair inside the boxes of the Tefillin. I estimate that I personally delicately tied over 100 pieces of parchment with calf hair this summer. If you open up your tefillin, you will find a lot of calf hair.
But this is no regular calf hair - the hair is a reminder of our greatest sin as a people. When Moshe is up on Mount Sinai receiving the Torah, the people get scared, so they ask Aaron, Moshe’s brother and the high priest, to create a golden calf for them, to be an intermediary between them and God. When Moses comes down the mountain with the Holy Tablets, the Ten Commandments, and sees the people worshiping this calf, he shatters the Tablets in front of them. God wanted to kill us all and start over, and this could have been how the story ended - we had Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jacob’s sons, the story of slavery in Egypt, we were freed by God, and then, we died in the Wilderness because we failed the test. But Moshe convinces God to give us another chance. Moshe invokes God’s sense of mercy, the thirteen attributes of God which say over and over again on this holy day.
Here’s the interesting thing - we hide most of the calf hair, but a little bit of it has to stick out in order for others to see.
In many ways, this is the Jewish story. We don’t hide from our failures, we embrace them and make them a part of who we are. When the Holy Temple was destroyed by the Romans, it would have been easy for the Jewish people to pack up and leave everything behind. It was a great story, but all good things must come to an end.
Instead, they were introspective, they said, what did we do to cause the destruction? We hated each other without end, Sinat Chinam, we fought against each other, we became our own worst enemies. After the destruction, we picked ourselves up and continued our tradition, reinventing ourselves through rabbinic Judaism. But we kept that heartbreak with us - this is really how the high holiday season begins, with the 25 hour fast of Tisha B’Av. Rabbi Allan Lew writes, “Tisha B’Av, the day when we remember our estrangement from God, is the beginning of the process of Teshuvah. This very estrangement is the engine that drives us on our journey back home, back to God.”
This summer, the Jewish people had what my kids would call an epic fail. The Israeli space program, SpaceIL, was on the verge of becoming only the fourth nation to land on the moon. Think about it, little Israel would join the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, as they safely landed a craft on the moon. The journey began 11 years ago in 2011 when the nonprofit organization SpaceIL formed to compete in the Google Lunar X Prize: $20 million to the first privately funded team to put a robot down softly on the moon, move it at least 1,650 feet on the lunar surface and have it send high-resolution imagery home to Earth.
SpaceIL gave the lunar craft a name that a Jewish mother would be proud of: Bereshit - the first word of the Torah. This moment was supposed to be the Genesis, pun intended, of Israel’s space program.
Many of us waited by our phones and computers, watching the live cast of the landing. Israel, the consummate underdog, was sure to land on the moon - look at everything this tiny country has done in her 70 years. But, the screen went blank, and static took over - the lander had crashed.
The Lunar X Prize founder and Executive Chairman Peter Diamandis and CEO Anousheh Ansari said SpaceIL will receive the award despite failing to land. They said: "I think they managed to touch the surface of the moon, and that's what we were looking for our Moonshot Award, and also, besides touching the surface of the moon, they touched the lives and the hearts of an entire nation, an entire world, and school kids around the world.”
Morris Kahn, SpaceIL’s president and Beresheet’s top financial backer, said April 13 that he intends to form a new group of donors to support a second Beresheet mission.
“We are actually going to build … a new spacecraft, we’re going to put it on the moon, and we are going to complete the mission. This is part of my message to the younger generation: Even if you do not succeed, you get up again and try.”
We come from a long line of people who have failed, and it relates to this day. Judah, or Yehudah, one of the twelve sons of Jacob, came up with the idea to sell his brother Joseph into slavery. It is on this day, Yom Kippur, when Joseph’s brothers slaughtered a goat and poured its blood on Joseph’s torn up coat of many colors, the one that his father Jacob lovingly gifts him. Jacob cries that day, and we can imagine how tortured Yehudah was for so many years. Eventually, Yehudah confesses:
מַה־נֹּאמַר לַאדֹנִי מַה־נְּדַבֵּר וּמַה־נִּצְטַדָּק הָאֱלֹהִים מָצָא אֶת־עֲוֺן עֲבָדֶיךָ
What can we say to my lord? How can we plead, how can we prove our innocence? God has uncovered the crime of your servants. - Genesis 44:16
When Yehudah meets Joseph again, not knowing that the Egyptian lord is Joseph, he admits his failures and his sins, he takes responsibility, he says, take me captive instead of my brother Benjamin. We are called Jews after Yehudah, our forefather who embraced his failures, taking responsibility for them, and using them to raise himself and his family up.
On Yom Kippur, we embrace the failure within Yehudah, and the failure of our people at the sin of the Golden Calf. Today, Yom Kippur, is the day when Moshe forgives us. On the 17th of Tammuz, Moses broke the tablets when he saw us sin with the golden calf. Forty days later, on Yom Kippur, Moses returns with a new set of tablets for us. We never forget that sin, because Moses placed that broken set of tablets inside of the ark of the covenant, along with the whole set of tablets.
We hold our failures at our very center.
My kids love watching epic fails on YouTube - their favorite ones are when a person is so sure that they will accomplish something, a skateboard jump or a back flip, and they fall flat on their face.
Our social media presence is filled with all of our victories. As we look upon the lives of others we think: everyone else’s family is perfect but mine; everyone has a better life than I do. The epic fails fills us with schadenfreude, a German word for the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another.
But those YouTube clips of epic fails never show the next part - when that person gets up. We need to change our culture, we shouldn’t cheer the Epic Fails, but we should marvel at how someone gets up, learns from their mistakes, wears it on their sleeve, or in our case, their heads, and tries again.
We have to do better with the failure of others. We have to accept that no one is perfect, that people fail. If they learn from the failures, if we give the opportunity to repent and own up to it, then we can all become better people.
In a digital world, if someone makes a mistake, it is there forever, and all we have to do is repost. Each mistake is inflated every time it is shared. During these unforgiving times, we must act more godly.
On Sunday, we held our Minhag service, our service for people and families in recovery. One of the many things I learned is the 4th and 5th steps of the 12 step program.
4. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admit to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
People in recovery must engage in a courageous and comprehensive personal inventory, or in Hebrew, cheshbon hanefesh, an accounting of the soul. All their failures and regrets are brought to light. Then they are given a sponsor, an individual who are farther along through the process of recovery who can help them during the times when they want to use again.
God is our ultimate sponsor. God is there for us when we fail, even epically, and God knows all of our failures, and yet, God always picks up the phone when we call, God never gives up on us. God forces us to examine not just our failures, but why we fail, the exact nature of our wrongs. That is what today is all about.
This is the Jewish story after all - and we are reminded of it every day when we put our tefillin on. Our failures are always a part of us, but they don’t hold us back from moving forward, they actually lift us up, to prepare us for the next challenge.
The second lesson I learned this summer relates to a condition you may never have heard of: tefillin arm. After we take off the tefillin off of our arm, there is an imprint that it leaves for a couple of minutes. Over the summer, I had to have tefillin on a lot longer than I do normally, and I noticed something - the marks I had on my arms stayed with me all day. They literally make an impression on us.
This is where I want to tell you the second part of my tefillin story, and why I started putting them back on as a young adult.
Four years after my bar mitzvah, I returned from the March of the Living, a trip where Jewish teens visit the Concentration Camps and Europe and then go to Israel. It was on this trip where I put on my tefillin every weekday. I came back and had questions for my grandfather, the one who gave me the set. Why was it so important that you, and no one else, buy my tefillin?
He told me a story of an experience he had when he was around my age at the time, just a teenager. During the WWII, my grandfather was interned in several slave labor camps before he was interned at the infamous Mauthausen concentration camp. My grandfather told me that he prayed in a morning minyan when he was a prisoner in one of these labor camp. He told me that he, along with a minyan of prisoners, would wake up an hour before work, look for day light, put on their tefillin, and daven Shacharit. Frankly, when he told me this, I was shocked. I asked him, “Why would you pray, with tefillin no less, to God when you were in a slave labor camp, and the reason you were a “slave” was because you were a Jew?” He told me something that I will always keep with me. He told me, “You had to pray, and you had to use your tefillin, because it reminded you of better times, of people you lost. We used our tefillin before the war, and we knew it was something you just did everyday. It reminded us of our past, before all this. We would look at each other during Shacharit, and we just knew that at least one of us would survive. Everything was taken from us except for our tefillin. Money, nice clothes, possessions, they meant nothing anymore, but when we put on the tefillin, then, for a few brief moments everyday, we felt free.”
Inside our Tefillin, we find the following verses from Deuteronomy chapter 11:
וְשַׂמְתֶּם אֶת־דְּבָרַי אֵלֶּה עַל־לְבַבְכֶם וְעַל־נַפְשְׁכֶם וּקְשַׁרְתֶּם אֹתָם לְאוֹת עַל־יֶדְכֶם וְהָיוּ לְטוֹטָפֹת בֵּין עֵינֵיכֶם׃
Therefore impress these My words upon your very heart: bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead,
וְלִמַּדְתֶּם אֹתָם אֶת־בְּנֵיכֶם לְדַבֵּר בָּם בְּשִׁבְתְּךָ בְּבֵיתֶךָ וּבְלֶכְתְּךָ בַדֶּרֶךְ וּבְשָׁכְבְּךָ וּבְקוּמֶךָ׃
and teach them to your children—reciting them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up;
and inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates—
to the end that you and your children may endure, in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers to assign to them, as long as there is a heaven over the earth.
It is this story, and so many others that I hold with me, the marks they leave on me, the words that are impressed onto my very heart, not just when it was told to me, but on a daily basis, every time I put my tefillin on, and they stay with me all day.
Whenever I discuss tefillin with bnai mitzvah families, I will often receive this question: “Can my son or daughter where his deceased grandfather’s or great-grandfather’s tefillin instead of buying him or her a new pair?” I understand what they are really asking for. They want their loved one to make an impact, to leave a mark, on their child like their loved one made on them.
The truth is, and I am honest with these families, there’s a 95% chance that these old pair of tefillin are no longer kosher. You can get them checked, but if they aren’t kosher, the sofer will not put them back together again for you. I tell them, “I am sure that your grandparent, who is no longer with us, would want your son or daughter to have their own set of tefillin.”
I cannot wear my Grandfather’s actual tefillin from that story, they were taken away from him, and they are forever lost. But my grandfather is here and he taught his son the value of following God’s commandments, God’s mitzvoth, and our tradition, and my father and mother taught me. I have had a couple of pairs of tefillin in my life, but each pair of tefillin I own are my grandfather’s, and his grandfather’s, and also YOUR grandfather’s.
The bayit, the boxes of the tefillin, are made of skin, just like we are; the words inside of the tefillin are written on skin as well. Tefillin boxes breakdown, the letter on the parchment crack and smudge, eventually, they have to be buried, but if we put them on every day, if we speak the words inside, if we perform the actions, the mitzvoth, the sacred acts that tie us to God, our tefillin will live forever. These words will be spoken to a new generation who will cherish them, and remember them. This is how we stay alive - the body dies, but the soul is eternal.
לְמַעַן יִרְבּוּ יְמֵיכֶם וִימֵי בְנֵיכֶם עַל הָאֲדָמָה אֲשֶׁר נִשְׁבַּע יְי לַאֲבֹתֵיכֶם לָתֵת לָהֶם כִּימֵי הַשָּׁמַיִם עַל־הָאָרֶץ׃ (ס)
“to the end that you and your children may endure, in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers to assign to them, as long as there is a heaven over the earth.” - Deuteronomy 11
Today, Yom Kippur, our tradition teaches us, is a sign in itself, an Ot. We don’t need tefillin today to learn their lessons: the lessons of embracing our shortcomings and failures, which we recite several times through our public confessions. We don’t hide our sins, we verbalize and internalize them, we learn from them, and we grow from them.
Today, Yom Kippur, is about seeing the impressions that God and our ancestors have made on us. Today is about the transmission of sacred Jewish memory, the key for our children’s endurance, and it is up to us to speak those words to them.
May the words of our loved ones surround us and embrace us. May our words make an impression. May they pick us up when we are down, may they carry us into the future, so they will embrace your children’s children until the end of time.
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