Armed
| November 7, 2023“This has the power to bring deliverance from the current hardships in peace”
As told to Miriam Bodner by Yitzchok Achter
ON
Monday, Isru Chag, I sat on the subway with a group of friends, headed to Manhattan. What struck me immediately was the cold and the silence. Or perhaps it was the tension? The passengers seemed frozen in place. The news of the war in Israel had stretched its hand across the ocean to hold us in its icy grip.
But that was precisely why I was sitting on the subway.
It was a mission, really. We were going to find Jews to put tefillin on. I sat back in my seat and wondered if the air had been this cold and icy in 1967. The Six Day War had begun in June, but surely the fear they felt must have made it as cold as it was now. As they dug trenches and organized troops, were their thoughts as wild as ours are now?
The train rode along with its usual sway, lulling me to drowsiness. When it suddenly stopped, I almost didn’t feel it.
“Train stopped… no longer running….” People were whispering.
We followed the crowds off the train and assessed the situation. “We must find out if it’s temporary,” my colleague said furtively. “It would be best to reach Manhattan sooner rather than later.”
The crowd was thick on the platforms outside the trains. We started looking for a different train, and then we saw one man walking calmly on the platform. Judging by his uniform, I could tell he was an MTA employee of sorts. I looked at my friend, and we both understood that the best option would be to approach him and ask for directions.
Something about the scene, the positioning of the speaker and the crowd, reminded me of a video I’d seen… I shut my eyes, trying to remember, and then opened them to look for my friends, but instead I saw scenes from the video. The crowd around me had changed, and I was now surrounded by Jewish men and women. The colors were from a different, older world, and when I faced forward, the man up front speaking looked familiar.
It was the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
A white banner behind him read “Lag B’omer 5727” in Hebrew. His speech rang with confidence as he assured Israel of Hashem’s protection from the threat of war. The farbrengen was well known to me, since it was then that the Lubavitcher Rebbe had begun his tefillin campaign. When you help someone fulfill the mitzvah of tefillin, I knew, it is considered in the merit of another Jew as though he himself put on tefillin.
“Great efforts should be made to encourage as many Jews as possible to lay tefillin,” the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s voice echoed. “This has the power to bring deliverance from the current hardships in peace.”
And as Israel sent her soldiers to their planes and tanks, the Lubavitcher Rebbe sent his to the streets and army bases. His words spurred a massive campaign, and Chabad chassidim around the world worked feverishly to spread this mitzvah. Within a few days, thousands put on tefillin for the first time, earning Hashem’s protection in the Six Day War. The chayalim won the war on the battle front; the shluchim won the war on the home front.
A jab in my side. I blinked, and the subway scene came back. The man on the podium was once again just an MTA employee, and the crowd around me just tense New Yorkers. Maybe there were Jews among them? That’s who we had come to seek.
“We can get more information about this subway malfunction from that guy,” a friend suggested. “Come on, let’s ask him.”
The employee looked just as cold as his surroundings. With stiff shoulders and expressionless eyes, he turned to us as we approached. But he didn’t have much information. “This should be temporary,” was all he could say.
He then turned abruptly away; he was obviously in a hurry. But my vision of the Lubavitcher Rebbe was still fresh, and my sudden burst of inspiration made me blurt out, “Excuse me, sir, but do you happen to be Jewish?”
He paused. Slowly, almost reluctantly, he turned back to face me. “I am.”
I eagerly brought out the tefillin from my bag and explained its significance, but the cold in his demeanor didn’t thaw. “I’m in a hurry,” he said. “I need to get back to work.”
Well, these missions require a fair share of persistence. Chabad chassidim learn to push their luck. It was then that I picked up on his Russian accent. Knowing Russian myself, I decided to speak to his heart in his mother tongue. I told him about the war happening in our Holy Land, and how the least we could do was fulfill such an important mitzvah as tefillin.
He hesitated. Those few seconds of uncertainty felt like years. And then I heard the words: “Yes, let’s do this!”
The tefillin straps had grown warm sitting beside me in my bag, and the contrast to his cold arm was stark. But as I gently wrapped his arm with the tefillin shel yad, his arm warmed with each bind. And when I positioned the tefillin shel rosh upon his forehead, his eyes melted.
The noise, the crowd, and even the lingering fear all faded away as I said each word of the tefillah with him and he repeated them. How interesting that history repeats itself, I thought. I was no different from the Chabad chassidim who had done the same for IDF soldiers back in 1967.
I unwrapped the straps from the man’s arms. Looking back at his face, I felt a jolt. How Jewish his face looked now, how warm and friendly! He shook my hand, smiled, and soon became a retreating figure in a crowd that eventually swallowed him up.
It was a different crowd now, I could see. There was excitement. We looked around and realized — the trains had suddenly started working again. And just like that, we were back on the train toward Manhattan.
The cold, the silence, and the tension still hung thick in the subway air. But the tefillin lay warm in my hands, and I could feel it sending out its waves of warmth to shatter the icy wall of fear. Sitting there on the subway, I smiled to myself. For today, as one of the Rebbe’s soldiers, I was doing my part to help Israel achieve a victory.
(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 867)
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