I just came back from a Chabad-sponsored Jewish learning retreat. Fun event, interesting classes, unexpected insights. How can anyone resist a class called “Things Beyond Resemblance: Art, Architecture, and Kabbalah”? Also, my brother got a complete personality makeover. Either that, or he was replaced by a Lubavitch pod person.
Where to begin?- Lubavitch hassidim are known for their efforts to make secular Jews into religious Jews. They’ll park their “Mitzva tanks” in some public area, and go over to people asking, “Excuse me, sir? Are you Jewish? Have you put on tefillin today? Miss? Have you lit shabbat candles this week?”
The idea for picking those two things, as I understand it, is that tefillin and shabbat candles are supposed to have an especially powerful spiritual effect. The stories I hear are like the religious versions of those weight-loss ads- “Mark Goldberg had so little Jewish background he thought Yom Kippur was a type of fish. One day, a Chabad emissary pestered him into putting on tefillin. Today Mark, who now goes by Moshe and studies Talmud full time in a yeshiva…” That sort of thing. It’s always a friend of a friend who read about it in a magazine article that it happens to. I mean, someone changing their entire lifestyle just because they wear a black box on their arm for a minute?
So my family is at the Chabad convention, going to classes. Most of us are going to classes. Brother is staying in his hotel room playing electronic games, because Brother isn’t really interested in being there. Brother is a typical teenage boy, who would rather spend his time surfing the internet for porn in his bathrobe, after getting up at noon.
One day, two days, three days… it’s right before Shabbat, and one of the rabbis is going around getting participants who didn’t put on tefillin to put on tefillin. Brother has not put on tefillin, becuase Brother isn’t interested in coming to prayers. The rabbi asks, and Brother figures, why not, it will only take a minute and it will make the rabbi happy.
Next thing I know, we’re eating Shabbat dinner, and Brother announces that he wants to change. He feels… spiritual. He spends the meal actually being nice to everyone. Oh, and he wants to go to prayers the next morning. And go to classes, too. And start taking regular Torah lessons. And go to a Jewish school. And put on tefillin every day, of course. And stop looking at porn (although he didn’t say that at the table). And generally do something worthwhile with his life.
It’s been three days, and he’s still committed to his new lifestyle. It’s almost scary. I mean, it’s a good thing that he’s being nicer and more productive, but the change was so sudden. I’ll be watching to see whether the change goes away, but at the moment he seems quite determined. Who woulda thunk? Anyway, I’m not doubting the Magic Black Box stories anymore. It’s happened in front of me.