Growing up, I never imagined myself wearing tefillin. While I don’t think I would have identified it at the time, this was in part because I never saw any women wearing tefillin. It was never modeled for me in that way, and it didn’t matter that my dad put on tefillin every morning, and even offered it to me (probably encouraged it!) around my Bat Mitzvah. In seventh grade, I remember a rabbi from my school taught a friend and me how to put on tefillin in his office. We did, and I recall it being an interesting - and weird - experience. He asked if we wanted to think about laying tefillin as a part of our morning tefillah at school. We immediately said no. That would’ve been too vulnerable, too uncomfortable.
This memory is etched in my brain because there was a part of me that felt connected to this mitzvah. I’ve always felt more drawn to tangible religious expressions; I love shaking the lulav and lighting Hanukkah candles. When I did finally start wearing tefillin, towards the end of college, it enhanced my prayer experience. Don’t get me wrong, it can definitely feel like a weird thing to do, and whenever I teach people to put on tefillin, I give them permission to feel that. Yet, despite this potentially awkward feeling of wrapping leather straps around my arm and putting them on my head, it reminds me that prayer, and our religious experiences as a whole, aren’t meant to be limited to our hearts and our minds. It also has to connect to our bodies, our physical beings. We use our bodies to praise God and to live out our religious values in many ways, and starting my day by putting on tefillin is a reminder to do that.
For those of you that have never put on tefillin, or perhaps it’s been many years, I hope you’ll feel that this mitzvah is offered (even encouraged!) to you. This coming Sunday morning, we are participating in a national event called World Wide Wrap, trying to expose more people to this mitzvah. Starting at 8:30am, we’ll have coffee and I’ll be offering a tefillin tutorial. We’ll begin minyan at 9am and have a delicious breakfast afterwards.
I had always said that putting tefillin on wasn’t for me, but I had never developed enough of a practice to figure out if that was actually true or not. I hope you’ll join us on Sunday morning with a sense of openness for what this mitzvah, even if just this once, might do for you.
