Bound Behind the Bank

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Just before noon on September 1, 1989, I was driving through a seedy section of downtown Elizabeth, New Jersey, when I spotted a branch of my bank. I parked in the deserted lot behind the building, walked around to the front entrance, and then remembered that I had left my check in my car. I trotted back, unlocked the car door, and leaned inside while fumbling through an assortment of papers and bills that filled my coat pocket. Finally, I found the envelope with my precious monthly stipend – most of which I had already spent, having mailed out a slew of checks the day before to pay some long overdue bills – and laid my coat back over the seat. As I straightened up and turned to close the car door, I let out a gasp.

Reeking of alcohol, three men wearing tattered jeans and filthy T-shirts had formed a tight semicircle around me. The man on my left was clutching the skinny neck of an empty whiskey bottle. Aiming it upward, he looked as if he were about to hammer something – or someone. His dark, glassy eyes revealed a mean, desperate gaze. The scrawny guy on my right looked almost friendly, but a little scared and hungry. The one in the middle, however, was Lerch, straight out of The Addams Family. His large, rectangular head loomed above me.

“Got some change?” Lerch asked, extending his huge hand towards the Adam’s apple bobbing up and down my thin neck. My bulging eyes stared down at the maze of lines in his palm and slowly read their way up his outstretched arm. A skull with crossed bones, a dancing girl, and a variety of other tattoos depicting scenes of decadence and humor adorned his long, bare arm. At the top, the ragged edges of a torn sleeve accentuated his broad shoulder.

I nervously tilted my head back and lifted my eyes over his protruding chin. A deep scar had formed a trench from his chin to just below his left eye. Lerch grinned. His smile was missing at least three teeth. “Like a couple of dollars,” said the guy with the empty bottle. “We’re real hungry.”

Just the night before I read an article about rules of urban survival in Reader’s Digest. The rules began racing through my head: “Never take out your wallet when a stranger asks for change.” The guys had probably seen me walking back from the bank, so I reasoned that if they found that my wallet was empty, they might really get upset.

Another rule: “Stay calm.” I took a deep breath. Why is this happening to me! Trying not to lose composure, I thought to myself, okay, everything happens for a reason. All is for the good. Only fear G-d. All of the chasidic dictums about life were flying through my mind. They made sense in yeshiva where I had been learning for the past year.

Stay calm, I repeated to myself. After all, today is Rosh Chodesh Elul. Elul is an auspicious month, the last month of the Jewish year, when G-d is supposed to be very accessible to everyone. As the chasidic masters explain, like the king who leaves his palace and travels through the streets and fields, G-d makes Himself more accessible and graciously listens to the requests of ordinary people. Oh, G-d, please be with me now. I have a wife and a three-month-old baby.

My hands were hiding behind my back, clutching the envelope and holding the nearly shut car door. “Yes, I have some change for you,” I said, while subtly dropping the envelope back into the car and locking the door behind me.

Everything happens for a reason, I repeated to myself. Every single Friday, as part of the yeshiva schedule, I would visit Jewish patients in Morristown Memorial Hospital. Who says I had to go to the hospital to visit the sick? Looking at the three men, I knew what I had in mind would be next to impossible, but maybe....

“Are any of you Jewish?” I asked, rather meekly.

“Yeah, I’m Jewish,” Lerch said.

“You’re Jewish?” I said, in disbelief. It must be a ploy, I thought. “You have a Jewish name?”

Pulling his head high with pride, like a foot soldier responding to his commanding officer, Lerch said, “Shmuel Yankel ben Moshe.” In his eyes, I probably looked like a rabbi, with my black hat and long, untrimmed beard.

“Did you have a bar mitzva?” I asked.

“Uh huh,” he uttered.

“You had a bar mitzva? Where?”

“In Asbury Park. Rabbi Carlebach bar mitzvahed me.”

“Wow, you are Jewish!”

“Of course, I’m Jewish. Boruch atoh Ahdo- Elokeinu melech ha’olam...” Lerch – or should I say Shmuel Yankel – was chanting the blessing for the Haftorah, which he had recited for his bar mitzva maybe 20 years earlier.

In response, the short, wiry man slapped the whiskey bottle against his palm. I trembled. I had better try to appease him.

“Hey, why are you asking for change?” I asked. “You should be asking for millions. Today is exactly one month before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and you can ask G-d for as much as you want. One month before Rosh Hashanah, G-d leaves his palace and comes down in the streets, and we can easily approach Him and ask for anything. As a matter of fact, G-d is feeling gracious towards us now. I’ve got a little change in my pocket – I’m just a student at a rabbinical seminary – but G-d, why, He has billions.”

As I spoke, I slipped the car key out of my back pocket. Keeping my right hand behind me, I unlocked the car door and reached for a bag on the car seat.

“Shmuel Yankel, do you know what these are?” I asked, as I unzipped a black velvet bag and took out two small boxes.

“Are you right-handed?” I asked, quickly unwinding the leather straps from around the tefilin box. “Good, now put out your left arm.” I slid the open loop of the hand tefilin over his large fist, up his bare arm, past the chorus line of tattoos, and – what’s this? I had reached a patch of little holes, at the top of the forearm, near the inside of the elbow. Oh, my G-d, I thought; those must be needle tracks.

I slipped my yarmulke from beneath my hat. “Here, Shmuel Yankel, let me put this on your head so you can say the blessing with me.” He leaned over so I could reach the top of his head. He must have been at least six-feet-ten-inches tall.

“Now, repeat after me. Boruch atah…” I said each word of the blessing, and he repeated after me. Then I tightened the knot around his upper arm, and wrapped the tefilin strap around his arm, trying my best to cover some of the unclothed tattoo figures with the leather straps. As I wound it around his forearm, I explained that the hand tefilin is bound around the upper arm, next to the heart, to show that our actions must be heartfelt and bound to G-d.

“Now, Shmuel Yankel, lower your head, and I’ll put the other box of tefilin on your head. The head is above the heart, to teach us that our head must rule and direct the desires of the heart,” I explained.

“Okay, hold out your hand again,” I continued, wrapping the strap of the hand tefilin around the ring finger. “This shows we are married to G-d. Our head, heart, and actions must all be united with G-d.”

The guy with the bottle had been pacing back and forth on the asphalt, like a hammerhead shark swimming before his prey. “Let’s do something already,” Shark finally snapped.

“You just wait,” Shmuel Yankel snapped back. “Can’t you see I’m prayin’!”

Shark backed off like a guppy. He dropped his bottle on the asphalt and kicked it into the weeds.

I gulped. “Before a Jew can pray to G-d, Who considers every single Jew his child, we must accept upon ourselves the commandment to love our fellow Jew. We say the following words: ‘Behold, I accept upon myself the positive commandment: You shall love your fellow man as yourself.’

“Now, cover your eyes with your right hand, like this, and we’ll say the Shema prayer together: Shema Yisrael Ado- Elokeinu Ado- echad.”

Shmuel Yankel wiped his eyes with his hand. They were wet with tears.

“G-d is right here with you, Shmuel Yankel,” I said, with a choked voice. “Ask Him whatever your heart desires.”

Shmuel Yankel was silent, but I could almost hear his heart sobbing. A tear rolled down from his eye into the deep scar along his cheek. I watched the large tear slowly roll down along the groove.

“I used to go to synagogue all the time,” Shmuel Yankel said. “I liked going. But after my bar mitzva, my parents got divorced and we stopped going.”

During this entire parking lot ceremony, the long-haired guy stood quietly, motionless. He looked mesmerized.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Mike,” he said with a slurred French accent. “My friends call me Mike. But my real name is Michel.”

“Michel, are you Jewish?” I knew that it was highly unlikely, but he had that longing look in his eyes.

“No, I’m Catholic,” he said. “I don’t really practice it anymore.”

“It’s okay whatever you are. G-d created everybody, and made everyone unique and with his own unique purpose in life.”

“My mother,” Michel said, hesitatingly, “my mother told me she was born Jewish. The Nazis killed her parents, and she joined the French Resistance. My father was also in the Resistance. After the war, they married, and she became Catholic.”

“Michel, you are Jewish!” I exclaimed. “If your mother was born Jewish, then you’re Jewish. Nothing can take that away. Once a Jew, always a Jew. It’s ingrained in the soul. Put these on and we’ll celebrate your bar mitzva.”

I was more nervous than Michel. Placing my yarmulke on his head, I said, “Repeat after me. Boruch…”

“Bah rook,” he said with a shaky voice. It was obvious that he had never uttered the guttural Hebrew ‘ch’ sound in his life. I excitedly put the tefilin on his arm and head. As the black box graced his stringy oily black hair, his dark eyes twinkled. Michel looked like a long-lost prince who had been dragged through the mucky alleys of medieval Europe, beaten and abused, and now had finally stumbled back to the gates of his royal home, crying out to his father, the king. The king ran to the street and hugged his long lost son.

Michel repeated after me the words of the Shema prayer and stood silently, his eyes closed, for a few endless minutes.

“We can take them off now,” I finally whispered.

Like a helpless baby, Michel held out his arm, and I removed the straps that were bound around his forearm. I couldn’t believe what was happening. The King must really be in the field!

Turning to the third guy, Shark-turned-Guppy, I asked, “And what’s your name?”

“Joe,” he blurted out. His hands were trembling.

Joe had safely positioned himself about six feet away, in front of the hood of my old Ford Galaxy. I was still standing by my car door.

“Is your mother Jewish?”

“No! She’s Catholic. My grandmother was Catholic. And I’m Catholic. I’m not putting those things on.”

“Don’t worry, Joe. You don’t have to; you’re not supposed to,” I said, showing him that I was putting them back in their bag. “A Gentile, that is, someone who is not Jewish, doesn’t have to do this commandment. But if a Gentile observes the seven commandments that G-d instructed Gentiles to follow, then he or she will get a share in the World to Come.”

I then explained the Seven Noahide Laws, stuttering a little when I stated the prohibition against stealing. “The only catch is that a person has to observe these laws – not because they make sense, and not because he’s afraid he might get caught but because G-d commanded them to mankind, through Moses the Lawgiver.”

Joe listened silently, with no visible response.

“Hey, let’s celebrate Michel’s bar mitzva,” I said, breaking the silence. “I have some cake in the car.”

I split the cake with Shmuel Yankel, Michel, and Joe.

“Lechaim. To life,” I said, raising my cake.

I told Michel what a great day it was for him, and how fortunate he was to have put on tefilin for the first time in his life. All three thanked me for the bar mitzva, and we all shook hands and said good-bye.

“Wait! Here’s some change,” I said, going after them as they began to leave. But Shmuel Yankel raised his arm, strong and high, stopping me in my tracks. “Thanks, we’re okay. We’re okay.”

This true story is reprinted with permission from the book From the Heavens to the Heart. A revised paperback edition of may be purchased through kehot.com or Amazon (the hardcover was not revised). A new Kindle version of From the Heavens to the Heart is also available through Amazon. Bulk orders are available from the author by calling 201-681-2613201-681-2613201-681-2613201-681-2613.

Bound Behind the Bank

by Tzvi Jacobs