More than 30 men and women gathered for a “wrap” session at Congregation Beth Sholom Sunday in San Francisco.
The group, mostly members of the Conservative synagogue’s newly formed men’s club, was celebrating the mitzvah of wrapping tefillin as part of the first-ever World Wide Wrap.
The international event, in which 8,000 Conservative Jews throughout the world joined a morning minyan and learned to lay tefillin, was sponsored by the New York-based Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs. The idea was to encourage regular practice of the mitzvah and increase attendance at morning minyans, which are held every day except on the Sabbath and Jewish holidays.
“We have a daily minyan in which a significant number of men and women put on tefillin anyway,” said Beth Sholom Rabbi Allen Lew. “But on this day additional people from the men’s club came — many who had never even put on tefillin before.”
Tefillin are ritual objects worn for Shacharit, or morning prayers, and are usually introduced at bar or bat mitzvah age. They consist of two small black boxes (bayit) made from layers of parchment that are sealed and lacquered and attached to leather straps. Inside the boxes are scrolls of parchment inscribed with four passages from the Torah books Exodus and Deuteronomy.
In order to prepare for the event, men’s club members gathered a month earlier for a study session on tefillin and watched the FJMC how-to video, “The Ties that Bind,” which details the technique of laying the leather straps on the arm and head and winding them around the hand and fingers.
Then, at the World Wide Wrap, Lew and Ernie Weitz, the men’s club president, spent the first half hour leading a how-to course on wrapping tefillin for to six to 10 people doing it for the first time or in need of a refresher course.
“There’s always such a great sense of wonder,” said Lew, who went through the process of binding the coils around his arm seven times, step by step. “When you tie it on correctly, the leather straps actually spell out one of the names of God, Shadai. You’re literally connected to the word of God.”
Lew, who said that binding tefillin “happens to be my favorite Jewish ritual,” said the connection to God is possible because wrapping tefillin is an act of “concrete gestures, not just abstract words.”
“You don’t just say you’re going to be connected to God, you actually act out that connection,” he said. Referring to the prayers found inside the tefillin, he added: “You’re actually binding the words on your hand and between the frontlets of your eyes — it’s not just poetic language.
“When you realize that your arm is bound, and at the end of that binding the name of God is spelled out, it’s such a vivid thing.”
Men’s club member and Beth Sholom World Wide Wrap attendee Harry Newman agreed. He said he tries to carry out the mitzvah of binding tefillin at least a dozen times a year.
He called the connection he achieves when wrapping tefillin “a marriage to God.”
“You wrap the tefillin around your middle finger as you would a wedding ring,” said Newman. “It’s like a spiritual intervention, a bond, a betrothal to God.”
He added that it’s a practice he believes he may be “getting hooked on.”
Once all World Wide Wrap attendees at Beth Sholom had correctly wrapped their tefillin, they then became wrapped up in a 45-minute morning davening, led by Lew.
Afterward a brunch of bagels and coffee was provided.
Although this was a men’s club event, Lew stressed that laying tefillin is not a strictly male practice in the Conservative movement but “an egalitarian practice.”
In fact, he said, the three or four women who normally attend morning minyan and put on tefillin also were present for the World Wide Wrap.
“It’s a mitzvah and ritual that I am fortunate enough to feel the power of every day,” said Lew. “I feel more people should do it.”
The FJMC plans to continue the World Wide Wrap next year and Newman believes, from the positive responses he’s heard, that Beth Sholom will also get in on the action.
“It was very productive,” he said. “It was social, educational and spiritual.”
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