One beautiful May morning, I traveled with my father and my son to the synagogue so that my son could begin putting on the tefillin that I, for more than a decade, had failed to wear on a regular basis.
Well, I thought to myself. I guess time’s up.
I was embarrassed by the failure. If you’ve ever been an Orthodox boy on the cusp of bar mitzvah, you know the rule: From the first day you put on tefillin during prayers, you must never stop. Barring Shabbat, holidays and maybe a major illness, you are expected to wear those boxes — one on the head, one on the arm — every single day until you leave this earth.
This never-stop, “not even once,” edict gets drilled into you early. “Hello,” you can imagine the man saying at the local Tefillin Anonymous, “My name is Dovid. It has been 17 years since I last forgot to lay tefillin.” The exceptions, often few enough to count on a single hand, are retold with a remorse that proves the rule. I was traveling, and my bag was rerouted; these words come in the form of an apology since everyone knows you must never put tefillin in a checked bag for this very reason. My whole arm was in a cast. I was lost in the woods. Tefillin, in this way, are a sort of Judaism-within-Judaism: you are bound before you really understand, and you cannot ever escape. As surely as the sun rises in the east (and preferably at about the same time), tefillin must be worn.
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But for more than 10 years, I just didn’t — and because the lapse was so blatantly inexcusable, I didn’t talk about it.
Forgive me. You don’t know what tefillin are. Nobody really does.
Oh, you mean you actually don’t know? Well, they’re a pair of black leather cubes, each about the size of a golf ball, tied to the upper arm and forehead with black leather straps. Inside each sealed box, almost never seen by the user, is a selection of Bible verses, written on parchment by a professional scribe. What are the verses about? Wearing tefillin, of course. In other words, tefillin literally contain their own instructions.
Nobody knows when Jews started wearing tefillin, but they are certainly ancient; the oldest discovered are over 2,000 years old. Their origin seems to coincide with the Jewish people falling in love with text itself, a home more reliable than Jerusalem’s flammable Temple. An older custom of ritual headgear may have gained a slip of parchment. We don’t really know — nor do we know why they are black, or cubes. This, too, is part of the alluring alienness of these literal black boxes that simply are and speak no words.
This mute physicality opens tefillin to interpretation, even strange ones. Lenny Bruce long ago joked that an ignorant cop might think a Jew with a leather-strapped arm was about to inject a narcotic. In 1982, the queer Israeli poet Yona Wallach scandalized the country by imagining tefillin as a toy in bondage play (“Put the tefillin in my mouth, a bridle bit / Ride me, I am a mare”). Leonard Nimoy — the actor who borrowed the Priestly Blessing’s distinctive hand position for the Vulcan greeting (🖖) — once published a book of photos of nude women with strapped arms; the book was called Shekhina, after God’s feminine presence.
Halakhically, of course, tefillin are to be kept a distance from drugs, nudity and all bodily fluids — and yet such physicalist interpretations seem inevitable, given that prayer seems otherwise little concerned with the body. Prayer is in the head; tefillin is on the head, and also the arm. They are supposed to go together. It took me a long time to realize that this juxtaposition collapsed tefillin into a kind of liturgical add-on. What if it was more than that?
I never meant for this lapse to happen, which makes it worse. The day that I first put tefillin on, at 12, I felt something that the rabbis describe as accepting the yoke of the kingdom of heaven, the emergent understanding of an eternal must that connected me to the universe. I liked this must; I liked the warm embrace of community that came with fulfilling this daily ask. I liked the uniform.
The Kotzker Rebbe said that prayer should be like a rock on your heart, ready to fall in whenever the heart chooses to open. But even rocks erode. Beginning in freshman year of college, I found myself leaving things out; a ritual that took 22 minutes now took 17, and then 12, and then eight. The words of divine praise to which I had never connected blended into a righteous breakfast smoothie of piety that, I still could not admit to myself, had never really been my taste. I retained the Shema and the Amidah not because I liked them more, but because I had been told that they were Very Important. In the space of a few years, I could, impossibly, do the whole routine in three minutes flat. The must was satisfied; I was not.
It held that way for a little while. Even as the prayers faded to mumbles, the mumbles stayed to justify being bookended by donning and doffing tefillin. But the practice had become a sort of ghost, not unlike the imprint of the tefillin strap on the arm, which lingers for some time even after the strap has been removed. The tighter the tefillin are held, the longer the imprint remains, but it must eventually fade.
And then a kid came, and with it the special brand of loneliness that comes with parenting an infant. I was unmoored and resentful; tefillin promised to tie me to community, but it didn’t deliver. Even going through the motions began to feel like it was too much.
And so, one day, I just stopped. I’ll start up again before the kids are old enough to notice, I assured myself. My wife wears tefillin; it’s not like they won’t see it around the house. How feminist of me to let her be the spiritual role model while I pretend I’m not in theological crisis. But the years dragged on, and I remained in limbo, never choosing to re-embrace and never choosing to truly walk away. I didn’t have enough faith to say yes; I didn’t have enough faith to say no.
In that purgatory, the practice evolved into a kind of fantasy of meaningless lapses. On work trips, I’d dutifully pack my tefillin bag, despite its bulkiness, so that I could play-act the pious fear of being without them while far from home, despite knowing deep down that they’d never leave my bag and would return, unopened, to their reproachful perch on top of the bookcase. To not pack them would be to acknowledge that I had designs on not using them. To pack them and not wear them would simply be yet another in a string of amendable errors. My evasion had become a ritual of its own.
This went on for years. The children grew up; they did, in fact, notice, and yet I could not bring myself to resume. Like so many people raised Orthodox, my connection to prayer had matured into a situationship that I could not look squarely in the eye, out of fear of losing further ground.
Tefillin are hardy, but they don’t last forever. Last year — perhaps hoping it would stir something greater in me — I finally replaced the retzuot, the leather straps that are supposed to be glossy black but had faded to a dull brown.
New straps are awful to wear because they don’t know your body; like a baseball glove, they need to be worked in. This means that as you learn to put on tefillin, they are learning you in turn. Bar mitzvah boys mostly don’t see the poetry in this. You have to leave and return for that.
Still, I didn’t put them on. My refurbished tefillin returned to their perch on the bookshelf, but I wasn’t ready. To what would I be tying myself? To the memory of my own past? To the prayers that had become no easier to say? Or would I just make myself vulnerable to more spiritual erosion?
And then: On a fall day, while on a work trip to San Francisco, I took the tefillin out of my suitcase. The new straps felt plastic, but my muscle memory had not diminished. As I finished by wrapping the strap three times around the knuckles of my middle finger, ringlike, I reflexively whispered the words of the prophet Hosea that one is supposed to say each morning at this precise moment.
Middle knuckle.
I will wed you to me forever.
First knuckle.
I will wed you to me with righteousness and justice, with goodness and mercy.
First knuckle again.
I will wed you to me with faith — and you will be devoted to the Lord.
I said nothing more; no Shema, no Amidah. The tefillin were simply good to wear, this porous barrier that reminded me of where I ended and the world began. I felt the familiar sensation of the tightening and loosening of the arm strap with each slight rotation of the wrist. I adjusted the box on my scalp, almost subconsciously, to be dead center on my forehead. It was a beautiful day. I was unimaginably lucky to be in it. The rest was commentary.
And so, wearing my tefillin, I sat on the floor, closed my eyes, and took a breath.
This essay initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on June 20, 2026. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
