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Rob Chimberoff, who does pagination at the Sun-Times, greets (left to right) Yakov Rosenblum, 16, Mendel Friedman, 15 and Schneur Ehven, 16, |
Prayer is defined as ... what? Talking to God? Praising His glory? Asking the cosmos for something you really want?
That strikes me as a very limited definition. It seldom seems to work. And I just can't wrap my head around a Supreme Being as powerful and all-knowing as the Supreme Being supposed is who is also so insecure that He needs His holy ass kissed constantly.
I would suggest that prayer could be all sorts of things.
For instance, most Fridays for the past 20 years, two or three Hasidic boys show up the Sun-Times offices to try to get me to pray. Because in their circles I am the notorious Meshumed fun Tshikago, or Apostate of Chicago, and the Lubavitch movement has vowed to win me over to their side.
Kidding.
The truth is there is some master list of Jewish office workers, and they go around trying to get them to put on tefillin—Yiddish for phylacteries, or prayer boxes—and say some Hebrew prayers. The tefillin are a black leather strap wound around your left arm—well, on my right, since I'm left-handed—and a small black box containing lines of Torah that sits atop your head, in satisfaction of Deuteronomy 11:18, "You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes." (Later in the passage the same words are slapped "upon the doorposts of your house," which is were mezzuzahs come from).
While most ultra-Orthodox sects of all religion are seriously into coercion, the Lubavtch are more gentle, low-key. They go around pushing tefillin out of the charming notion that doing so gets us all closer to the arrival of the Messiah (so in that sense, they're trying to bring about the End of the World. But in a good way).
And every week, Amy, the charming receptionist, sends an email telling me that the boys are here, and every Friday I can't act on it, because I'm home, or because I'm doing something else and didn't see it for hours later. I can't say I'm consumed with regret to have missed them.
But this Friday, not only was I at my desk, but drinking coffee to beat the band. So much so that mid-morning I leaped up, briskly marched toward the front desk, and ran smack into Yakov Rosenblum, 16, Mendel Friedman, 15 and Schneur Ehven, 16, all students at Lubavitch Mesivta Chicago in Rogers Park.
Knowing when I was caught, dead to rights, I jovially waved them back to my office. On the walk, I told them about the only Bible story I quote with any regularity: Jonah is told by God to go to Nineveh and preach. Not wanting to, he flees to Tarkshish, or tries to, but ends up in a whale. Sometimes fate boots you toward Nineveh, so you just have to shrug and go.
At the office, I automatically rolled up my right sleeve and took off my wristwatch.
"You've done this before," one said. I don't think any of the boys had been there before. I tend to treat them as the same individuals, but the truth is, the teens who first came to see me are now no doubt rabbis in Montreal and Brooklyn with growing families of their own.
One of the boys wrapped the leather strap around my arm — I've never shot heroin, but there is something about wrapping the extended arm that always struck me as being like a junkie tying off his arm to raise a vein. I also put the box upon my head, and repeated the Hebrew prayers after another one of the boys, haltingly and half-remembered.
Why do it? A number of reasons. Altruism, mostly. The lads are here and want me to, to further the philosophical notions their sect possesses.
"You guys get points toward a bicycle or something for me doing this," I said, my standard joke, and they denied it, as the boys have done for decades.
It must also freak out passersby — I have a glass wall in the office. I like the thought of people walking by and seeing Steinberg lost in some arcane religious act with three black-hatted attendants.
And I do like that the Lubavitch are low-key, or at least as low-key as you can be showing up at people's offices in the middle of working day and dragooning them into your ritual. They never say I'm going to hell otherwise. They don't set off bombs. A lot of faiths could take a lesson from them.
But it's also a pause from the day, for me. Their reason strikes me as specious. I can't conceive of a world where the Supreme Being, throned in glory, looks up, smiling, thinking, "Neil's putting on tefillin. All riiiiight!"
But for me, the combination of the pause, the interaction with the friendly black-hatted boys, the doing of a small favor for them, the muttering of the ancient words, well, it all blended together to perk me up. Without going into detail I had been feeling particularly lousy Friday morning, one of those minor professional annoyances involved with the new book, one that 99 out of 100 writers would leap to have to go through in my place, but which just left me sour-stomached and frustrated and viewing the whole writing process, not as work I love, but as another damaging addiction.
By the time the boys left, the problem, which had been a noxious fog surrounding me, blocking my view in every direction, was now a cloud on the horizon, large, yes, but no longer so present. And it was diminishing, and I was feeling my old self again.
Maybe that was unrelated to the prayer. Maybe it would have happened whether the boys showed up or not. But I'm not sure. The prayer probably didn't help. But it couldn't hurt.