In the last years of his life, my father and I took long, leisurely walks through his Rush Street neighborhood in Chicago, and we would go to one of his favorite Greek restaurants, which bustled with people and loud cheer. He liked going to these restaurants because everyone knew him and would smile when he came in. The waitresses would fuss and flirt with him, and he liked that more than the food. Our walks were our way of deepening our relationship.
For many years, we had not spoken to each other, and there was a great divide that separated us; which pained both of us deeply. Although we had never fully discussed the reasons that separated us, we had forgiven each other, and our walks cemented our friendship and our love.
When I moved to Milwaukee to work at the Veterans Administration, I met a rabbi who visited Jewish patients and employees. He was a small, luxuriously bearded man with a booming voice and an endearing smile. After a genial welcome, he would grab my arm and wrap it with tefillin. We would then recite a prayer together, which I did haltingly.
Using tefillin was as foreign to me as going to confession, and yet I felt energized – as if the universe had given me a hug.
As a boy, my father grew up in a small Russian Jewish neighborhood next to a shul. He was bar mitzvahed there, and it was the center of his young adult life. Why he stopped going to services was a mystery I never plumbed, but I suspect it was to please my mother, who believed that religion undermined intellectual thought.
During one of our last walks, I told him about this wondrous rabbi who introduced me to the use of tefillin. He smiled and said in a faraway voice that, when he was a boy, he used tefillin. He looked at me, eyes twinkling, and grabbed my arm as we continued our walk.
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About the author
Barry Slavis has been part of Milwaukee’s Jewish community since 2007, when he moved here to work with homeless veterans at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Deeply engaged with Jewish history, literature and art, he is an active supporter of Jewish Museum Milwaukee.
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