Have Mezuzah Kit, Will Travel!

Have Mezuzah Kit, Will Travel!

In addition to contributing to my health and wellness, one of the benefits I derive from going to the gym on a regular basis is the opportunity to meet interesting people and forge meaningful new relationships. One of the people I’ve met there is with a lovely man who is an active member of a synagogue near Princeton and the son of a retired Conservative rabbi. He and I have discussed a whole variety of topics, we have learned some good Torah together, and we have talked about our dads, both of whom are named Stanley.

My friend, who is a local therapist, was supportive and comforting to me when my father died, and I have offered him words of encouragement in coping with his father’s decline into dementia. Our respective life paths and their similarities enable us to understand and identify with each other in helpful ways.

A few weeks ago I ran into my friend at the gym and found him in a pensive mood. So I probed a bit to see what was troubling him. With his father clearly fading, he and his family had reached the conclusion that it was time for his mother to move from the family home, and they were now in the process of dismantling the setting where so much of their lives had been lived and their memories shaped. “It is so hard to see my father this way,” he lamented. “For a man who was such a strong and vibrant leader of our people, and whose voice echoed the wisdom to the Torah and the Sages, to be so diminished, unable to speak, and barely able to take nourishment is just too painful to see,” he said.

I reminded him of the teaching from the Talmud that after the sin of the Golden Calf, when Moses received the second set of the Ten Commandments, the fragments of the broken Tablets were placed in the Holy Ark along with the new Tablets. In B’rachot 8b, Rabbi Judah analogizes these broken Tablets to an elderly person who has forgotten his learning. Your father, I said to him, is the broken Tablets. He is still holy and deserving of honor and respect till the day he dies, and beyond.

The next time we met at the gym, my friend surprised me by announcing that he wanted to give me something. So I waited while he went out to his car from which he retrieved a well-worn metal tackle box. I couldn’t imagine what could be in there. Was it fishing tackle? I’d never given him reason to think I was interested in fishing, so why would he want his rabbi friend to have this?

He opened the box and revealed its treasure. It was filled with mezuzah parchments, the klaf written like a Torah scroll, containing the Sh’ma and V’ahavta, that we Jews affix to the doorposts of our house. There were mezuzah cases of all sizes and types, nails, screws, hammers, glue, and other paraphernalia that one would use to affix a mezuzah. It was a rabbi’s toolkit—Rabbi Stanley P’s mitzvah tools, his k’lei kodesh, which he used to help Jews dedicate and sanctify their homes and offices as dwelling places of the Divine Spirit. A rabbi’s toolkit belongs with a rabbi, said my friend, so I want you to have it, if you’ll use it.

“It would be an honor and a privilege to be the custodian of this piece of your father’s legacy,” I said, “but on one condition. I will do my best to use it as your father did, but I don’t want to own it. I’d like to hold it in trust for the next generation, and pass it on to my daughter Shira when the time comes.” My friend agreed it was a good plan.

So now I am the proud keeper of Rabbi Stanley P’s mitzvah tools, and I stand ready to use them in the service of our Jewish community. If you don’t have a kosher mezuzah on the doorpost of your home, I will come affix one for you, and recite with you the blessings that declare your home to be a mishkan, a sanctuary where God’s presence and the values of our people live.

May Holy One bless and keep Rabbi Stanley P, a devoted and learned servant of God, whom I never had the pleasure to meet, but whose spirit I have pledged to honor by continuing a small but significant part of his sacred mission. And may my friend and his family find comfort and consolation in the knowledge that his father’s legacy will live on in the world in one more way.