The Tefillin in Quarantine: Seeing the Dancing Letters

A halachic question was posed to a leading rabbinic authority on medical ethics and Jewish law. In the early 1980s, a patient was quarantined in Hadassah Hospital with an infectious disease. He was told that any personal item he brought in with him would be disposed of upon his release. He was a religious Jew who prayed with his tallit and tefillin daily. What to do? He was torn between his obligation to pray as usual and the knowledge that these holy items would be burned, in keeping with the medical protocols required for public safety.

The rabbi felt that it was better to pray without tefillin than to desecrate the sacred items. His position was forwarded to the Rebbe, who took everyone by surprise when he emphatically insisted that the patient be allowed to bring his holy items in with him for the duration of his stay.

The Rebbe saw only the devotion of a man to his Maker. He repainted a darkened canvas with light. Where others saw desecration, he saw exultation. He didn't provide an answer; he chose instead to reframe the question. What is it that endows a sacred item with its continued sacredness? Is it the letter of the law or its spirit? And is that spirit grounded in the actions of man, or is its holiness endowed from on high?

Tricky terrain, especially given the Rebbe's deep insistence on scrupulous adherence to the minutiae of halacha. How does a Rebbe who never wavered on objective standards, driven by an uncompromising stance on the divine nature of religious norms, take such a seemingly humanistic position?

The answer, perhaps, lies in a unique way of seeing humanism. If the human is separated from the Divine altogether, then why bother in the first place? If, on the other hand, as the Alter Rebbe, the first Chabad Rebbe, posits in Tanya, the spirit of G-d flows through the consciousness of man, then the human holds the key to the most profound expression of the existence of G-d. Seen this way, the human mind itself, with its default setting of separateness, becomes the ultimate platform for fully experiencing true oneness. Given that our very perception of a separate self is by design, seeing that through is at the heart of Judaism.

The Rebbe saw Torah as the Divine tool at our disposal to achieve that objective, not the other way around. He saw each mitzvah as a means to an end, a way for man to reach G-d, not as an end in itself. From this vantage point, in that instance, the tefillin could retain their sacredness only when worn by that man, in that moment, despite the inevitability of their fiery end.

We, too, come into this world with the knowledge of our own eventual demise. Knowing that can spur us to live each moment passionately, fueled by the possibilities of the here and now, refusing to become paralyzed by what can be an overwhelming sense of the tentativeness of it all.

A story from the Talmud: one of the leading sages of the Mishnah was discovered by the Romans secretly teaching Torah, in violation of a ban on all Jewish study. He was sentenced to a cruel death, an ancient precursor to the notorious auto-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition. As he was burning, his students called out to him with tears in their eyes, "Rebbe, what do you see?" He replied with his last breath, "I see parchment burning, but the letters are intact, dancing aloft."

In that case, the letter of the law was its spirit. I can imagine the Rebbe shuddering at the image of the holy items, the tashmishei kedushah, burning, and then looking beyond it. There he saw the fire burning in the heart of an isolated man, cut off from all human contact. He knew that cutting him off from G-d as well would extinguish the only fire he had left. This was a matter of pikuach nefesh, preserving life, a Jewish value that overrides the preservation of the sacredness of ritual items.

A new ruling was issued. The Rebbe didn't see only the burning parchment; he saw the dancing letters as well. The psak (religious ruling) was clear: depriving him would constitute an even worse form of burning.

The Rebbe saw what Abraham saw at the beginning of this week's portion, when he was interrupted by three strangers while in a rapturous moment of devekut with G-d. He sensed the angelic nature of man and simply reconfigured the moment of communion. He didn't view it as a rupture of his contact with the Divine. He was merely broadening it.

Much Love,
Rabbi Yossi