(no subject)

[impossiblewizardry]

my dad I think has some vague spiritual beliefs involving reincarnation; I could be wrong, he doesn’t really talk about it. My mom, after she got lupus, started going to the Chabad center and keeping kosher and such. And driving to schul on Shabbat, but parking kind of far away so nobody could see that she had driven in.

My mom started raising us Jewish, and my brother was to have his bar mitzvah, and my dad allowed all this but drew the line at tefillin. Nobody’s putting leather straps on his kid. No way my mom was going to win that argument. But it was what she was supposed to do; her son was supposed to start putting on tefillin after his bar mitzvah.

She was talking about this with my paternal grandfather. He took out his father’s tefillin, tried to put them on, couldn’t remember how to do it. Later, he was talking to an Orthodox jew that goes to his gym, who was going to Israel. They ended up agreeing, this orthodox guy would pick up some kosher tefillin in israel, and my grandfather would buy them from him. My mom didn’t put him up to this, it was an independent idea.

So he did, and gave me and my brother tefillin as bar mitzvah gifts, and my dad couldn’t say anything to that, and of course all the lubavitchers at my mom’s schul were saying it was divine providence.