The Pittsfield tefillin and the homeless at Sinai

Exodus 18:1 – 20:23

In June 1815, a young boy in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, digging in a field owned by local farmer Joseph Merrick made a strange discovery: a leather box with an attached strap. After a few days, Merrick examined the find, and found it contained four small parchments inscribed in a foreign language, which a local minister identified as Hebrew, and as the Jewish ritual artifact called tefillin. In a short time, this discovery became a small sensation, and was interpreted by many excited New Englanders as evidence of a strange but not uncommon belief of the time that Native Americans were in fact descendants of ancient Jews.

In 1823, Vermont Congregationalist minister Ethan Smith published “View of the Jews,” which featured the Pittsfield tefillin as a key argument for the “Hebraic Indian” theory. More intriguingly for the history of American religion, these tefillin were later cited by LDS Church founder Joseph Smith as proof for the Book of Mormon’s somewhat different claims of Hebrew Indian origins.

Even at the time, cooler heads suggested a more likely theory. During the War of 1812, Joseph Merrick employed British and Hessian prisoners of war held locally. Perhaps one of them was a Jew, and it was his tefillin, lost on other side of the world only to resurface in the field. One way or another, the find underscores the attachment to this mitzvah held by a Jew very far from home.

When thinking about our ancestors at Sinai, the narrative that dominates our parsha, we often miss the reality that we were a nation of the homeless. The Jewish people emerged into the world as a clan of nomads, and in the stories of Genesis, we find the patriarchs as tent dwellers rather than living in permanent homes. It is a great irony that notwithstanding the suffering of the Egyptian period, it was in Egypt that we are first described as living in houses.

Our tradition celebrates the ability of the Jews in Egypt to maintain elements of culture — language, traditional names, distinctive clothing — even against the backdrop of a host culture that was profoundly hostile to both the Jews and the beliefs and mores they had inherited from the patriarchs and matriarchs.

The ability to nurture a counterculture is profoundly tied into the home. It was the houses, the stability that we had in Egypt that allowed the transmission of these values against all odds, and it’s not surprising the night of Pesach focuses on the house. The blood of the Korban Pesach (Paschal Sacrifice) was daubed on the doorways of the houses, the Jews were instructed that they were not to leave their homes during that dramatic night, and the meat of the sacrifice would be invalidated if it left the confines of the house. What better place to celebrate the merits that survived long decades of slavery than the homes that nurtured them.

After all that, one of the challenges of the Exodus was the need to abandon those beloved homes and the psychological security they represented, and enter into a long period of rootlessness. When they arrived for the great day of revelation, the medieval exegete R’ Avraham Ibn Ezra (Shemos 25:5) suggested that temporary structures had to be erected at the foot of Sinai by deforesting an oasis of acacia trees. With their future homes in the Land of Israel still unrealized dreams, one can only imagine that our ancestors would have felt that fundamental instability of their homelessness as a major challenge to being able to create an environment that would ensure the transmission of the Torah to a new generation.

The answer to this challenge is hidden in the mitzvah of tefillin. Jewish tradition refer to the leather cubes of the tefillin that house texts of the Torah itself as batim — literally, houses. Tefillin teaches that Torah can survive, and indeed, even thrive, even during periods of literal or metaphoric homelessness, and can in fact itself provide that sense of security and rootedness. Tefillin are a portable home.

When we think of the anonymous Jew who left his tefillin behind in the wilds of Massachusetts more than 200 years ago, the notion of the portability of Torah across time and space is driven home. PJC

Rabbi Daniel Yolkut is the rabbi of Congregation Poale Zedeck. This column is a service of the Vaad Harabonim of Greater Pittsburgh.