On Not Wearing Tefillin

All pious people are alike; each heretic is heretical in their own way.

Photograph by the author (2005)

When I was learning Arabic in the early 2010s, I spent a weekend in Dahab, a small resort town in the Sinai.

While there, I spent a good amount of time talking wit a local t-shirt seller who bragged to me about having memorized large parts of the Qur’ān in his youth. To demonstrate, he began to recite Surat Yūsuf—but then almost immediately stopped. He had realized, right then and there, that he no longer remembered.

We don’t talk about this part of ritual life, about the ways that it can quietly fall apart. These are not the full exits that make it to novels and TV shows.

I have published seforim that have sold tens of thousands of copies, and yet it has taken me a long time to feel comfortable talking about my relationship with tefillin and prayer. I finally decided to do so here.