Rabbi Frand
The fellow who told me the story last winter is Yosef Chaim Golding.
A couple of years ago, we said a shiur on the week of Parshas Lech Lecha about tying shoes. The Halacha proscribes an appropriate sequence for putting on and tying shoes based on the laws of putting on hand tefillin (which we put on the left hand and tie with the right hand). Usually, we give the right side precedence. Therefore, we first put on our right shoes and then our left shoes. However, by tying, we tie the left shoe first, just as we tie tefillin on our left arms.
The connection between shoes and tefillin is learned from this week’s parsha where Avraham comments that he would not take from the King of Sodom “neither a thread nor a shoelace” (so that the king not later claim that he was responsible for Avraham’s wealth). The gemara in Chullin comments that because of this statement of Avraham, his descendants merited receiving the mitzvoth of techeiles [the blue thread on the tzitzis fringes] and tefillin (represented by the “shoelace“). Since the Talmud makes a connection between tefillin and shoelaces, the tying of shoes is supposed to correspond with the tying of tefillin (where the left side has precedence).
Yosef Golding told me the following amazing story, which he heard from a person who was present in a mourner’s house, when the subject told the story: Dr. Joseph Kamenetsky was one of the prime leaders of the Day School movement in America. He was a student of Rav Shraga Feivel Mendelovitz. All the Day Schools that were in the “hinterlands” were the result of Dr. Joseph Kamenetsky’s work. He passed away several years ago. His daughter was sitting Shiva in Eretz Yisrael. A fellow came in to be menachem avel, to offer consolation to the mourners. All of the family members began whispering with each other to try to figure out his identity. No one knew him. The fellow explained why he came:
I am here because I want to show appreciation to your father and grandfather, Dr. Joseph Kamenetsky. I come from a small town in America. My parents were not religious. They sent me to a Day School. My father really was not into religion, but he sent me to a Day School. One day, he wanted to take me somewhere and called up to my room and said, “Hurry up! We are late. You need to come down already so we can go!” I told him “Sorry, Daddy, I have to retie my shoes.” My father was incredulous. “You have to retie your shoes? What’s the problem?”
I told him that after tying my shoes I remembered that I did it wrong. Instead of tying the left shoe first and then the right shoe, I tied the right shoe and then the left shoe. So now I must untie the shoes and then retie the left followed by the right. My father said “Are you out of your mind? Where did you get this craziness from?” I told him “That is what they taught me in school!” My father said, “That is what they teach you in school? Are they crazy? I am taking you out of that school!”
His father pulled him out of Day School and put him into Public School. The son went “the way of all flesh” and grew up an irreligious Jew to the extent that years later he became engaged to a non-Jewish woman.
Now comes the incredible part.
On the day of his marriage, he bent down to tie his shoe. He bent down to tie his shoe and he tied his left shoe first. Why? Because that’s what he learned in school! He said to himself: “I am going to throw this away? I am going to completely abandon Judaism?” He called up his bride—on what was to be their wedding day—and told her “I cannot go through with it.”
What happened? He went to Eretz Yisrael. He became a baal teshuva [newly observant]. He learned in Yeshiva. He was getting older and he had not yet found a shidduch [matrimonial match]. One day, his Rosh Yeshiva told him, “I have a girl for you. She is a nice religious girl. However, you should know that she is a convert.” The “hero of the story,” who was getting older by now, said, “I don’t care!” He called up the girl to make the date. Lo and behold—it was the bride he abandoned on the day of their scheduled wedding!”
After that traumatic experience of her groom cancelling her wedding on the day of the wedding, she said to herself, “If someone is willing to give up his love for his bride for a thing called Judaism, I need to see for myself what it is all about!” She investigated Yiddishkeit. She wound up in Eretz Yisrael. She went to a ba’alas teshuva institution. She converted and became observant.
He married this very girl to whom he was once engaged and almost married!
