I want to share with you an unbelievable story. I have the zechut (merit) to be a member of Hatzalah. About a year ago, we got a call. We go rushing to the house. This was in a neighborhood a little farther out, not such a religious neighborhood. We get to the door and see there's no mezuzah (doorpost scroll) there. We walk in and go straight to the patient. He's an elderly male. We treat the patient, put him on the stretcher, and are about to leave the house. As we're leaving, he turns to us and says, “Do you mind grabbing something for me from my study?” “Sure.” He says, “On my desk is my tefillin (phylacteries). Could you please bring it to the hospital?” We all froze; we looked around. We didn't even know he was Jewish. Tefillin? Okay, sure. We grab the tefillin, go to the ambulance, and on the way to the hospital he turns to us and says, “I'll tell you the story of the tefillin.”
He says, “18 years ago, my daughter had a child, and the child was born with autism. As the child started to grow up—one year old, two years old, the child turned three—the doctors told us he is never going to be able to speak; he's nonverbal. And it really, really got to me. I started thinking to myself, ‘I wish that my grandson could just call me grandpa.’ One day I sat down and said, ‘God, please let my grandson start talking.’ At the end of the prayer, I said, ‘You know what? I'm going to accept upon myself something that I haven't done in 50 years. I'm going to put on my tefillin. I haven't put it on since my bar mitzvah (son of the commandment).’ And I put on my tefillin for the first time. The next day, my daughter came into my house with my grandson. And he comes running into my arms. And he says, grandpa, he started talking. My daughter almost fell on the floor. But I knew exactly what was going on. I kept on putting on tefillin day two, day three, day four. On day five, I stopped.” He says, “That night I had a dream. And in my dream, somebody came to me in a dream and said, ‘I kept my side of the deal. You need to keep your side of the deal.’” He says, “I woke up in a sweat, but I knew exactly what I had to do.” He says, “I haven't missed tefillin in 15 years. So please, that's why I asked you to bring it with us to the hospital.”
I was thinking about this story. How is that possible? This is a man who hasn't done tefillin in 50 years. This is a person who doesn't keep anything. All of a sudden, he accepts upon himself tefillin. And now an open miracle happens in front of his eyes. And then it hit me. Maybe it's not about the tefillin. Maybe the fact that he accepted upon himself something that is completely outside of his nature. An old man starting to put on tefillin for the first time is completely outside of his nature. I was thinking, all of us, all of us people that do mitzvot (commandments), that put on our tefillin: how could we tap into such a thing? And then it hit me. Shemirat Einayim is something that, no matter how big of a tzaddik (righteous person) you are, it is above your nature to turn your head when there's something that you want it to look at. And then I said to myself, if we could be mekabel (accept upon ourselves) something small in the area of Shemirat Einayim, that is a way that we could tap into that type of miracle, that type of changing the teva (nature) of the world. And B'ezrat Hashem (with God's help), we could be zocheh (merit) to see miracles.