“And that is why I want you to be a deep-sea diver,” Mr. Rosenthal told Jason. “I want you to dive down to the bottom of New York Harbor and bring those cast-off tefillin back up to the land.” Then he collapsed on the nursing home bed.

Jason called for the nurse, but when she came, it turned out that his alarm was for naught—Mr. Rosenthal had just fallen asleep. Jason left and later returned, trying to get Mr. Rosenthal to talk to him again. But Mr. Rosenthal, usually quite animated, refused to say a word. The following day, Jason returned to Mr. Rosenthal’s room and found that Mr. Rosenthal had disappeared. When Jason asked about him, he learned that Mr. Rosenthal had had a major stroke the night before and was now in a coma on a respirator. Jason hadn’t thought about the story again until today, when Mr. Rosenthal, at the age of no one knew what, abandoned this earth.

Leora looked at Jason, captivated. “That’s an amazing story,” she stuttered. Then she looked away, embarrassed that she couldn’t think of anything more to say about it. An image flashed through her mind of Naomi’s memorial service with all its stupid speeches. A terrible tragedy, a devastating moment. Such potential, such promise. “An amazing story,” she sneered at herself. What a pointless thing to say.

Jason sat back on the bench, finally looking up from his twitching, nervous fingers. Sitting there, more quiet than she had ever seen him, Jason had never looked more beautiful to Leora. She knew the moment was wrong, but she wanted to kiss him.

“There’s only one part of it that I didn’t understand,” he said, a tinge of hesitancy in his voice, and she waited for whatever he might say next. “Maybe this is a stupid question, but what are tefillin?”

Leora the Jewish tutor didn’t know whether or not to laugh at him. How could he have missed the punch line of the story? But she loved him, and was patient. “Do you know what the Shema is?” she asked.

“Sure,” he snorted, “that prayer that talks about God being one.”

Relieved to have one less thing to explain, Leora told him that the Shema goes on to say that you should love God in everything you do, and that you should bind these words as a sign on your arm and let them be frontlets between your eyes. Tefillin are a set of two little black boxes connected to leather straps, she told him, and each of the boxes has those words of the Shema written on parchments inside it. During prayer, Jewish men actually bind these boxes to themselves, one on the arm and the other on the forehead, between the eyes. Her father had them, she said. He had put them on every day during the year after her grandfather died.

Jason was astounded. “Your dad? Really? Stock analyst by day, arm-binder by night?”

“Well, they’re only worn in the morning, actually,” Leora mumbled, resisting what might have become a whirlwind of questions. She still wanted to kiss him. “So are you going to do what he told you?”