Kevin Deutsch wasn’t expecting to have a mystical encounter while reporting a story about kosher meals in Overland Park, Kansas City. But when he stepped through the doors of the Chabad House, he felt the pull of something sacred drawing him inside.

Kevin, a prolific journalist in both Jewish and secular news, had been assigned to spend an afternoon learning about Torah Learning Center’s (TLC) new dairy kitchen and expanded Meals on Wheels program. It was the kind of community feature he had written hundreds of times before – observe, interview, write, and move on to the next story.

But as he began interviewing TLC’s directors, shluchim Rabbi Benzion and Esther Friedman, he slowly started to feel drawn in. They explained how each dish was cooked fresh, how they made sure local Jews received not just food but companionship and a taste of Jewish joy, and how innumerable lives had been touched by TLC’s kosher meals program.

“I realized then that holiness can be found in the simplest things,” Kevin later wrote in an opinion piece for the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle. “A ladle of soup, a loaf of challah, or a knock on a stranger’s door. This epiphany wasn’t just intellectual, for I felt something shift within me, some ancient spiritual switch turning on.”

“Listening to their stories, I felt part of that same divine tapestry. I sensed a locked door opening in my soul, a thread as old as the universe leading me forward.”

After their long and meaningful conversation, the Friedmans asked Kevin if he wanted to put on tefillin in the shul. At age 43, he had never done so before.

“I felt the pull of that same holy thread guide me forward, and I said yes.”

“Then this will be your bar mitzvah,” the shlucha told him, beaming.

Rabbi Friedman led him to the bimah and began wrapping tefillin with him.

“The boxes were heavier than I expected, and when they touched me, something timeless stirred within. I delighted in the feeling, exuberant as the rabbi guided me through the steps. It was as though my heart had been cinched into alignment with a current that had been flowing for millennia, and for the first time I had tapped into it.”

Rabbi Friedman explained each step of the way, including what the seven loops represented.

“With each turn, I felt myself becoming less a journalist in a sanctuary and more a note in an infinite, divine ensemble.”

When the tefillin were finally in place, Kevin looked down at his hand. “It no longer seemed entirely my own. It was an instrument, sanctified and marked, part of something infinite.”

As he began reciting Shema for the first time in his life, it happened:

“A moment I’ll remember the rest of my days…I felt myself dissolve into something larger. The room expanded; reality expanded. My heart, my mind, my body — all of it was caught up in the pulse of creation. I was no longer a reporter in Kansas. I was a soul, bound to G-d, bound to my people, bound to everything.”

He had walked into TLC as an observer, ready to write someone else’s story. Instead, he left carrying his own. Two weeks later, Kevin purchased his own pair of tefillin – and has been using them ever since.