“I need you to pull over. Right now.”

Rabbi Chaim Danziger, the Rebbe’s shliach to Rostov, was riding in a taxi on the long drive from Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region, to the airport. It’s a long, quiet stretch of road, and like often happens on such drives, the two began talking.

At first, it was the usual small talk. Where he was coming from. Where he was heading. What brought him all the way out to Birobidzhan?

Then the driver mentioned something that made Rabbi Danziger glance down at the clock.

“My grandmother was Jewish,” the driver said almost casually.

Rabbi Danziger checked the time. It was two minutes to shkia. He was already cutting it close for his flight. But a shliach is a shliach in every situation.

“I need you to pull over,” he said.

The taxi driver looked at him in the mirror, clearly confused. They were on a highway, miles from any town, with nothing around but trees and open road. Just a moment earlier, Rabbi Danziger had been worried about missing his flight.

“Please,” Rabbi Danziger added calmly. “Just trust me.”

The driver slowed the car and pulled onto the shoulder.

“Roll up your sleeve,” Rabbi Danziger told him.

“He thought I was a little crazy,” Rabbi Danziger later recounted. “But he did it.”

Rabbi Danziger took out his tefillin and carefully wrapped the strap around the driver’s arm.

“Repeat after me,” he said gently. “Shema Yisrael…”

The driver followed along, slowly repeating the words he had never said before.

When they finished, the driver looked down at his arm for a moment, then turned back toward Rabbi Danziger.

“What did we just do?”

“Okay,” Rabbi Danziger said with a smile, “now you can get back on the highway. I’ll explain.”

They merged back into traffic, and as they drove, Rabbi Danziger explained simply and to the point.

“We just fulfilled the mitzvah of tefillin,” he said. “For the first time in your life.”

The driver fell quiet.

The rest of the ride was very different from the beginning. They spoke about his grandmother, about the little he knew of her background, and about the Jewish roots he had never really thought about before, how there was a whole wealth of Yiddishkeit and tradition that, in truth, all belonged to him.

By the time they reached the airport, Rabbi Danziger managed to make his flight just in time. Before boarding, he also helped connect the driver with a local rabbi near where he lived.

“Sometimes,” Rabbi Danziger says, “a Jewish identity is just one conversation away.”