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Holidays on Wheels

Mitzvah Tanks have changed their routine during the pandemic, but they keep on rolling

by
Leon Kraiem
December 09, 2020
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I was sitting in the Chabad-Lubavitch Mitzvah Tank at 37th Street and Broadway on a sunny November afternoon, listening to election results come in from the Rust Belt, as Rabbi Levi Baumgarten told me what it’s like doing mobile Jewish outreach in the middle of a global pandemic. “Look at this,” Baumgarten said to me, gesturing through his window at an unseasonably quiet midtown Manhattan. “Have you ever seen the city like this?”

In normal times, the rabbi would have been leading a daily minyan, packing 10 people into the not-so-large RV, and stopping passersby on the street to wrap tefillin. But now, most of Baumgarten’s engagement happens on the phone, or over Zoom. He was making and taking calls throughout the hour or so that I spent in the tank with him, only occasionally taking out his AirPods to hold court when a regular visitor opened the door. Some visitors wore masks inside the tank; others did not. If someone didn’t have a mask, there was a box of them for the taking, and a Purell dispenser placed among the prayer books on the shelf.

When the coronavirus pandemic first locked people in their homes earlier this year, synagogues, day schools, and other brick-and-mortar Jewish spaces learned to adapt to life online. But the Chabad-Lubavitch Mitzvah Tanks—so-called ever since Menachem Mendel Schneerson referred to them as “our tanks against assimilation” in 1974—are an inherently public sort of thing. Everything the Mitzvah Tanks are known for—welcoming people inside to daven, laying tefillin, approaching strangers on the street—is made more complicated by the pandemic. (It’s hard to ask a stranger, “Are you Jewish?” if the person is quarantined at home.) So the Mitzvah Tanks have had to adapt their operations.

Some New York-based Lubavitchers have found ways to conduct their outreach safely. On Sukkot, for example, they wiped down their lulavs and etrogs after each new stranger shook them. In other places, where engagement with pedestrians isn’t as center-stage, there was some wonderment at how men on the street have adapted. “I don’t know how they do it in New York,” said Yochanan Posner, who runs Chabad of Skokie and is one of the Chicago area’s several tankistim. “If you go up to people, and you’re saying, ‘excuse me,’ and you’re wearing a mask, so they can’t really hear you anyways, and you’re passing something hand to hand”—it gets complicated.

Masks and Clorox wipes inside the Mitzvah Tank
Masks and Clorox wipes inside the Mitzvah TankPhoto: Leon Kraiem

But Posner, like Mitzvah Tank drivers around the country, has found new ways to reach people in these strange times, ever since the initial lockdown in March, when the tanks, like everything else, went off the streets entirely. At the time, Baumgarten and his son themselves got sick with COVID-19, and they didn’t return until a couple months later, when infection rates went down enough that some people, if not nearly as many as before, were back on the street to engage with them.

The only place where Mitzvah Tanks did not suspend their activities at all was in Israel, after the (nonmetaphorical) Israel Defense Forces designated the tanks as “essential” right from the start. “We’ve always been operating,” said Akiva Marshall, who oversees the Mitzvah Tanks in Israel. After all, “even in a hot war situation, God forbid, we go to the front lines. This is not a war situation,” Marshall said, “but it’s a war against an illness. It has a similarity—you have to go beyond what’s normal.” In Israel, that has meant a creative use of the tanks’ loudspeakers to reach people who can’t leave their homes, especially children. “In normal times,” Marshall told me, “they’d come inside, watch an educational video, have an arts and crafts project.” Now, one child will commandeer the loudspeaker to call out verses and rabbinic sayings he’s learned, and people on the balconies will repeat the verses back to him, in a call-and-response dynamic.

In May, when it became clear that Chicago’s Fourth of July parade probably wouldn’t be what it usually is, Chabad in Chicago put together a jumbo Lag B’Omer parade instead, hiring contractors to safely decorate dozens of vehicles with Jewish-themed flair, following the Mitzvah Tanks in an all-day tour of the city. “We went up every street,” Posner told me of the parade he led in Skokie, “and we let people know in advance what the schedule would be, down to the minute. Going down Demster, turning right, at 11:00. 11:02, turning left.” When the tank rounded a neighborhood’s corner, Posner said, “people knew about it. They came out of their houses, they waved, they cheered. They were a part of it without having to actually go anywhere or do anything unsafe.” People held signs, he recalled, including one sign with a quote from the Christian Bible—he can’t remember exactly what—but he remembers it was “nice and warm, to show how much they appreciated” the parade.

In this same spirit, Posner’s Mitzvah Tank has been showing up to bar mitzvahs in the area, adding an upbeat energy to the safe outdoor settings that can sometimes feel a little out of place in their ordinariness. “A bar mitzvah isn’t the same as it used to be,” he told me. “It’s just a few people gathered somewhere, often in a parking lot. And one of the ways we can make it more festive is to come with the Mitzvah Tank. The idea of a colorful, bright, celebratory vehicle that plays music—it changes the atmosphere from just being outside somewhere to being at something.” It’s the same consideration that leads Posner to deliver crafts supplies and educational materials to the children who are Zooming into Hebrew school. They could probably get the same things themselves, but “it’s all about making people feel a connection,” he said. “Whatever people would have gotten if they were coming here to us, now we’re bringing it to them.”

That’s true of school supplies, but it’s also true of the ritual objects and ceremonial foods that, in normal times, people might handle at their local Chabad house. When Passover came, shortly after the lockdowns began, Posner, as part of Chabad of Illinois, delivered full Seder meals, and tanks in New York did double duty, becoming roving billboards for a new shmura matzo delivery service (normally the tanks would have matzo onboard) as well as the actual delivery trucks that brought the matzo to area Jews’ homes. For a holiday to which food is so essential, Posner said, the rapid delivery of items that are not exactly American staples, and whose combined preparation can easily feel overwhelming—was a great relief. “People were panicked,” he told me. “They weren’t going to stores, they weren’t comfortable with things like Instacart yet. And making Seder alone is unthinkable.” Posner did not, however, use a Mitzvah Tank to make deliveries. “It gets 5 miles per gallon,” he told me. “It’s like driving a fire truck.”

Several months later, when the holiday of Sukkot rolled around, attention turned to another meal-based mitzvah, but this time one that wasn’t focused on what you eat, but where. Putting up a sukkah is complicated, and expensive, and you need at least some amount of outdoor square footage to do it. Enter the Sukkah-Mobile: a flatbed truck, in the spirit of a Mitzvah Tank, with a kosher temporary dwelling on its back, driven from house to house throughout the holiday. Using the same logistical back end that was up and running for the Seder deliveries and the minute-to-minute tracking of the Lag B’Omer parade, residents of the Chicago suburbs could reserve a time slot of 20 or 30 minutes to dwell in the sukkah without leaving their driveway. Posner, safe in the driver’s seat, would wait for his holiday guests—often a family, who would sit for a meal together, but sometimes just an individual, whom Posner would give a little something on which to pronounce a blessing and then get going. Then, after wishing his visitors a chag sameach, he would wipe down all the sukkah’s surfaces and drive to the next house, allowing the booth to air out as he drove the truck across town.

Now, as Hanukkah approaches, the New York-based Mitzvah Tanks are preparing for their annual Menorah Parade, which is set to take place in New York on Dec. 14, the festival’s fifth night. The parade is well suited to pandemic times: No one has to leave their car, so there’s no risk of transmission. It’s also well suited to the spirit of the holiday—survival, hope, a sense of darkness as a condition of something to come—which seems more relevant than ever.

This has been the theme that Baumgarten has been counseling people with. When a group of young men bounded into the tank, asking for wisdom, the rabbi’s advice was straightforward: “The more good things you do, you’re making the world a better place to deal with the pandemic. Our job is to do more. Do another mitzvah. Help another person.” Later, after those visitors left, the rabbi stressed to me the mental health consequences of the lockdowns, and he told me how important his in-person face time has been for people who are cooped up alone inside. “Some people get depressed,” he said. “And you know what happens. So they call me.”

Leon Kraiem is a journalism fellow at Tablet and a senior at Brandeis University, studying philosophy.