The Word on the Street
Armed with goodwill and good works,
the `mitzvah tank' invades the Gold Coast
By Barbara Mahany
Tribune staff reporter
January 25, 2004
Just off the alley in West Rogers Park, in the blank asphalt spaces shared by a bar and a synagogue, a 28-foot-long, souped-up RV with the words "Mitzvah Tank" plastered along its flank has just revved its engine.
Exhaust spews and unfurls toward the heavens.
It is a Sunday morning. Snow falls like salt from a shaker. As the big ol' tank is dislodged from its resting spot, making a tight left hook as it heads toward the street, the falling white stuff makes of the alley a first-class obstacle course.
Fear not, for in the driver's seat there is Yehuda Sugar, a fiery-eyed thunderbolt who could sell you a set of second-rate pots and pans with no more introduction than a doorbell (he did it one summer).
He steers as if God is on his side, and maybe that's not such a stretch.
Sugar, you see, is no longer peddling pots; he's moved up to the Most Divine.
It's his mission, foremost, to bring fallen Jews back into the fold. But he's out on the streets in his mitzvah mobile looking to spread God's Good Cheer to anyone willing to look up, to nod or even to listen.
(Mitzvah, by the way, is Hebrew for "commandment" and is a term used to mean any good deed or act of kindness or piety.)
A decade ago, Sugar, once a hard-boiled wire service reporter who knew well the hard-rockin' ways of Lincoln Park, ditched his secular life. He joined Chicago's Lubavitch Chabad community, a branch of Judaism that believes that following the precise letter, as well as the deep and joyful spirit, of the Torah, or the five books of Moses in the Bible, and spreading that message to the world is the sure way to bring on the Messiah.
Peaceful artillery
And so it was that 1 1/2 years ago, inspired by Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, head of the Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois, Sugar ventured up to the Lake County Fairgrounds in Grayslake.
There, he kicked the tires of some of the 300 RVs parked in rows at a year-end RV sale. By day's end, he was a little deeper in debt for a 1987 Travelmaster that had already clocked 51,500 miles, previously owned and operated by a minister/farmer/mechanic who, Sugar was told, probably had similarly used it for God's work. You might call this particular Travelmaster "God's Holy Roller."
It is only the third such full-time Mitzvah Tank in the U.S., the only one in Chicago. In Israel, there is a platoon of at least 20 such tanks that take to the streets and, yes, the battlefields nearly every day of the year.
The artillery of these tanks is strictly pacific: candles for the women to light at the start of the Jewish Sabbath on Friday nights; tefillin, or prayer boxes with long leather straps that wrap the head and arms of Jewish men in a supreme form of supplication; boxes of matzoh, or unleavened bread, by the thousands, at Passover; menorahs and candles at Hanukkah; good deeds and simple listening anytime anyone—Jew or non-Jew—seeks either.
Duly armed this snowy Sunday morning, Sugar sets out.
A joyful noise
Emerging unscathed from the alley, he flicks a few switches, cranks a few knobs, and he's rolling and blaring simultaneously. Hassidic tunes, somewhat scratchy versions thereof, blare from the rooftop speaker, drawing stares and waves and the occasional scrunched-up maw from passersby.
Inside the steamy windows of the tank, more Hassidic tunes compete with a CD-ROM unspooling on a dashboard laptop. Then the cell phone jingles. Not enough sensory output, Sugar, 46, who wears his hair close-cropped and his beard long and who sports a wide-rimmed black Borsalino hat, black down coat and black Lugz boots (he mentions that black and white are a Lubavitcher's favorite colors because they are the colors of the letters of the Torah), plucks a hand-held microphone from its holder and starts singing along to the tunes, broadcasting his bass right out the window and into every passing pair of ears.
He revels in the noisy swath he cuts through the otherwise hushed streets of West Rogers Park.
"People are going home right now, saying to their spouse, `You know what I saw, what I think I saw? A 28-foot tank playing music, and what looked like a rabbi singing along,'" says Sugar, a West Rogers Park father of three who makes his living Monday through Friday as an executive recruiter and career coach. He takes the tank out mostly on Sundays (he hires a rabbi to take it out weekdays). "By driving and playing the music, we're penetrating."
He penetrates all the way down Lake Shore Drive, and then he hits the Gold Coast. Never mind the snow hurtling in through the driver's side window. Sugar has one hand on the wheel, one hand and his head out the window.
In a head-spinning blur of no-holds-barred optimism and extroversion, this is Sugar on a 10-block swath of the city: He's on the mike calling out to a guy in a red knit cap. Waving to a doorman with a bucket of salt. Putting the tank in park and dashing out the side door, folder in hand, wishing a guy with a shopping bag a sweet 2004.
Back in the driver's seat, he doesn't even get down a block of Dearborn Street before spotting a woman with a red umbrella turned inside out against the wind. Seizing the opportunity, he's back out the door. His big black hat plops in a pond of slush, but he nabs the woman and shares with her a few gentle words and one of his good-works folders before returning triumphant to his throne.
He couldn't be more cheery as he rolls toward Water Tower Place.
"Inch by inch, rabbi by rabbi, mitzvah tank by mitzvah tank, transforming the darkness permanently to light, that's the pull of moshiach," or rather, the promise of final redemption that is to come with the long-awaited arrival of the Messiah, says Sugar, weaving the tank through a mob of doormen and double-parked cars outside the Drake Hotel.
The big prize
It is not so many inches away, over at Dearborn and Elm, just outside Biggs, a restaurant where a baby organic salad will set you back 15 bucks, that Sugar snares the prize he has been hoping for all day, the thing that got him to roll out this tank in the first place, the thing that has him merrily forking over $150 a month for gas, $1,000 a year for his friendly mechanic.
A young urban buck leaps from a car door, hoping to make it to the sidewalk without sinking ankle-deep into the slush. Sugar eyes the prime candidate. He pounces.
"Are you Jewish?" he asks, fairly sure of the answer. The young buck, a 26-year-old computer programmer at the University of Chicago Hospitals, is easy--"like butter," Sugar would later report.
As if old friends, the two walk across the slush and over to the tank, which is idling, spitting fumes on the far side of Dearborn.
Taking the giant step up into the tank, Sugar is asking, "When's the last time you put tefillin on?"
"My bar mitzvah," answers the computer programmer, whose name is Michael Rubinstein, and who just moved to Lake View from Skokie, where he immigrated at 11 from Estonia in what was then the Soviet Union.
"So it seems every 13 years you put on tefillin," Sugar says warmly, as he digs out the long leather straps and the tiny boxes that hold passages from the Bible commanding Jewish men to bind them to their head and arms, something a strictly observant Jew would do every weekday, in effect binding their thoughts and deeds to God.
While Sugar is unfurling the tefillin, Rubinstein, who is on his way to meet a buddy for lunch, has stripped off his coat and is standing in the chill in a navy T-shirt. He dons a yarmulke, or skull cap used for prayer, and Sugar wraps first his considerable biceps and then his head.
Standing in the middle of the souped-up tank, what with its dirty rose carpet and its faux paneled walls, its pantry turned over to a reference library, its back bedroom turned over to storage of extra menorahs, Rubinstein stands serene in a posture of prayer, and whispers, in Hebrew, one of the most holy Jewish prayers.
"I used to put them on after my bar mitzvah, but then I went to public high school and I changed my ways," says Rubinstein, after taking off the tefillin. "You change, you become like everybody else. I tried to wear kipot," the Hebrew word for yarmulkes. "But I felt everybody's eyes on the back of my head."
"And here comes Mr. Lubavitch, to haul you back into the fold," says Sugar, laughing.
"To do it on my own," says Rubinstein, "to be honest, I don't take the initiative. But when someone asks, I do it willingly. It makes them happy. It makes me happy. It makes God happy."
Just one more
Sugar indeed looks happy as Rubinstein slips back into the cold and the snow whipping every which way.
But he doesn't stop.
He catches the eye of a guy climbing into a red sedan with wire-rimmed wheels, and he's gone. "One more," he calls over his shoulder, "it's that Rebbe thing, you gotta do one more."
Settling back at the wheel, he explains: "See, I'm hungry. Like a salesman trying to make one last sale."
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