The Deal He Made for a Drum Kit: A Drummer’s Awakening

Some stories stay with you long after you finish reading them. This is one of those stories.

American drummer Chemy Soibelman, a Jewish musician from Surfside, Florida, recently shared a personal memory that quickly went viral. What he described began as a casual encounter and became the turning point of his life.

A Cigarette Outside a Wedding

“When I was sixteen,” Soibelman writes, “I was standing outside a wedding, smoking a cigarette. A man walked up to me and said, ‘Smoking is bad for you.’”

Soibelman laughed.

The man tried again. “At least are you studying with that cigarette?”

“No,” Soibelman answered.

“Are you praying?”

“No.”

“Do you put on tefillin?”

“I told him I didn’t anymore.”

Then came the unexpected offer.

An Unbelievable Deal

“The man said to me,” Soibelman continues, “If you put on tefillin for thirty days, I’ll give you whatever you want. I laughed and walked back inside to play.”

But the man did not let it go.

“He followed me into the hall, climbed onto the stage, leaned over, and whispered in my ear, ‘I’ll buy you the best drum kit in the world if you put on tefillin for thirty days.’”

It sounded too good to ignore.

“I said, ‘Deal.’”

The Phone Call That Changed Everything

The man asked for Soibelman’s cell number.

“I didn’t have one back then,” he told him.

“Then give me your address,” the man said.

Soibelman did.

“The next morning, at 9:00, and I am not exaggerating, a driver pulled up to my house with a brand new cell phone. The instructions were simple. Put on tefillin and call me every day you do.”

A deal is a deal.

For the next thirty days, Soibelman called the man every day and told him he had put on tefillin.

“But the truth is,” he admits, “I hadn’t.”

The Drum Kit

At the end of the thirty days, the phone rang again.

“Come outside,” the man said.

Soibelman stepped out and saw the same man from the wedding. He took him straight to Sam Ash, the famous music store, and bought him the most expensive professional drum kit in the store, worth thousands of dollars.

“I came home, set it up, and just stared at it,” Soibelman writes. “And then I said to myself, I can’t play these drums. They are not really mine. I didn’t keep my side of the deal.”

That moment changed everything.

“I decided that for the next thirty days, I would actually put on tefillin,” he writes. “And I did.”

Thirty Days That Never Ended

Years passed.

Today, Soibelman is thirty five.

“Baruch Hashem,” he writes, “since that day, I haven’t missed putting on tefillin even once. And more than that, my entire journey upward in Yiddishkeit began at that moment.”

The Man Behind the Promise

Only later does Soibelman reveal the identity of the man who changed his life.

His name was Harry Rosenberg.

Rosenberg was killed in the tragic Surfside building collapse in Florida, together with ninety nine others, including many Jews, among them his daughter and son-in-law. He was the first victim recovered from the rubble.

“Today, Harry,” Soibelman writes, “I came to pray at your resting place and to thank you again. Pray for all of us up there. You have a place of honor with Hashem. As I wipe away my tears, I can say with certainty, you were a tzaddik.”

“I Know”

Soibelman ends with one final detail.

“A few years ago, I ran into Harry at another wedding,” he writes. “I told him, Harry, you know I didn’t actually put on tefillin during those first thirty days.”

Harry laughed. “I know.”

“So I told him, But after that, I never stopped.”

Harry smiled again. “I know that too.”

Harry Rosenberg, may the memory of the righteous be a blessing. May these words be for the elevation of his soul.