Why Did the Head of the Monastery Don Tefillin?

Recently, a moving monologue by Rabbi Ze'ev Krombi of Chabad has been circulating online, demonstrating how deeply connected the Jewish soul is to Hashem, even in the most extreme and unexpected situations. Here it is with slight editorial changes. My son, Rabbi Mendi, serves as an emissary in Sri Lanka near India. About a year ago, we came to Sri Lanka for the haircut of our grandson Loyk Shiach. One day while wandering the streets of the city, Mendi called me to meet his friend. To my astonishment, I saw Mendi talking to an elderly Buddhist monk wearing an orange Buddhist robe. It turns out this monk is a Jew named Moshe. As a child, he lived in Indonesia, but the Japanese killed his father and all his siblings. His Jewish mother fled with him to Holland, but the Nazis arrived there and killed all of his mother's family. He was sent to Sri Lanka as a young child and has lived in a monastery in the jungles of southern Sri Lanka for more than fifty years.

The many years in the Buddhist monastery did not extinguish the Jewish spark in Moshe's heart. In the emotional conversation we had, Moshe recalled the prayers he participated in during his childhood at the synagogue and even knew how to sing "Avinu Malkeinu" in a stammering manner. He also told us that his mother (who married a non-Jew) never agreed to eat or cook the meat of "another thing." He remembered his mother "washing all the dishes in the house once a year"... .
We stood in the middle of the city, and Mendi put tefillin on him. Mendi had already met Moshe before and even given him several books on Judaism. In his monastery in the middle of the jungle, Moshe read the book "A Prophet Like You" translated into English and was very moved.
Amazing divine providence brought us together again. In the short time left before sunset, Mendi put tefillin on Moshe and recited "Shema Yisrael" with him. The tune "Ashreichem Yisrael," which is sung all night in Meron and was sung the day before at Loyk Shiach's haircut, played in my mind. "Ashreichem Yisrael," that the Jewish soul always remains connected to the Creator.
Who can estimate the soul of a Jew? I stood in the middle of the street, tears of excitement streaming down my face as I tried to understand what drives Moshe, after more than fifty years as the head of a Buddhist monastery, to roll up his sleeve for the donning of tefillin? The local residents around us looked at us in wonder. What is their "saint" doing with these oddly-dressed people? And I remembered the holy words of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, in the name of the Baal Shem Tov, that seventy or eighty years of life are worth it to do a single good deed for a Jew, physically or spiritually.