I don't know how I overlooked this one! This story is from more than a year ago but was too interesting to ignore. When I read the headline of this story from the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, I was sure that they were going to say that somehow the cops mistook the rolled Mezuzahs for joints. During the years that I worked in my store Mezuzah Center in Los Angeles, many people commented that watching me roll the Mezuzah scroll looked like watching someone roll a joint. I just always smiled and didn't say anything. I never really had much experience with rolling joints in my years in Yeshivah.
It turns out that the story is about something different, but no less intersesting...
Alex Grabiner was not a particularly religious Jew, but when he and a few friends opened a medical marijuana pharmacy last year in the San Fernando Valley, they invited an Orthodox rabbi to install three mezuzot in hopes that God would bless their business. "We wanted to create a place where there was a drastically different energy inside than there was outside," said Grabiner, a 22-year-old Boston transplant. "That is what the mezuzah symbolizes: That this is a house of people who believe." But last month, the Karma Collective, as the pharmacy near Van Nuys Airport is known, was burglarized. The thieves didn't take much -- a few hundred dollars, no drugs -- but they cut through a steel security gate and knocked down the front door and another door that opened from the lobby to the cannabis shop...Read the rest of the story here
Also, note that the Mezuzah in the picture looks strikingly like the Mezuzahs that we sell in our store. The folks in the story are only a few miles away from our store. I wonder if they bought it from us. I just hope that they don't come back and ask for a refund on the grounds that the Mezuzah didn't stop the robbers.
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