Friday Tefillin

there are these two religious guys that came by the store a week or two ago on friday and asked me to put tfilin on (a jewish practice, if you're curious, search wikipedia).
anyways, they were very insistant that i do it, but i politely told them that i wasn't interested.
while it seemed like it had crushed them emotionally, it just wasn't something i felt like doing, especially at the store.

so today they came back, introduced themselves, and i asked them where they went to highschool.
they told me that they're in yeshiva which is kindof like high school.
so i told them that i understand since i went to yeshivat or chaim (for those of you who aren't familiar, i was raised in the orthodox day school system), and that my entire grade except for me is currently in israel, studying in actual yeshivas (again, for more information, see wikipedia).
so then thet tell me that they've never heard of or chaim and that they're from yeshivat chabbad lubavitch, (and thus the ideal to try to get every jew to do as many mitzvas as they can [mitzvahs=positive commandments]).
they then asked me if i felt like putting on tfilin this week.
i told them no and they asked me why.

after brief a conversation about how i came to associate judaism and religion with oppression during my upbringing, how i was never intellectually comfortable with monotheism, the position of agnosticism, the flaw of pascal's wager, the problems with nationalist-centred thinking, as well as how i've more recently been able to appreciate judaism for it's pragmatic worth, i told them that while i am cautiously warming up to the idea of judaism in the national sense, i was nowhere near embracing it as a religion, and was by no means going to practice it in the store, a place that should have no clear association with any particular religion.

they were again crushed after what seemed like endless pushing and gave me the weekly lubavitch pamphlet that i used to read in shul when i was little, and told me that they'd visit again and that maybe one week i'd want to put on tfilin.