My wife and I made our first trip to Israel in 1979, with Yeshayah, our one-year-old, who took his first independent steps in New York and was fairly running when we returned seven weeks later. We had the pleasure of living in Jerusalem and at Moshav Me’or Modi’im during much of our stay and were pleased to have adopted the observant life-style of most of our friends and many of our neighbors. When we returned to Berkeley, however, we quickly returned to many of our previous habits, among which I include driving on Friday night in order to spend Kabbalat Shabbat at whatever home our spiritual community, the Aquarian Minyan, was conducting its services.
In 1986, we again made a six or seven week visit to Eretz Yisrael, this time with two young kids, visited some of the same people, stayed in some of the same places, did some learning, and came back imbued with a determination to live here as we had there. That commitment lasted about two weeks. Soon we were back in the East Bay rhythm, wherein if you wanted to go somewhere that was at a distance, you drove.
In 1990, we went again. We stayed in a nice apartment and took classes at Pardes. Our kids went to Camp Ramah – a five-minute walk from where we were staying – and played soccer or basketball with the neighborhood kids till it grew dark. This time, when we returned, we felt more resistance to changing back. Nevertheless, there seemed to be no way to remain active and au courant with our community without reverting to our previous practice of driving to Shabbat services.
Initially, we were able to walk on Friday night to places in the general vicinity of our home. But finally, the Shabbat of Chanukah arrived, and the Minyan was celebrating at a home in Oakland we had never visited, on a street we didn’t know, in an area we never frequented. Moreover, I had been asked to tell a story there. It seemed we would have to use the car, so Yehudit and I, along with our rambunctious kids, who would certainly rebel at being asked to walk all that way, and a guest, our Bat Bayit and sister storyteller, Lynn Feinerman, prepared to get in the Toyota for a ten or fifteen minute drive.
Only there were a couple of hitches before we could leave. Nine-year-old Elishama’s plastic harmonica had gotten stepped on, and a piece had cracked off. Unfortunately, all the air he blew into it rushed out that hole, ruining the musical quality of the instrument. Faint squawks were an inadequate substitute for full chords and sonorous notes. I needed to glue it back on because tape blocked the pipes, reducing the range of the scale.
I was a firm believer in super-glue, so I got out my tube and hastily squeezed a couple of drops onto the thin rough edges. I managed to press them together, but because I had to hold them in this position for a minute, and because I had gotten some glue between my fingertip and the plastic surface, I couldn’t pull my hand away when the plastic had bonded – the skin of my finger was also bonded to the surface.
I thought I had a solution, though. I reached for my exact-o knife, an aluminum handle topped by a pointed razor, excellent for cutting through paper and cardboard when I did layout work. I figured I could just saw through the thin layer of glue that held my finger and the plastic harmonica together. However, the glue resisted, and my fingertip got pulled more and more into the narrow space. Soon its skin was cut, and it dripped blood all over the instrument, the table, the floor, and my clothes. In desperation, I pulled my stuck finger and the plastic mouth harp apart, tearing skin and leaving a layer of glue on my shaky digit.
I assumed the glue would peel off over the next few days, and I figured the raw skin would eventually heal, though it was quite tender at that moment. I was grateful not to have lost more skin. I washed off the blood, put some peroxide on the wound, and summoned my family, in front of whom I’d been raving for several minutes, out to the car.
It was now fully dark out, but in December it gets dark early. Also, Chanukah comes just before and just after the New Moon, so you don’t see much moonlight until near the end of the holiday. I took off down Shattuck Avenue and headed toward Oakland with my four passengers.
I suppose I should have asked Yehudit to drive, but she was still holding out – willing to accept a lift but not to be the main perpetrator. The traffic grew heavy as Shattuck merged into Telegraph, and I hesitated, not sure if the yellow signal was a blinking light or was turning red. The guy close behind me knew the terrain better and honked me on while tailgating. My New York genes kicked in as I rolled forward a couple of feet then jammed on the brakes, just to let him know: “Don’t push me, man!”
He got the message, all right, and stayed close behind me – I mean inches behind me – as we joined the stream going down Telegraph. The adjacent lane was also full of cars, so I couldn’t move over to the left, where I needed to be to make the turn, and I didn’t have much maneuverability because this guy was right behind me, and the adrenaline was flowing because I was literally in fight or flight mode, and, thinking of the safety of my Minyan friends, I decided I didn’t want to lead him to the Shabbos house, so I tried to stay ahead of him and looked for a right turn. I took the first one I saw and found myself headed down a dark side street with few lights ahead. Desperate to shake my pursuer, I turned abruptly into the parking lot of a 7-11, but he followed right behind me. I circled around and exited the same way I had come in and sought, by speeding, to distance myself from my tailgating rival.
I took a left turn onto Martin Luther King, then quickly made a right. One block ahead the street narrowed into a tunnel-like underpass, with traffic emerging from both lanes against us. Fearing the other driver more than a head-on collision, I shot into the tunnel, headlights ablaze, horn blaring. Startled drivers changed lanes to avoid me, but at one point we gridlocked because my pursuer had moved into the adjacent lane to overtake me, leaving the oncoming drivers with no space to avoid us.
He got out of his car and walked methodically to his trunk. I thought of telling everyone to duck, for I sensed some kind of projectile would soon come our way. I hunched behind the wheel. The trunk opened. He was 20 feet away. I refused to look directly at him, not wanting to provoke a further confrontation. There was a loud thump on our left rear fender. We all flinched, the traffic ahead of us opened up, and we fled from the cramped interior of the underpass, with our pursuer right behind. I did a 180 and headed back into the tunnel and sailed, with the traffic this time, out the other side, the other car still following close behind, and then made a right turn back onto Telegraph where I tried to lose myself in the traffic. I seemed to have put a few car lengths and intervening vehicles between us before risking a left turn, toward the house where we were expected, though not exactly by the route we had chosen. As we eased through the quiet streets, we looked around but saw no vehicle pursuing. The other driver had given up the chase.
When we reached the house, we stumbled inside, immensely relieved. Lynn headed for a back room to recuperate. Yehudit and I and the boys took our places in the circle, indicating little about our adventure and escape. When it came time to tell my story, I told over everything that had happened in the third person, making us characters in a talk, my narrator’s voice establishing a safe distance from the danger we had just survived. It was a comical bit, though imbued with a dark and self-mocking undertone. When we got home that night, we knew that our days of routinely driving on Shabbat were over.
– This story first appeared in Ancient Roots, Radical Practices, and Contemporary Visions: The Aquarian Minyan 25th Anniversary Festschrift (1999)
