Seidemann: A Bereshis bar mitzvah miracle

From the other side of the bench

by David Seidemann Issue of October 15, 2010, 7 Cheshvan 5771 We all know that what passes as fashion in Israel does not always pass muster here in the United States. Weddings, bar mitzvahs and the like are traditionally more casual in Israel than they are here, and in this writer’s mind, that’s probably a good thing. Nevertheless, some standards should be maintained and for the bar mitzvah boy’s mother to show up on Shabbos morning in a jean skirt, baseball cap and sneakers was unacceptable. More than one pair of eyebrows were raised two weeks ago in a small shul 45 minutes outside of Jerusalem. The only person dressed, or should I say not dressed, more inappropriately than the mother was the bar mitzvah boy’s eight-year-old brother who showed up in a T-shirt, clogs and a pair of sweatpants. In fact, as of the Friday morning preceding the bar mitzvah, both the mother and the brother were not even planning to attend. Oh they wanted to, but the doctors had other ideas. The saga began the day before Sukkot. The eight-year-old gregarious son of our friends in Israel decided to use the mattress in the family sukkah as his personal launch pad. 30 minutes later he was in the back of an ambulance. Two hours later he was under the surgeon’s knife to repair a fractured femur. Two days later he was home and plans for the bar mitzvah of his older brother were continuing. Relatives began to arrive from far and wide and the house and the shul were spruced up. The little brother would come to shul on crutches. On the eve of Shemini Atzeres, however, the brother had a slight fever. After consulting with the doctor, the boy was brought back to the hospital for observation. Mother bade her family goodbye not knowing if she would return for the bar mitzvah. A number of things would have to go their way in order for the family to spend Shabbos together. Either the eight-year-old had to make a miraculous recovery on Friday when it was permitted to travel back home to Jerusalem or a rabbinical ruling would have to be made to permit the family to travel back home on Shabbat. If the child was not ready to be discharged, travel would be both medically and halachically forbidden. If the child was still ill on Friday but completely healed on Shabbos, from the standpoint of Jewish law, travel would be prohibited. Returning just for the sake of a bar mitzvah is forbidden. If the child was healthy on Shabbos morning, the mother and her eight-year-old son would have to spend Shabbos in Jerusalem. The only way the child could be discharged on Shabbos was if he was just sick enough that he would heal better at home. What goes into making such a decision is beyond the scope of my knowledge. The mother was not counting on that possibility and she resigned herself to missing her son’s bar mitzvah as she lit candles on Friday evening. She held on to one faint hope that the hospital doctor and rabbi would confer at 7 a.m. the next morning to determine whether this rare combination of circumstances would allow her son to travel by car to spend the bar mitzvah Shabbos at home with their family. Her husband davened at a 7:30 a.m.  minyan which meant that they would reach the Torah reading portion of the services at approximately 8:30. The doctor was not scheduled to return to the hospital until 10 a.m. and the rabbi wasn’t scheduled to return until 11. When those two bits of information were reported to her on Friday night, the mother was crestfallen. Even if the doctor and the rabbi ruled that the child may travel home, there was a good chance that they would not make it home in time to hear the bar mitzvah boy read from the Torah. Don’t ask me why, but the doctor arrived that Shabbos morning at seven. Don’t ask me why but the Rabbi arrived at five minutes after seven. And don’t ask me what went into the medical and Halachic analysis, but it was determined that the boy should be discharged and sent home immediately to continue his convalescence. Where were they going to find a non-Jewish taxi driver at 7:15 in the morning that would be willing to drive them 45 minutes out of Jerusalem without compensation? Enter the shift nurse who was tending to the young boy and whose shift happened to end that day at 7:30. It just so happened that her husband, a non-Jewish taxi driver, was waiting in the parking lot to take her home, a home that was in the exact direction the family needed to travel in. And so the taxi pulled into the shul parking lot at approximately 8:30 and the inappropriately attired bar mitzvah boy’s mother and brother hobbled into shul just as the bar mitzvah boy began to read the Torah portion of Bereshis. “In the beginning,” when all of nature and humanity were in the right place at the right time. Light and darkness, heaven and earth, fish and fowl, water and land, man and animal, and of course the doctor, rabbi, nurse and taxicab driver all in the right place at the right time. David Seidemann is a partner with  the law firm of Seidemann & Mermelstein.  He can be reached at (718) 692-1013  and at ds@lawofficesm.com