Back when our son was getting called up quite a bit during the first year of the war, he asked if he could borrow one of our cars. They only had one (neither he nor his wife used a car to get to work, so one was plenty), but now that he was regularly heading to to the Lebanese front (or down south? we were never sure we believed him when he told us where he was headed), taking their car meant leaving his wife with none. If he could have one of our cars, he could leave one with her for taking the kids to the doctor, going to visit her parents, etc.
Obviously, we gave him a car.
Even by that point, the car (which we hardly ever used) was more than a decade old. So we told him just to keep it. Who knew how long the war would go on? We transferred the ownership to him so he could get a resident parking sticker in his greater Tel Aviv neighborhood, and I went ahead and got the new model of that very same tiny car to have here as our totally unneeded backup.
That little car (a Toyota so tiny they don’t even sell it in the States) went back and forth to the Lebanese border and back and forth (and occasionally to the border down south, wherever they called him to), for months. At a certain point, though, his call-ups became less frequent, and having to find parking for the car outweighed whatever convenience retaining it might have provided. So he asked us to take it back.
Great. What in the world did we need three cars for? Truthfully, we only need one. Having two is kind of silly, and now, having three was ridiculous. But we took the car so it wouldn’t be a pain for him, brought it back to Jerusalem, parked it on the street here and mostly forgot about it.
Shortly thereafter, sitting in shul one Shabbat morning, a friend of mine mentioned that his son-in-law was getting called up for what was going to be an extended period. I knew the young couple didn’t have a car, and know that when the son-in-law’s around, he does a ton with taking kids to school, picking them up, and all that. I told my friend we had an extra car and pleaded that his daughter take it. She resisted, but eventually, after a few months (yes, months), she relented.
She had it for a while, and then, a couple of months ago, she WhatsApp’ed me to ask if she could share the car with a friend. She would use it to commute to work and pick up the kids, while her friend, who had been called up to Sde Teiman (the detention base near Gaza where Israel holds thousands of Palestinian prisoners), would also use it to get there. I didn’t know the friend, but of course it was fine.
In our minds, this was now a reservists’ car. I told her she could lend it to whomever she wanted, to whoever needed it for reserve duty or anything related. Whoever, wherever, whenever.
And so it went. The car got passed here and there, went to this base or that, picked up these kids or those—all good. We never knew where it was.
We totally forgot about the car once again until a few days ago when the young woman who was the official borrower called to say that there was an ominous red warning light lit up on the dashboard. I had no idea what it was, but a quick ChatGPT lookup suggested that it might not be good. I told her not to drive it out of town, so she wouldn’t get stuck, until we figured this out. She took the car to the dealer on Monday, and they told her they’d call me the next day with an estimate. Sure enough, yesterday morning, they called. For a car well over a decade old at this point, the amount the Toyota woman quoted for the repair struck me as a lot to put into it, but I figured it would still help these young kids. What the hell.
I told them to go ahead. It might take a few days to fix, they said. Parts for cars that old are no longer in stock and must be ordered. I texted our friend’s daughter to let her know. She told me she thought it was nuts to put that kind of money into the car (which was barely worth more than the repair), but I told her that we wanted to help her out.
An hour later, the woman from Toyota called back and said the guys had made a mistake. The repair was going to cost more. How much more? About twice as much. We were now well in the “more than the car is worth” range, for sure. OK, I said, trying to convince myself that we should still do it. “Are you sure that once you do that, everything else in the car is OK?” Actually, not really, she said. They guys see some other things that seem suspicious, but we’d have to charge you to run the tests, and if something else does require fixing, those are also parts, so the cost will go up even further.
There comes that moment when you realize that you’re in la la land. I called the woman who was borrowing the car; we were on the same page. “OK,” I asked the Toyota woman on the phone, “How much will you give me for the car if I don’t fix it?”
You gotta come in and talk to Shlomi1, she said.
Shortly thereafter, I walked over, and found Shlomi, a tall, not at all slim, strapping guy who was kind of out of central casting for the role of the guy who buys used, worthless cars.
“You the guy whose car the girl brought in?”, he wanted to know. I held my tongue about the “girl” bit. “Yup.”
“The car’s not worth much,” he said to me. Yup. “How much do you want for it?”, he asked me. I gave him a number that I thought wasn’t ridiculous in either direction. He laughed, and said, “Let’s be serious, you know from the estimate that even the parts that the car needs cost about what the car is worth. Neither you nor I are gonna get rich from this car.”
Fair enough. He offered me a thousand shekels. Now it was my turn to laugh, but I also knew that his paltry offer would save me from having to get rid of the car with some shyster somewhere else. I was basically buying my own time. OK.
He’s filling out all the paperwork, we go online to the DMV website to do the transfer of ownership, he writes me an actual check (when I realize that I can’t remember the last time I saw a real check) and I deposit it on the bank’s app. All good. Done.
I’m getting ready to leave, sans car thankfully, and he says, nodding at all the shiny new cars sitting there in the show room, “So what are you going to buy instead?” “Nothing,” I told him. “It was a reservists’ car.”
“A what?” he asked, obviously confused. So I explained the whole story to him.
And then, this giant, burly guy in the black, two-button Toyota shirt sits there, looks at me, and his eyes well up with tears. “You’re a tzaddik.” I laughed. I held up the check for the measly thousand shekels and said, “The amount on this check proves that I’m most definitely not a tzaddik.”
But he was genuinely upset. “You know,” he said, “I wish you’d told me this story before I offered you a thousand shekels. I would have offered you more.”
I laughed, once again. It probably wasn’t true, but the mere fact that he said it struck me as incredibly sweet. “All good,” I told him. “I appreciate your time on this.”
“Gmar chatimah tovah,” he said to me. “You, too. A meaningful fast.”
I got up to go, shoved the little bit of paperwork into my bag, and started to walk. “Come here,” he said.
He came out from behind his desk and towering above me, gave me a big hug.
Yihyeh be-seder po, he said. “Things are gonna be OK here.”
Nekaveh, I said. “Let’s hope so.”
He released me from the bear hug, patted me on the shoulder, and—still bewildered by my little story—shook his head and said, “Shana Tova.”
“You, too.”
I walked home, charmed by the bear of a guy and those utterly unexpected tears.
The whole thing was so incongruous, that moment so filled with his sweetness and goodness, that—knowing that this country is filled with people like him—it struck me that he might well be right.
Yihyeh be-seder po.
Nekaveh.
*****
Gmar chatimah tovah. Wishes for a meaningful Yom Kippur.
Not his real name.
כל הכבוד דניאל
גמר חתימה טובה. לכולנו.
Rak b'yisrael.