Rabbi Lipszyc's Story of the Week #52.
Dedicated In memory of Aharon Tzvi ben Avigdor
Although I used to enjoy driving, and did quite a lot in my time, my driving habits weren’t necessarily the best. Through the years, I got into numerous accidents and only because of G-d’s kindness, am I around to talk about it. The first accident was while I was a teenager and still a new driver. My brother Heshy would let me use his car from time to time. The evening before Yom Kippur he allowed me to use his car to run an errand.
In the wee hours of the morning, around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. on the day before Yom Kippur it is customary to “shlug kaporas,” the tradition is for a female to take a chicken and a male to take a rooster and say a prayer while encircling it around the head, (three sets of three circles around the head,) and then giving it to the shochet (kosher slaughterer) to ritually kill the chicken in the prescribed manner while looking on and thinking that “I deserve the death penalty for having rebelled against G-d during the past year.” The kosher chicken is then given to a poor person or to a charitable organization. In those years (it was in the late 1960’s) this custom would be carried out in one of the many kosher slaughter houses throughout the city. For the students of the yeshiva, buses would be arranged to take us to the slaughter house which was in a distant part of the city. Somehow, that morning, I and some of my fellow students managed to miss the bus. Still carrying the keys to my brother’s car in my pocket, and knowing that he needed the car by 6:00 a.m. to go to work, I figured he wouldn’t really mind if I took it for this purpose, as long as I had it back home by 6:00 a.m. [Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew it was wrong to do so without his express permission.] We all squeezed into the car and off we went to the slaughterhouse. Unfortunately, on the way back, while driving under an elevated train, I swerved and hit one of the large steel beams that held up the tracks. Since the streets were not well lit there, I couldn’t see any damage to the car and I drove back home and left the keys for my brother on the kitchen table without mentioning the accident. Later in the day my brother pointed out the dent in the car that was very clearly seen in broad daylight. But my older brother taught me several lessons that day. A) Without the slightest anger he pointed out that I wasn’t given permission to take the car that morning; B) he mentioned that a car can be replaced, but a person not, and he was thankful that at least I wasn’t hurt; and C) when I do something wrong, I need to own up to it.
The second accident happened while I was in yeshiva in Montreal. There was a group of us going to the Rebbe for a farbrengen. I rented a car and six of us squeezed in for the trip. One of the passengers was Rabbi Volf Greenglass a”h, a kabbalist and Chassidic mentor of the yeshiva. We left very early in the morning, and I was travelling at quite a clip, around 85 – 90 miles an hour. Suddenly I had a front wheel blow-out. The car started to swerve out of control, however I knew not to slam on the brakes. I looked in my mirrors in all directions and saw that thank G-d there were no other cars on the road, so I knew I had the “convenience” of allowing the car to swing from lane to lane without worrying about hitting any other vehicles, so I didn’t panic, didn’t slam on the brakes, nor did I suddenly jerk on the wheel. Instead I just took my foot off the gas pedal, allowed the car to slow down on its own while turning the wheel to match the direction the car was travelling, thus I pretty much was in control of the car, though I was widely swerving from lane to lane. Unfortunately, the student sitting next to me, who was suddenly woken up from his sleep, and seeing the car swerving, thought that I had lost control of the car so he grabbed for the wheel. Realizing the danger, I had to use my right hand to keep him away from grabbing the wheel, while trying to maintain control of the car with my left hand. During this wild ride everyone in the car (all of whom had been sleeping) woke up to this frightful sight. Thank G-d I was able to bring the car to a safe stop. However, when we got out of the car, which had stopped on the median of grass, between the north and south going lanes, we saw that only for those few meters was the medium level. Had we gone onto the median a few meters earlier or a few meters later, the car would have flipped over. Realizing how close we had come to disaster, I was really shaken up. I turned to one of the other guys and asked him to please change the tire since I was in no condition to do so, and I needed the chill out time to get back my equilibrium so that I could continue driving afterwards. As I was standing off to the side, Rabbi Greenglass was observing me and saw how I was shaken up. In his unique humorous style, he walked over to me and said with a smile, “in the olden days the ferd (horse) would lead the wagon by being in the front, but from outside the wagon, it seems that nowadays the ferd, (referring to the “animalistic way teenagers drive,” lead from inside the wagons.” I burst out laughing and got my equilibrium back, and drove the rest of the way a little more responsibly.
The third accident happened during the week of my sheva brachos. I had rented a car for our wedding and the week of sheva brachos. On the first morning after the chasuna, I went to 770 to daven. Together with my then 6 year old nephew, Heshy Spalter, we brought my wife to my sister’s house, and with Heshy as my “shomer,” I drove to 770. As soon as the light turned green for me I took off, but the owner of Black Pearl Car Service, ran a red light and boom, we “met by accident.” Since it was a heavily black neighborhood, all the African American “witnesses” came out to say that I was the one in the wrong. Thank G-d, just as the accident was happening the Oholei Torah school bus was passing by and the driver actually saw what happened and he stopped to assist me, so the others backed off from what potentially could have turned into an ugly racial incident.
The fourth accident happened in my first year of Shlichus. I was living in Michigan and I travelled by car to NY to be by the Rebbe for one of the chassidic holidays. When I was to return to Michigan I was asked by a newly Torah observant student, who lived in Michigan and was studying in yeshiva in New York, if he could join me on the drive back to Michigan. I agreed. Then close friends of ours, Rabbi & Mrs. Shmerel Katzen, who were shluchim in Pittsburgh, PA at the time, asked if I could make a detour and drop them off in Pittsburgh as well. I agreed to take all of them. As we were nearing Pittsburgh, on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a double tractor trailer truck passed us at high speed and the back trailer swayed into our lane and knocked our car right off the road. The truck kept on going and it seemed as if the driver wasn’t even aware of what he had done. Meanwhile our car rolled over and over and was totally demolished. Thank G-d, although we all had to go to the hospital to get checked out, the Katzens were only slightly hurt, but were treated and released, I almost wasn’t hurt at all, and Friedlander, the student, stayed over in the hospital for the weekend. I had immediately called the Rebbe’s office to inform the Rebbe what had happened and the Rebbe told the secretariat to call Rabbi Sholom Posner a”h to meet us at the hospital and help with whatever we needed. Rabbi Posner and Rabbi Kehos Weiss a”h came to the hospital and by that time the Katzens and I had been released so they offered that we would stay by them for Shabbos. We asked if we could stop by the junk yard to which the police had towed my car, so that we could pick up our suitcases and talis and tefillin. They agreed. When we got to the junkyard, and we all saw the condition of the car, Rabbi Posner exclaimed that it was good that they first came to the hospital and picked us up, for if they had first gone to the junkyard and seen the car, he would have gone to the morgue not the hospital, for he could not understand how we walked out of that totaled car. When we got to Rabbi Posner’s house, Rabbi Posner called the Rebbe’s office and informed the Rebbe that we were fine. After Shabbos the Rebbe gave out a directive to the entire chassidic community that we should cease driving inter-city at night. We then found out that what brought that directive about was that on that same night of our accident there were two other serious accidents as well. One was a van load of campers from Gan Israel of Montreal who were in a serious accident, and the other was a car of Chabad chassidim in Israel were also in a very serious accident. Three major accidents in one night!
This directive made for a major issue for Rabbi Meir Roness and his Tanya project. Reb Meir would send out, once a week several cars of bochurim to different towns and yeshivos (i.e. Lakewood, NJ and other such other places) to give Tanya shiurim (classes) in order to spread the study of chassidus beyond the Chabad community. In the summertime, Rabbi Roness would arrange dozens of cars throughout the week to go up to the various summer camps in the Catskills. These three accidents that brought on the Rebbe’s directive happened at the beginning of the summer. Reb Meir’s successful project could only continue with nighttime inter-city driving. Thus Rabbi Roness wrote in to the Rebbe, explaining the problem and asking for directions on how to proceed. The Rebbe then modified the directive and added that if it was absolutely necessary to drive long distances at night, then there should either be two drivers who switch over every hour or if it’s one driver he should stop every hour for a 5-10 minute stretch. This then became the operative rule in Chabad for nighttime long distance driving.
The next accident came about after I returned back home from a trip with my family and a group of university students to the Rebbe. I dropped off the family at our home in Oak Park, Michigan and then drove the students back to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. As I was already close to home, I came around a curve in the road where the light on the lamppost was missing, and hit a pothole that blew my tire and sent my car careening into the pole. The car was totaled and I broke several teeth and needed stitches in my face. When I got home in middle of the night, my wife was asleep so she didn’t see what I looked like. But when I got up in the morning and she saw my face she shrieked and asked what happened. I smiled and said “if you think I look bad, you should see what the pole I hit looks like.”
The next accident happened several years later. (Are you getting the feeling that I am accident prone?) In any case, it was the year that we opened the new Chabad House in Ann Arbor. I would spend Shabbos there with my family in order to help the new Chabad shliach, Rabbi Aharon Goldstein, get acclimated to university life. One Saturday night, as I was returning home with my family from Ann Arbor, I was actually just a few blocks away from home when a drunken teenage driver, who had escaped from a lunatic asylum and stolen his father’s car, ran a red light at 70 mph and slammed right into the front door on the passenger side, where my pregnant wife was sitting. Both cars were totaled and the other driver ran off. There were a lot of witnesses who told the police what happened. We were whisked off to the hospital. After making sure that my three oldest children who were with us were ok, I went back into the emergency room to see how my wife was doing. Since the impact was exactly where she was sitting, she got the brunt of the collision. She was in the beginning of the ninth month of pregnancy and the collision caused her a concussion and temporary amnesia. She was disoriented and she went into labor as well. Of course I called the Rebbe’s office immediately, for the Rebbe’s blessings that all should be well. Having received a blessing from the Rebbe, I was sure things would be well. B”H her labor that had started because of the accident stopped. This accident took place just before Pesach, so my mother a”h convinced us to change our plans and go to my parents for the holiday. We asked my wife’s obstetrician if it was advisable that she travel in her ninth month and her doctor actually encouraged it, as he couldn’t see how else she would be able to handle Pesach. So my wife went to New York, for a little TLC, right away, but I had to stay in Michigan until just before Pesach. Our daughter Chanie was born in New York on the 7th of Nisan. This particular accident had all the potential for a money making lawsuit to collect big bucks from insurance. I have a first cousin in New York who worked for the very same insurance company that carried both my auto insurance as well as the auto insurance of the car that hit us. So I was advised, and did so, to take a top lawyer who specialized in automobile accidents. My cousin told me that I was guaranteed to walk out with a minimum of $500,000 -- definitely a lot of money in those years. It took a number of years but it really looked like it was happening. My lawyer and cousin both recommended that I turn down a $250,000 settlement the insurance company offered. As we were coming close to the court date, and was really expecting the payout, my lawyer came under investigation by the IRS for tax evasion. In order to protect himself he burnt all his records, and my case literally went up in smoke. Never saw a penny from that accident. He ended up in jail and I felt that he had enough tzoros and I probably wouldn’t be able to get a penny out of him in any case, so I didn’t follow the advice of those who were pushing me to sue the lawyer. My wife was a bit upset, so I just said, “zol dos zein a kapora,” it should be a “sacrifice” – in exchange for something worse happening to us.
It wasn’t long until I saw openly how prophetic those words were. It was precisely at that time that my family made the move from Michigan to Alabama. As we were driving, in a brand new car, to Alabama and we were just outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, we hit a bump in the road, blew a tire, and the car turned over, rolling into the depressed place between the two parallel roadways. My wife and I with our seven children were able to get out of the totally wrecked car with the only damage to our bodies being one small barely bleeding scratch on our baby’s nose. When the state troopers drove up, one of them, a veteran officer, looked at the car and then looked at us. He asked, “you were all in that car?” I answered in the affirmative. He said, “Someone up there was surely looking out for you! I am a state trooper for over forty years and I have never seen an accident of this proportion that didn’t have any fatalities, and you guys are left with only a small scratch on the baby’s nose!?” And he shook his head in amazement. Neither I nor my wife were then sorry for the loss of our previous case. Thank G-d that was also the last of our auto accidents. Ironically my first and last accident was connected to a kapora. Perhaps a clear message that anything “negative” that happens to us in life should be put down as a kapora.
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