Mezuzot and miracles

'Tis the season, and all...

DYK Torah Journal just posted an article called “The Mezuzah’s protective field”, which made me think about something that happened to me almost 30 years ago.

In 1996, I was living in a cruddy apartment in Washington Heights, on the 6th floor. It was the kind of apartment that had four rooms, a hallway, a kitchen, and a bathroom. No communal living space. It was like a mini-tenement.

A guy was renting the whole place and subletting the other three rooms. He was Jewish, though no longer religious. The other two were (I think) non-Jews.

The kitchen had an adjoining door to the room of a girl named Stacy. That was the only way into her room.

I was eating Shabbat dinner by myself in the kitchen, when I heard the tinkling of glass breaking in Stacy’s room. Without really thinking about it, my brain registered “Stacy’s home”.

About 5 minutes later, I heard some kids outside yell “fire”. I turned to the side, towards Stacy’s room, and saw smoke coming out of the doorjamb.

One of the things they tell you not to do when there’s a fire is to open a door to it. But like I said, my brain had registered that Stacy was in there, so I slammed the door open. The entire room was filled with white smoke. I couldn’t see a thing. So I slammed the door closed again. And then hit myself, because if Stacy had been in there, obviously I wouldn’t have seen her through the smoke. So I slammed the door open again. This time...

Have you ever seen the movie Backdraft? It’s about firefighters and arson and such. And what I saw in that room looked like a special effect from Backdraft. A wall of flames. Apparently, the first time I opened the door, I’d fed it oxygen. Oops.

So I slammed the door shut again and ran to my room, which was on the opposite side of the kitchen from Stacy’s room, but through the hallway. And for what was probably the second time since I’d started keeping Shabbat, I grabbed the phone and called 911.

Yes, that’s another thing they say not to do in a fire. Don’t call from inside. What can I say? I was never great at following rules.

You know the joke, “911, please hold”? Well, the phone rang at least 6 times before they picked up. Finally, “911, can I help you?” I told her there was a fire in my apartment, and she took down all my information, address and such. And then said, no joke, “Hold please, I’m transfering you to the fire department.” Which she did, and they asked me for my address again. I started to give it, and then I heard a loud banging at the door to the apartment. So I said, “Hold on a second,” and put the phone down.

I ran to the front door, and there was a guy standing there. “You know there’s a fire?” he demanded. But I was busy. I said, “Yeah, I’m on with the fire department” and ran back to my room to give them the rest of my address. I finished that and ran back to the front door, where the guy’s jaw was still wide open at the stupidity he had just witnessed.

Then a stray thought hit me, which was that in a fire, you’re better off leaving your door open so that the room doesn’t contain the fire and so that the firefighters don’t have to chop it down. So I turned to run back and open my door, and the guy caught me by the arm. I think I had his fingerprints in my upper arm for the next week or so. At which point my brain woke up (a bit), and I went down the stairs with him.

I went outside the building, and watched as the apartment burned. So did everyone else on the street. I kept edging closer and closer to the building, because that was all my stuff in there, until finally, they assigned a policewoman to me to keep me back. I watched papers flying out of the windows, and my imagination ran overtime trying to think what they could be (they were from someone else’s room, it turned out).

Finally, the fire was out. And a fireman asked me if I wanted to go in and see if there was anything undamaged that I needed. I followed him up the 6 flights of stairs and went into the apartment. Everything smelled like wet ashes (funny that), and it was pitch black except for the fireman’s flashlight, because obviously the electricity was out. I went to my room, and he played the flashlight around a little. It was a mess, and not just the mess it usually was. But I couldn’t see a lot. I went and grabbed my meds, which I needed for the next day, since I obviously couldn’t go to a pharmacy on Saturday.

The fireman said, “Okay, let’s go,” and I said… “That’s okay. I’ll stay here.”

See, it had just occurred to me that there was no eruv. I wasn’t going to be able to take my meds out of the building. Hell, I wasn’t even sure I could take them out of the apartment.

The fireman said, “What?” like he couldn’t believe his ears, which was probably the case. I asked him, “Is the building in danger of collapsing?” He shook his head mutely. “So I can just hang out here until morning, okay?” After a few seconds of staring at the madwoman, he turned around and went downstairs. I started to look around for something I could sit on or lay on for the night.

A few minutes later, he was back, with two frum women from the neighborhood who I’d never met. He let them explain to me that I had to get the hell out of the building. I explained my eruv problem to them, and they looked at each other, and then told me I could put them in the mailbox downstairs. I explained to them that that was no solution, because I couldn’t take my mailbox key outside. They told me I could hide it inside the building.

Having run out of objections, I left with them. One of them invited me over to her apartment, where they’d just finished Friday night dinner. They offered me some leftovers when they found out I hadn’t had a chance to actually eat, gave me their daughter’s housecoat to sleep in (she was away), and I went to bed.

The next day, I went back to the apartment. The rest of the building was untouched. My apartment actually didn’t look as bad in the light of day as it had the previous night, but it was pretty bad. And yet. All of the damage in my room was fireman damage. It was firemen bursting in and breaking the window open, and running roughshod through my mess. There was a little bit of smoke damage, but that was all.

The layout of the apartment was, starting from the door, the subletting guy’s room, my room, the kitchen, Stacy’s room. And at the end of the hall, another guy’s room (it was his papers that I’d seen flying out the window). Every room was gutted. Except mine, which the fire had decided to skip over. “Pass” over, if you will. My room was also the only one with a mezuzah.

So I take mezuzahs fairly seriously.

Could it have been a coincidence? Of course. But as I said in my article on Israel and Amalek, that’s the defining difference between us and Amalek. They see the ordinary in the miraculous. While we see the miraculous in the ordinary.

As a postscript, because I like tying things up, even though it’s irrelevant to the point of this post, Sunday morning, I went to collect my stuff. The door to the apartment was locked. Apparently by the landlord. After simmering with anger for a little while, I decided the proper thing to do was to go over to the nearby hardware store and pick up a crowbar. So I collected my stuff anyway.

It turns out the fire was caused by an electrical fault in the walls. The tinkle of broken glass in Stacy’s room was probably a lightbulb shattering from the heat of the fire. The guy I’d been subletting from had taken a security deposit from me (presumably a quarter of the security deposit he’d paid to the landlord), and refused to give it back to me, claiming that the landlord hadn’t returned his. To this day, I think that was illegitimate, but then, all of his stuff had burned up, so how much could I fight?