If I didn't know it before, coffee with Kareem taught me one thing: Hashem incontrovertibly runs the world — often in unexpected ways

IT

all began with a breakdown. On a Tuesday night a few weeks ago, my superannuated car went to sleep in the lovely village of Shefer, near Tzfas, in relatively good health. On Wednesday morning, it woke up with the mechanical equivalent of whooping cough.

The wheezy rattle that the car produced would have worried a pulmonary specialist. It certainly worried me, especially as it was day two of a two-day vacation.

Israelis are handy beings, so I asked Noam, my gracious Airbnb host for some help. Noam thought that the problem was the fan belt, but he sent me on to Itzik a bit further up the hill for a second opinion. Itzik detected trouble with the alternator.

“Go to Kareem,” he said of an Arab mechanic a few miles away. “He’s very honest and can help you.”

So, off I trundled to Rameh, the Arab town in question, for my rendezvous with the mechanic. As I nursed the car through the beautiful hills, it occurred to me that it was turning out to be quite the mechanical summer. I had run out of gas once; lost my air conditioning system a few weeks later; and now possibly totaled an engine.

Uncharitable souls might call me mechanically challenged. I, on the other hand, think that my auto drama is nothing to do with failure to check oil and coolant levels — it’s because my cars exist to teach humankind valuable life lessons.

Like the goodness of Jews like Eli Petrol. That’s obviously not his real name. But that’s how he’s saved in my phone — the quiet man who stepped up to fill my gas tank when all seemed lost.

A comedy of errors found me stranded a few months ago at a gas station late at night with a car full of children and a heart draining of hope.

Admittedly, there’s an element of criminal negligence in setting out on the highway with an empty fuel tank and with neither cash nor credit cards, nor battery power for payment apps.

Anyway, there I was, stuck. The pump attendants couldn’t care less, but Eli Petrol could. Out of the dark, this emissary of Eliyahu Hanavi rode to the rescue. He paid for my gas and vanished, trusting me to pay him later. (In case you were wondering, I did.)

Lesson #1: Even in an era when different-looking Jews look at each other with suspicion, never discount the goodness of the Jewish heart.

Back to my breakdown, there’s something curiously medical about the experience of watching your car being treated by a mechanic. The whole scene is akin to a particularly oily operating theater. The patient is opened, innards on display as the surgeon pokes around, trying to locate the trouble while avoiding damage to the vital organs.

Funnily enough, mechanics actually use an auto stethoscope to diagnose strange inward noises like the one my car was making. It’s literally the version you see around the doctor’s neck plus a needle on the end.

That’s what I learned when sitting in Kareem’s garage. The latter — a Christian Arab mechanic in a Galilee town whose Arab residents live peaceably alongside their Jewish neighbors — gave me a warm welcome, and opened up his workshop with all the hospitality of a desert chief.

As Kareem’s prognosis progressed, you might have measured my reaction on an ECG. When he looked concerned, my heart plummeted. When he exclaimed in satisfaction, my heart rose. Up, down, up, down — hours of cardiac vacillation while my car was suspended in auto-medical traction.

It was the espresso that made me laugh, though. Midway through the morning, Kareem took a break for the traditional Arab coffee. Ever the gracious host, he offered me some.

As I pondered how to elegantly sidestep, the sheer cosmic unlikeliness of the whole situation struck me. What cascade of events had drawn me to this pinprick on the map, to while away my vacation with people I’d never see again?

Who could have predicted that I’d spend half a day of my life being served creamy espresso by an Arab mechanic by the name of Kareem?

If I didn’t know it before, coffee with Kareem taught me one thing: Hashem incontrovertibly runs the world — often in unexpected ways. Only the iron Hand of Hashem explains the bizarreness of so many of our encounters. So much of what we do has neither apparent rhyme nor reason — except as a lesson in that ultimate of Rosh Hashanah themes, that Hashem runs the world.

Sitting in Kareem’s garage, my mind wondered to another embarrassing episode of motoring malfeasance on my part. Years ago, I drove my first car up from Yerushalayim to Tzfas. As far as I was concerned back then, the only liquid that a car required was fuel — checking the oil was a foreign concept.

So, when a warning light came on halfway up the Route 6 highway, I treated it as some pesky distraction designed by overzealous Japanese engineers to annoy honest motorists.

It was to my great surprise, that the little red light turned into something bigger. On the ascent to Tzfas, the little car gradually grew sluggish and then lost power. Emitting a cloud of white smoke that would have made the Vatican proud, the engine gave up the ghost.

There I was, stranded in (another) little village near Tzfas with young children and no car.

Then came the strangest part. Sitting that night in the moshav shul full of hard-working farmers, I listened in as the maggid shiur spoke about me and my car.

“Imagine a man who’s driving, and a dashboard light comes on together with a beeping noise,” he began. “Beep, beep, blink, blink,” it goes.

“Distracted by the noise, the man goes to the mechanic. ‘Can you get rid of the beeping and blinking?’ he demands.

“ ‘But the noise is because there’s an underlying problem,’ the mechanic tries to explain.

“ ‘Don’t give me excuses,’ the man interrupts, ‘I just want the noise gone!’

“So, the mechanic disconnects the warning system, and the noise is gone — together with the engine, when the car overheats a few days later.

“That’s how it is with us,” explained the maggid shiur. “Hashem sends us warnings to correct course — money, health, other blinking lights come on in our lives.

“Yet instead of dealing with the underlying issue — that Hashem wants us to change — we try to get rid of the annoying light, the health or financial problem.”

I don’t know what the room full farmers made of his homily — after all, I doubt that John Deeres are as prone to mishaps as old Toyotas. But it’s one pre-Elul lesson that this maladroit motorist is unlikely to forget.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1078)