In Kroizer, the rock crusher met its match

The shuls in my neighborhood, like many other neighborhoods around the world, are now open. The murmur of davening has returned to the prayer-soaked buildings. And along with my gratitude for this return to almost-routine, I’m left wondering at the sudden silence outside my window, the window that watched a daily showdown for months.

The back of our apartment building spills out into a wadi. During the lockdown, the wadi and the hill abutting it provided a generous space for an outdoor minyan. The minyan wasn’t big, but it was reasonable: A group of socially distanced men and boys spread up and down the hill, supplemented by scattered daveners standing on their porches or by their windows.

The organizer, leader, and de facto chazzan of our minyan was a man I’ll call Kroizer — a wiry father and grandfather with a long, grizzled beard and raspy voice. He doesn’t look strong or tough in the typical sense, but there’s a certain mettle in the way he pushes forward, a rigid persistence in the way he takes everyone’s suggestions and then announces his own.

Kroizer faced many obstacles over the months holding his outdoor minyan. The weather didn’t always cooperate. One rainy Pesach morning I watched the minyan’s two tall, elegant Kohanim with their neatly curled peyos gingerly position shopping bags under their stockinged feet so they wouldn’t get wet, as Kroizer shifted his ShayneCoat over his head and kept belting out his chazaras hashatz. And there was at least one merciless heatwave that would have kept even the most hardened Sabra indoors, but not Kroizer, and not anyone who took part in his minyan.

The people weren’t always in agreement either: Some wanted to start earlier, some later. Certainly many might have preferred a more musical chazzan. Some had little patience for his long, hoarse, fervent L’sheim yichud preceding every night’s Sefiras Ha’omer. When he arranged a socially distanced Lag B’omer bonfire, the skeptics stayed home. Just a few of the faithful regulars showed up to watch him rock up and down in front of a disposable grill while a one-man-band with two amplifiers boomed the latest chassidish hits through the dark night.

But nothing posed as much opposition to Kroizer as the municipal plan — drafted years ago and put into motion months before the lockdown — to expand the highway facing the wadi. While a deadly pandemic brought the city, the country, even the world to a halt, a coterie of heavy-duty trucks kept up their labor on the road behind our wadi. It wasn’t reasonable, it wasn’t sane, it probably wasn’t even legal — but every single morning, just as the sun hit the stone buildings over the hill, the trucks woke up from their slumber, lifted their cranes or shovels, and resumed the job they’d been sent to do: scraping away at the side of the mountain, unearthing piles of dirt and debris, and feeding the rocky results into a massive rock crusher.

It was the rock crusher that was Kroizer’s real nemesis. The huge, hungry machine growled in a monotone as it crumbled its rocky diet into bits, and it kept roaring as it spit the pulverized gravel into the waiting receptacle. The noise filled the entire wadi and rattled our windows. It overpowered any conversation or music inside our homes. It snatched away our peace and stole our sleep.

But in Kroizer, the rock crusher met its match.

It’s been weeks since the backyard minyan has disbanded. The roadwork has advanced and the rock crusher is no doubt disturbing the sleep of some neighbors who live farther up the hill. But those neighbors will never hear the notes of submission that we heard in its growl every morning. They will never know the drama of that epic daily showdown.

No one I know can scream over a rock crusher for more than a few minutes. No one I know can summon the power to do it day after day in the blazing sun or stinging rain. But this I know, because I watched it myself: Morning after morning, that rock crusher tried to drown out the minyan, and by miracle or grit or the sheer unmusical force of a raspy voice, Kroizer managed to win every time.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 815)