Photos: Menachem Kalish

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riving with an empty seat is an aveirah,” my father used to say.

In Eretz Yisrael 30 years ago, not many people had cars, and public transportation wasn’t very reliable. My father, an elderly European Yid who moved from America to Eretz Yisrael at the end of his life, loved doing chesed, to the extent that he couldn’t bear to drive without giving someone a ride. Each time he drove out of our Yerushalayim neighborhood, he would stop at bus stops and fill his car with passengers, whom he would then chauffeur to their respective destinations.

One morning, my father stopped at a bus stop near our neighborhood and picked up a nonreligious woman who had recently made aliyah from California with her family. She was on her way downtown, and my father graciously offered to take her right to her destination.

“I just have to make a quick stop,” he said.

Not wanting to lose his mitzvah, he decided to deposit his treasured passenger at my home, which was near where he had to go. My wife, Sarah, was the only one home at the time, and she was none too pleased to find herself having to host and entertain a total stranger off the street. “I’ll be right back to pick her up,” my father told my wife. “Just hold on to her for a few minutes.”

“I had a whole to-do list planned for the morning,” Sarah later complained to me. “But what was I supposed to do?”

My father, kind soul that he was, had no concept of time. His “few minutes” turned out to be two full hours. Sarah wasn’t the only one who was annoyed — the passenger, whose name was Lauren Egerwood, was, too. Apparently, however, she wasn’t in that much of a rush to go downtown, because she stuck around to schmooze with Sarah until my father returned, at which point he apologized profusely for the lengthy delay.

“Doing chesed is my yetzer hara,” my father confided to Sarah. “I just can’t resist an opportunity to give someone a ride.”

During the two hours in which she hosted Lauren, Sarah had no choice but to be polite and make conversation. She learned that Lauren’s husband was a military engineer who, after working in the US Army for years, had been offered a similar position in the IDF, which he accepted.

Lauren herself had graduated with honors from a prestigious university, and although she had received no Jewish education, she had a warm place in her heart for Yiddishkeit. “I grew up completely secular,” she shared with Sarah that morning, “but whenever I hear about a Jewish practice, I take it on. In university, I started lighting candles Friday night, and back home I used to buy Manischewitz matzah for Passover.”

Lauren then told Sarah an interesting, if tragic, anecdote. “My mother was very ill some years back, and it seemed as though she was going to die. As her deathbed wish, she asked me to abandon the religious observances I had taken on, because she was afraid those practices would stop me from getting married. ‘A religious fellow won’t marry you because you’re not religious,’ she explained, ‘and a nonreligious fellow will get scared off by this religious stuff. So please drop it, okay?’ ”

“That’s a Yiddishe mama,” Sarah commented when she recounted the story to me. “No matter how secular she might be, her thought on her deathbed is finding a shidduch for her daughter.”

Lauren’s mother recovered from her illness, to everyone’s surprise, but Lauren could not bring herself to honor her mother’s erstwhile deathbed request. But she did manage to marry a man who was a secular Jewish mother’s dream: a high-earning, well-educated professional.

Seeing that Lauren was interested in learning more about Yiddishkeit, Sarah invited her and her family for a seudah that Shabbos. (Excerpted from Mishpacha, Issue 718)