Shelby N. is standing next to her car, a luxury behemoth of a car, the kind that is advertised, inexplicably, in the pages of The New Yorker, with the Charles Schwab and the Pratek Philippe and the Mandarin Oriental ads. ( I have read The New Yorker for years and yet I still marvel at how little its advertisers seems to know about me. ) I think it’s a Jaguar. She’s got that chemically straightened hair and she’s wearing those sheepskin boots and a big down coat and the sky is slate gray and spitting at us with contempt. It’s not a day and its certainly not a good time to stand next to your car in the middle of the rotary at Memorial Drive and the BU bridge. She’s getting splashed by other cars, five-thirty in the evening, merging and weaving in an endless circle. It’s nearly dark and she forgot to put her hazards on, and she’s talking on her phone (I see her nails, immaculate orange, clutching her phone, they’re almost the only part of her I can see in the wintry dark) and I can’t see what’s wrong with her car but obviously something, because why else would she be standing there, gesturing madly, in the sleet, next to an enormous puddle.
Who knows how I recognize her at all? I haven’t seen her for thirteen years. I’ve thought of her sometimes, since college. I have thought of her with bile and malice and bitterness and regret. She was awful to me -- who knows why? -- one year in school. The people who assigned roommates had been mistaken. We could not live together, she and I. By the end of the year I shrank from her, I skulked so as to avoid her, I found a boyfriend I could spend the nights with so I did not have to hear her, see her, be tormented by her.
Of course I recognize her. The mind remembers danger, right? She looms out of the darkness at me, and I know her at once, and I knot up in fear and catch my breath and remember I am safe and warm in my own car, and I can drive right on by and leave that bogey in my past.
I can’t, though. I mean, I can, of course, but I may not. I am commanded not to. Stop, says my God and the God of my people. Stop and help your enemy raise her ox, which has fallen under the weight of its burden.
That’s what mishpatim says.
*****
It doesn’t say I have to be gracious about it. It was Jesus who is best known for saying we must love not merely our neighbors -- which is difficult enough, God knows -- not just our neighbors, but our enemies too. Not that Christians have a monopoly on loving their enemies. I remember a story about a Jewish man who befriended, somehow, I forget how, a grand poobah of the KKK after said person tried to pipe-bomb his house or something equally terrible. I think the poobah got reformed and when he became fatally ill was cared for by the Jewish man and his wife, in their home, until he died. It sounds like I read that in one of those Chicken Soup books, but I didn’t -- the book I read it in had a much more tasteful cover, and was much more scholarly in tone. Chicken Soup for the Cultural Snob’s Soul. But there wasn’t any talk of chicken. Chicken is not scholarly and it is not advertised in The New Yorker.
Anyway, God commands me to stop, in the sleet, in the dark, with my dandruffy hair and my Target boots and my cheap dye job ( Natural Instincts, if you must know) and my ragged nails ( did you know you can superglue a nail together so it doesn’t tear entirely off after you have chopped it up while making dinner? ) and my station wagon with a piece of the front bumper missing and the plastic in one of the rear lights broken, to pause my own life and to bring my 18-year-old self, shrinking or no, right along with me stopping up behind the Jag and putting my own hazard lights on and getting out of my own safe cocoon and stepping into reach and asking “Can I help you?” with what I hope is a sympathetic smile.
God doesn’t tell me what has to happen after that. That depends on Shelby, right? Maybe Shelby needs my help, and she has her son in the backseat, and some groceries, including ice cream, and maybe he’s autistic, her son, and perhaps I loan her my car to take him home in and I stand there myself, waiting for the tow truck, so her autistic son can be safe at home eating ice cream.
Maybe Shelby does not need my help, and moreover does not recognize me, and she is bewildered that I have stopped and a little irritated at my odd solicitude, some people are so weird, and she waves me on without a word, with just her eyebrows.
Maybe instead the tow truck comes as I am asking if she needs any help and she could get a ride with the tow truck guy or I could drive her home instead, and she’s alone, no son with special needs, and she does remember me, of course, come in for tea, why don’t you, I’ve always felt I was not quite fair to you that year, that I made your life more difficult than it ought to have been. I’m so glad to see you again and tell you so.
God and Mishpatim are silent on what happens next. Never mind. What would be the fun of living if we knew how it all would turn out, the raising of our enemy’s ox? God breathes it all in motion and builds a web of rules, like the best damn game theorist you ever saw, and waits to see if we can listen, if we can hear and can obey. If I stop my car that day, God wins. I was commanded, and I obeyed. Do I win too? Can that ever turn out bad for me, that question, “Can I help you?” I could spin some horror story endings, something snopes would warn about. If it all goes south from there on out, should I have listened and obeyed?
I think so, yes. That’s Bitachon, or trust in God. The moment I stop, the moment I ask, God and I have won together, whatever happens next. A piece of the world has been repaired.
****
To be honest, I don’t get much else from mishpatim. Such a faraway land, such a strange people, a trembling mountain, Moses dashing blood upon the men of Israel, gathered together at the base of the thundering mount. Such alien laws. I am embarrassed to confront the rules on slaves and how to free them properly. You can take your proper bride price and the penalties for raping a virgin and you can shove them up your neighbor’s ox’s butt. I have no fields to let lie fallow in the seventh year, and I know of no one, Jew or otherwise, who does not believe in making loans with interest. Clearly that’s one the Rabbis have driven several trucks of loopholes through.
Still. Here is an ancient scroll, from an alien people. It purports to tell me of my god and what God wants of me. Maybe it tells me other stuff too, stuff that isn’t really about God at all. That happens. I don’t know for sure.
But I do know what I must do if I see Shelby N. and her broke-down Jag in the sleet on a February afternoon. And perhaps that’s quite a lot indeed, from mishpatim.
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