After a week of drama, outrage, and poisonous name-calling, the cancellation of the concert might have been the most peaceful conclusion. But it was also the saddest
ast week, as I watched the Ezra LeMarpeh concert overtake the headlines, I kept thinking of a single story retold in Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau’s Out of the Depths. The story occurred during the years that the orphaned Yisrael Meir lived with his uncle and aunt, the Vogelmans, in Kiryat Motzkin, a little town bordering on Haifa.
As he remembers it, he was around 12 years old when the local bus line inaugurated a new Shabbos route that would run from secular Haifa to the beach, via Kiryat Motzkin. Rabbi Mordechai Vogelman was broken by the thought of a bus running through his neighborhood on Shabbos. But what could a single religious rabbi do to halt the secular establishment from rumbling roughshod through his enclave of tradition?
This is what he did: That first Shabbos, Rabbi Vogelman led his kehillah outside of shul when the leining concluded. As bus number 52 approached, he removed his tallis and spread it on the street. The rest of the men followed suit — as Rabbi Lau remembers, they carpeted the avenue with talleisim “until not an inch of asphalt was visible.”
The bus driver braked and got off the bus. He approached Rabbi Vogelman, shaking visibly, and said, “Why is kevod haRav doing this to me? Am I not a Jew? How can I run over a tallis?”
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