The following story is taken from the book The
Director, published by ArtScroll.
In the Middle of the Night
Aside from the standard bedtime prayers, there is a custom to
recite certain verses and psalms before going to sleep. One
of these paragraphs is the beautiful chapter of Tehillim
beginning with the words "Yoshev beseser," a
chapter which describes the security and confidence one can
have in Hashem even in times of great danger. A recurring
theme in the chapter is that of being under the shelter of
Hashem; "I will say of Hashem, `He is my shelter and
fortress,' " and "beneath His wings you will be protected."
Seldom do we stop to think of the implications of this
idea.
The following story was told to me by its protagonist, who
today lives in Atlanta, Georgia. It is an incident that he
will never forget, and one that drove home to him this
concept of "dwelling under the shelter of the Most High."
*
Just another springtime thunderstorm, thought Eli Melamed as
he crawled exhaustedly into his bed. In the distance he could
hear the thunder rumbling ominously as the storm approached,
but it was not enough to keep him from his slumber. The week
preceding Pesach is never a relaxing time in the average
Jewish household, and for the 20-year-old student, this year
was no exception. Since his family's move to the leafy
northern suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, it had been an uphill
battle for the young man to adjust to life without the help
of the two or three maids and servants he had become
accustomed to in South Africa. Now, two days before the
Festival of Freedom, he was feeling the effects of this
reality, having been drafted into his mother's Pesach
cleaning corps for the duration of the week. As Eli slept
peacefully, the storm was rousing itself on the horizon.
It was a loud "clunk" on the roof which woke Eli in the early
hours of the morning, and when he opened his eyes, the first
thing he noticed was how the garden appeared to be
permanently lit by successive bolts of lightning. Thunder
boomed across the city and the wind howled dementedly through
the tall Atlanta trees, driving torrents of rain against the
windows of his room. After a moment of soporific
deliberation, Eli hopped anxiously out of bed with the
intention of informing his father of the unusual sound that
had woken him. As he reached the door leading from his room
into the hallway, a massive crashing, splintering sound
ripped through his room behind him. Without looking back, he
fled into the hall.
As Eli had slept peacefully, he had been blissfully unaware
of the fact that one of the worst tornado systems in modern
times was tearing through the United States. The same weather
system that pummeled his home had raged across the
southeastern section of the country, wreaking havoc and
destruction throughout the states of Alabama, Mississippi,
and Georgia. A long line of angry squalls accompanied by
violent winds and baseball-sized hailstones lashed the
countryside, overturning trucks and cars, uprooting trees,
and reducing houses to pitiful heaps of rubble. When daylight
eventually arrived, a horrific scene greeted the eyes of
rescue workers and residents alike.
The worst damage occurred just west of Birmingham, Alabama,
where a twister carved out a path a half-mile wide and 21
miles long, killing at least thirty people. Weather officials
later confirmed that the twister had registered F-5 on the
Fujita scale for measuring tornadoes, on which F-0 is the
least intense and F-5 the most destructive. An F-5 tornado is
very rare and carries winds in excess of 260 miles an
hour.
After ripping its way through Alabama and Mississippi, the
storm approached Georgia. An emergency worker who watched the
wind overturn a woman's car in Cobb County later compared the
scene to the aftermath of a massive bomb-blast. Deaths and
damage occurred in widely scattered areas in Georgia,
including Savannah in the southeastern part of the state and
the northern suburbs of Atlanta more than 200 miles away.
When the final damage was tallied Thursday morning, it became
apparent that the storm had claimed some 43 lives in the
three states. Nearly 200 people were injured and over 2000
homes and businesses were either damaged or destroyed.
Georgia had lost ten of its residents, two of them in the
small suburb of Dunwoody.
Back in Dunwoody, Eli was standing in the hallway of his
home, too bewildered to move, unsure of what to make of the
thunderous noise which had moments before ripped through his
room. When he finally dragged his sluggish mind out of what
seemed to be a bizarre dream, he glanced at his watch, which
showed that it was 1:30, and then continued down the hall to
his father's room. Together, father and son cautiously
approached Eli's room to assess what had indeed occurred.
They were greeted by a horrific sight. The room was
unrecognizable. A massive, horizontal tree filled the entire
room, with leaves and branches poking in all directions. Rain
was pouring in and was gathering in small pools on the floor.
Then their eyes came to rest on a terrifying sight, and both
Eli and his father let out an audible gasp. The tree had come
crashing through the roof, knocking down a section of the
wall with it. Somehow the wall had slowed the tree's fall,
and the massive trunk had come to a halt millimeters above
the bed in which Eli had been sleeping moments earlier!
It was only when the storm abated and the first glimmers of
dawn lit the garden that they were able to assess the extent
of the damage. Outside, they found eleven other trees which
had fallen toward the house domino-style, apparently causing
the final tree to crash down onto Eli's bed. They also
observed that the twelfth tree, Eli's tree, had been embedded
in three feet of cement, which may very well have slowed its
fall, allowing Eli enough time to move away from the bed and
his room. Moreover, had the small branch not fallen onto the
roof moments before the tree did, Eli would most certainly
have been just another statistic of one of America's worst
storms.
The next morning, the Melamed family set about kashering
their kitchen for Pesach by means of a gas burner, the
electricity lines having been severed by the falling trees.
Fortunately, some good friends heard what had happened and
invited the family not only for the Sedarim but for the
entire Pesach week. As he sat the next night around the Seder
table relieved and thankful, Eli was able to raise the four
cups of wine with an entirely fresh perspective on the
miraculous salvation that his forefathers had experienced in
the middle of the night.
