Last Thursday morning—right after the first two days of Sukkot—I went downstairs with my daughter, ready to head to the office. I walked to the spot where I knew I had parked just before yom tov, but lo and behold, the car wasn’t there.
Now, in our household, that’s not entirely unusual. We’re multiple people sharing a single vehicle. Sometimes my wife parks it, sometimes I do, and sometimes it's my daughter. We even have a dedicated WhatsApp group called “Where is the car?” and whoever parks it last is supposed to update the group.
So I called my wife.
“Did you move the car before yom tov?”
“Nope,” she said, “You were the last one to park it.”
I’ll admit, I can be a little absent-minded sometimes, and it’s possible I parked one block over.
I walked up 1st Ave, no car.
Down 2nd Ave, still nothing.
I circled the block twice. Gone.
I zigzagged back and forth to all the possible spots I would ever park the car, and nothing!
I called 311, in case it had been towed. They asked for my license plate number, which, of course, I’d forgotten. So I had to call my wife again (thank G-d one of us is organized!), but after checking, 311 said there was no record of any towing.
At this point, I started to worry. Could it have been stolen?
I called the police, who ran the plates and reported back: “It wasn’t stolen. It was repossessed.”
I found myself completely speechless.
Repossessed? How could it be?!
It turns out the car—our leased Honda—had been repossessed because we hadn’t paid the bills … for over a year!
Now, I am meticulous with bills. I thought everything was being paid by my secretary, but somehow, the lease invoices were sent to her, and for some reason she had ignored them. Honda even called multiple times, and again it was ignored.
To get the car back, I had to pay off the entire lease—$42,159—in one check. There was no way around it. Otherwise, my credit would be destroyed for years.
Frustrated doesn’t even come close to how I was feeling. This was next level! I had to get hold of the 42k and then go personally to the bank and get a bank check.
But there was no way around it. So off I went to the bank, all the while wondering how on earth this could have happened.
As of today, we still don’t have the car back.
But it’s been a good reminder that we are not in control, even though we often think we are! G-d and G-d alone runs every facet of our lives. For some reason, He wanted my minivan to be repossessed. And, since the Baal Shem Tov taught that we should seek a lesson in every experience and encounter, I’ve been wracking my brain. What that lesson is, I have no idea. Maybe it was to write this blog and inspire someone reading it!
But in Yiddish, there’s a beautiful saying: “Zol zayn a kapporah” — may it be an atonement. Maybe something far worse was supposed to happen, and G-d, in His kindness, decided to take it out on the car instead.
So should I get angry? Lose sleep? Take it out on my secretary? No way.
Clearly, G-d had some reason for wanting all those payments to go missed and all the phone calls ignored. This is Him showing us that He is in control and everything happens because He wills it—something we need to make a conscious effort to ingrain into every fiber of our being.
And after all: If G-d took the car, then He can give it back! And until then, I’ll just thank Him for trading a crisis for a car.