Near a Tzaddik

The organization he works with goes by a name familiar from tefilla, suggesting that the group’s aim is to care for the needy, imitating God.

Sagi was our contact. He agreed to come on a Tuesday to pick up a bag of dishes and cutlery, a desk, and a large bookcase. Nothing else was left in the apartment we had just moved out of.

Sagi was expected at 11. At 1 PM we WhatsApped him. “Sorry,” he replied, in English. “I am in the emergency room.”

Hearing nothing further, we contacted him the next morning. He said he would come at noon.

About 1:30 he drove up in a truck that had seen better days. Sagi was on the phone as he exited the truck. I looked at the truck’s side while he kept talking. There was a sticker for “The Party of the Heart of the People.”

Author photo/illustration

These days a party that calls for unity and love does not generate big numbers.

Next to this was a photo of a young man in uniform. The dates next to his picture showed that he passed away in 2023.

“Hello, sorry,” said Sagi, shutting his phone. “Another call for a pickup tomorrow.”

Inside, I showed him what he needed to take away. He nodded, seeing no problem.

Sagi is a wiry man, perhaps 50. He wore jeans and a cutoff T-shirt. Tattoos festooned his upper arms and forearms. His graying hair was fastened in a flowing ponytail.

“We help people,” he said, referring to the organization. “Some are homeless, but not all. We give them whatever they need: food, clothes, furniture.  All at no cost to them.”

“And how do you live yourself?” I asked.

“I am a nacheh Tzahal,” he said, a disabled IDF veteran. “I get a monthly pension. 40% goes to tzedakah and I live on the rest.”

“This storage bookcase is very heavy,” I said. “Will you need any help?”

Sagi shook his head. “You stand and watch,” he said.

Author photo

I knew just how heavy and bulky the bookcase was. I had picked it up second-hand with my son-in-law, who did all the heavy lifting. After he took it apart, the two of us schlepped heavy boards to his car. Reassembly was an ordeal. And this medium-sized fellow was going to move it alone?

“The man whose picture is on your truck….” I started to ask.

“My cousin,” he said. “He died in a kibbutz in the otef on October 7^th.

I murmured my sympathy.

“Another cousin was killed the same day in a different kibbutz,” he said. “He was an infantry commander.

“In my opinion,” Sagi said, “everything comes from God, the good and the bad. God decrees everything. Our job is to do what we can to live with God’s decisions even if we don’t understand them.”

I tend to react to unsolicited declarations of piety with detached skepticism. In this moment, however, that stance felt wrong. Sagi spoke with artless sincerity, his appearance and manner were plain and unaffected. He seemed to be talking as much to himself as to me. Given how he spends his time, he walks his own talk daily.

Sagi stared at the storage bookcase, rubbing his chin. Then he went out to his truck and brought back a worn wooden board to use as a conveyance pallet. He rocked the bookcase to one side, slid the board under it, and set them both upright.

Then he took some ratty-looking ropes and started to fasten the bookcase to the board. He tied knots, redid some, added more ropes. He then made ready to pull the bookcase out into the street.

“Sagi,” I said. “How do you know how to move everything by yourself, for all the different things people ask you to pick up?”

“From my father,” he said. “At our house we never had a handyman. Dad did it all and showed us how.”

“What was your father’s work?” I asked.

“He was in the secret service,” he said. “Before that, the police.”

With that Sagi bent over, leaned the bookcase on his back, and dragged it out the door. As he pulled it down the four steps to the building entrance, the board slammed against each step with a sharp report, rather like a gunshot. A neighbor opened her door in alarm. Sagi smiled to reassure her.

Many Jerusalem paths are not level. Once he was headed to the street, Sagi let the bookcase rest on the board and pulled it out, bump by bump, to the street. By some miracle, there was an open parking space behind his truck.

Sagi opened the truck’s rear doors and looked inside. After a few moments of thought, he fished out an old green broomstick and a round piece of wood. He then jimmied the broomstick under the pallet, slid the wood under the broom as a fulcrum, and moved back to increase leverage.  Then he started to lever the bookcase up and toward the back of the truck. Archimedes would have been delighted.

The top of the bookcase tilted closer and closer—until Sagi saw that it wouldn’t clear the truck’s roof. He was off by a few centimeters. “I knew it,” he mumbled to himself.

Bracing the bookcase, Sagi looked to his right. Just then a neighbor, a portly Chabadnik with tzitzit as long and broad as he was, came out onto the sidewalk.

“Achi, efshar la’azor?” Sagi called to him. Bro, lend a hand?

The Chabadnik walked to the side of the bookcase opposite Sagi.  Together they slowly lowered the bookcase down sideways until its top could clear the truck’s roof and fit inside. The two of them shoved it in.

A Hasid with tzitzit flying on one side of the bookcase; a secular Jew with tattoos and a ponytail on the other, working together. An arresting image that might tempt a viewer to infer some broad social message. Temptations are best resisted.

Still, it was a very Israeli moment. Sagi’s improvising–having a general idea of what to do but not figuring out the details till the last second. His turn to a complete stranger for instant help, expecting to get it. Try that in the US and the stranger would text his personal-injury attorney.

When they were done, the Chabadnik did not just walk away. He helped Sagi load our desk onto the truck.

Sagi and I walked back inside.  “How was your emergency room visit?” I asked.

“They recommended back surgery,” he said, “but I refused. Too dangerous.”

Back surgery?!! I asked myself, staring at the slender man who had just dragged a huge piece of furniture on his own back.

“May I wash my hands?” asked Sagi.

“Of course, “I said.  “You’re not going to agree with me,” I said, “but I think you are a tzaddik.”

He demurred, of course. “I don’t think so,” he said quietly, “What I try to do is get near a tzaddik, so I can keep learning how to help people better.”

I walked with him to the door and thanked him as he left.

Near a tzaddik sounded like a good place.  I’d just been there myself.