Paroled by G-d

The court case for my car accident last year was called for Lag B’Omer, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s yahrtzeit (anniversary of death). I’d been somewhat stressing over it for 10 months already, as I could lose my license, or get it suspended for months, or end up paying a ton of cash (and also, at least technically, get sent to prison).
 
Well dear reader, Hashem did a lot of miracles for me. Miracle one is that I really, really wanted to get to Meron for Lag B’Omer this year, but I couldn’t swing it. All the places were booked up for staying there, and I couldn’t risk driving up and back on the day itself, in case I got stuck in traffic and would miss my court appearance.
 
Two weeks before Lag B’Omer when I realized all this, I said a small prayer, and asked G-d to get me to Meron somehow.
 
The week before Lag B’Omer, I get a phone call from a friend who has a friend in very high places in the Beersheva Court system: I could come in and settle my case by talking to a lawyer. I didn’t have to appear in court after all. But that wasn’t all, the meeting was set for Pesach Sheni, three days before Lag B’Omer, which meant that I could get to Meron after all.
 
Pesach Sheni is an auspicious time for a Jew. It’s a time when G-d gives us a second chance, and that’s really how I felt as I drove down to Beersheva, to see the lawyer. I’d been prepped by my friend to bargain and haggle over whatever sentence they were going to give me, but I’d already decided in my heart that I was going to accept whatever they doled out, because it came from G-d. And me and G-d had been having big discussions about all the different ways I needed to clean up my act for months already.
 
G-d had made it clear that I needed to be more humble; that I needed to be more grateful; that I needed to stop holding grudges, and to forgive people; that I should stop all the mental speculation and circular thinking, and literally turn my brain off whenever I started thinking about the flaws of anyone other than myself (or my husband ☺).
 
G-d was dealing me a tough set of parole conditions, but I’ve been doing my best to abide by them, as I’ll probably write about in more detail elsewhere. For now, suffice to say that I’d made as much teshuva as I could, and whatever the court in Beersheva decided, so be it.
 
Being British, I got to Beersheva a full hour ahead of my appointment, which was very useful, because being Israeli, the address we’d been given for the meeting didn’t seem to exist. We went up and down the very long street five times before I had a brainwave and decided to pull into the local police station, to ask them where the place was that I needed to get to.
 
Wouldn’t you know it: it was the police station.
 
We parked, we spent twenty minutes going down a bunch of dead end streets, and trying to get in by the wrong doors (who knew that the nicely landscaped front entrance was just for show?) until finally, we made it in, 20 minutes late.
 
Often, when G-d is going to do a big miracle for you, He wraps it up in a bunch of very annoying, but otherwise meaningless obstacles and problems, and so it was here.
 
The nice lawyer lady invited me in; wrote some stuff down; asked me if I had anything to say for myself, and this is what I told her, in my rubbish Hebrew:
 
“It’s the first time I ever had an accident. I’m very sorry it happened. Whatever you decide to give me, it’s good for me, because it’s all coming from Shamayim (Heaven).”
 
The obviously not-religious lawyer lady cracked up, and then started writing something. A minute later, she told me she wasn’t suspending my license, and she was giving me the smallest fine she could get away with – the one they usually hand out to soldiers.
 
“But you have to be on best behavior for the next two years,” she told me. I got the message: in Hebrew, the verb used for driving and the word used for conducting yourself properly come from the same root-word: linhog. She was telling me to drive safely, but G-d was telling me to keep working on the humility and the gratitude, and to not just slip back into arrogant mode, now the court case was behind me.