My name is Shimon. I'm a father of four beautiful children, baruch Hashem. We live in a warm, friendly building with excellent neighbors in every respect, except for one small, nerve-wracking detail: our neighbors across the hall have a very different understanding of what it means to watch your children.
These neighbors have an especially energetic group of kids. Now, I have nothing against simchas chaim or healthy childhood energy, on the contrary, a happy child is a clear sign of good, healthy chinuch. But when one of the children decides that the narrow street in front of our building isn't just a road but a secret testing ground for hide-and-seek and tag, and chooses to stand in the middle of the lane just as the garbage truck driver is trying to remember where he left his coffee, my pulse shoots straight to 180 and my eyes nearly pop out of my head from sheer panic.
Every time I witnessed this terrifying scene through my living room window, my heart would sink. I would drop everything, grab the phone, dial their father and try to explain with deep concern: "Hello, this is Shimon. Your son just nearly went under the wheels of the garbage truck. Please, I'm begging you, bring him inside before it's too late."
At first, the father would still respond with some kind of human reaction: "Thank you very much, Shimon, I'm taking care of it." But as the days passed and the children's disgraceful habit of playing on the asphalt didn't change, his response became fixed, cold and particularly complacent: "It's fine, Shimon, everything's under control, we're keeping an eye on things."
"Keeping an eye on things?!" I wanted to shout into the phone so the whole neighborhood would hear. Your child is nearly examining the tire pressure of the truck up close, and you call that "keeping an eye on things"? What kind of supervision is that? I felt like I was hitting a wall of indifference. I tried to explain, tried to warn, but when the other side is sealed shut and relies on miracles as if it's a fixed line item in the state budget, there's no one to talk to.
I understood at that point that I had to let go of trying to educate him or change him. When there's no cooperation, there's no point in exhausting yourself with pointless conversations. I let him be, but I shifted to maximum alertness on my own end, at the level of a covert operation. Every screech of brakes on the street made me jump from my seat.
When I encountered his children, I decided to explain to them the magnitude of the danger. Without instilling fear in them and without describing what they would have had to scrape up, rachmana litzlan. I simply spoke to their hearts whenever there was an appropriate opportunity. But then, something happened that nearly knocked me over: their mother met me in the stairwell and said to me: "Thank you very much for your concern, but I'm asking you not to put fear into them, they're happy children and it's a shame to ruin that for them."
At that point I understood the situation was truly complicated. I understood that the parents genuinely didn't grasp what was happening. I simply let it go.
And then, something happened... something that put a definitive, absolute end to this whole story.
It was a Sunday afternoon, the sun about to set. I was standing on the mirpeses, and I saw their youngest son outside on the sidewalk playing with a ball.
Suddenly, the ball slipped from him, and after two bounces it rolled straight into the middle of the street. The child, without looking right, without looking left and without thinking twice, simply leaped after it between two parked cars, straight into the lane of an approaching vehicle. And who was driving that vehicle?
His own father, the indifferent neighbor himself.
It happened in a split second. The neighbor, who in no way expected the small figure to emerge from between the parked cars, caught sight of his own son right in front of him.
A terrible, blood-curdling screech of tires being dragged across the asphalt was heard in the street. His car swayed violently, locked up in a horrific jolt, and stopped, literally, literally, just a few centimeters from the child's body. In this case: his own son.
The car door swung wide open. The neighbor stepped out, trembling like a leaf in the wind, white as chalk. His heart was pounding like a hammer, and he stood there completely stunned. His knees buckled as he grasped the magnitude of the horror that had been averted at the last second: he himself, with his own hands, had nearly struck his son, who in another moment would have become a memory, rachmana litzlan.
I heard the screams and the heart-rending crying of the shocked child.
The father dropped to his knees, hugged his child with all his strength, and broke down crying from the depths of his soul. His false sense of calm and indifference shattered to pieces in a single second.
I didn't need to say a word.
From that day on, things changed completely. The complacency vanished as if it had never been. The neighbor didn't just start supervising with seven eyes, he immediately contacted the municipality, arranged for the installation of speed bumps on the street, and his children? They were no longer outside the building on "the playground road."
