Cities of Refuge

Although i’ve always known I’m Jewish, my family was not in the least bit religious. We rejoiced on the High Holy Days because it was so easy to reserve a tennis court near our house in Scarsdale. We were too busy decorating our Christmas tree to celebrate Chanukah. When Easter rolled around, my sister and I dyed hard-boiled eggs lurid colors and received little baskets filled with chocolate bunnies and jelly beans.

Even though we never joined a temple or went to services, it was impossible to grow up in Westchester County without learning something about Judaism. There were bar mitzvahs and weddings to attend; occasionally I went to temple with a friend’s family. I learned how to say “Baruch atah Adonai Elohenu,” and I knew the words meant “blessed our Lord,” but I had no idea what came afterward and no burning desire to find out.

I learned more in college, because I took a course on Judeo-Christian religions after I was closed out of a class on Eastern religions. I also sat through a day-long workshop about the Kabbalah, in the same spirit that I attended Sufi dancing and Buddhist meditation sessions—striving to be open, but knowing in my heart that something was off about the fit. I don’t believe in organized religion, I concluded, and that’s where things might have stayed if not for the accident.

The Accident

At first what happened convinced me that God did not exist, or at least not a benign and loving God. If He did, He would never have let an eight-year-old boy named Brian dart into the street in front of my car. He would never have let that child die in the road, his blood pooling on the blacktop while his mother wailed a few yards away. He would not have left me all alone at age twenty-two, without comfort or support. None of it made sense.

I could only partially accept the idea that God was punishing me. I was envious of those prettier and more popular than I was, contemptuous of those less so, and overly concerned with myself. But why would God punish an eight-year-old boy? Why punish his entire family? If there was a God, He wasn’t paying much attention on that day.

I spent the first few weeks after the accident hiding inside my apartment. I was ashamed to show my face and afraid of being attacked if anyone recognized that I was the girl who killed a local child. Although I had moments of despair, I mostly felt dull and frozen. I thought about the accident all the time, while a continuous loop of flashbacks ran in random sequence: The boy flying up into the air after I hit him. His mother in a house dress, knees buckling on her front stoop. A crowd of onlookers. Blood. Sitting in the back of a police car, arms wrapped around myself, while an officer told me the boy had died.

Sometime during those weeks I pulled out my college textbooks and read more about Judaism. I was longing for solace, but I would have settled for some decent advice. What I discovered was not reassuring. In To Be a Jew, a book offering an introduction to contemporary Judaism, Rabbi Hayim Donin writes, “If he who saves a life is credited in our tradition with saving a world, it follows that he who destroys a life is guilty of destroying a world.”

“He can’t mean me,” I told myself. “What I did was accidental.” But I couldn’t shake the suspicion that he did.

Thumbing through the book for another perspective, I ran across a quote by Abraham Joshua Heschel. “The purest intentions, the finest of devotion, the noblest spiritual aspirations are fatuous when not realized in action.” So, my intentions were irrelevant. It didn’t matter that the child’s death was an accident. What mattered were my actions, and they were horribly destructive. I felt queasy.

But didn’t Judaism also tout the wonders of atonement? Could I atone for...