Panicked, he asked a neighbor breathlessly, “What happened?”
“Uh, your son tried to ride down a flight of stairs on his tricycle.”
Rabbi Lerner took a moment or two to absorb this shock. Then he remembered: He just hit his head on a bed a few days ago and had a gash on his head. The stitches must have opened. While saying this, he was moving forward to pick up his little son. Bracing himself, he gave him as good a head examination as he could. Oh, boy, stitches open all right, plus it looks like he could use a few more stitches now. A few quick moments of thought, and he had decided. The injuries were potentially life-threatening; they must go to the hospital immediately.
Rabbi Lerner’s heart was racing after the dash over to the next building. He banged urgently on Mr. Glick’s door. His neighbor had just come home from shul and was standing in his living room with his tallis still on when Rabbi Lerner burst in. “Baruch, I need a favor. I have to get my son Menachem to Shaare Zedek. Can I borrow your car?”
Baruch Glick bobbled for a moment, then rallied. “Sure, take the keys, they’re on a hook in the kitchen.”
Rabbi Lerner took them off the hook, said, “Tizkeh l’mitzvos,” and ran back to his apartment.
Recently there had been quite a few car thefts in Jerusalem. Baruch couldn’t afford a car alarm, so he had done the next best thing to “burglar-proof” his car. Each time before he turned off the ignition, he turned his car radio on full blast and tuned it to the loudest and most obnoxious rock station he knew of. That way, if anyone tried to steal his car, he would make an unholy racket the moment the engine was started.
Unfortunately, Baruch was so flustered by Rabbi Lerner’s sudden arrival that he forgot to tell him about his little invention.
The rabbi opened the car’s back door, and his wife put Menachem in the back seat. He quickly settled into the driver’s seat, put the keys in the ignition with his right hand, and turned the key.
His jaw dropped when he heard “music,” so to speak, come out of the speakers. The car’s engine was actually drowned out by the raucous blare. For a second he put his hands over his ears, until he realized that he had to get his son to the hospital as soon as possible.
His hand went out instinctively to turn off the radio, but then he stopped himself. It was Shabbos today; nothing was permitted except what would keep his son out of danger of his life. Frantically he rolled up the windows as he guided the car out into the street. But even with the windows closed, Shabbos in Ezras Torah was now interrupted by a blaring serenade from the rock group Black Sabbath.
Baruch was just about to sit down at his Shabbos table when he heard the uproar outside. His wife said to him in shock, “Do you hear that? Who has the chutzpah to play that awful music on Shabbos?”
Baruch felt his heart sink to his stomach. He slapped his forehead as he collapsed in his dining room chair. “Oh, no! I forgot to tell him about the radio!”
Rebbetzin Lerner turned away from Menachem for a second, the shock evident on her face. Loudly she ordered, “Turn that noise off!”
“What?” He couldn’t hear a word.
This time she yelled at the top of her lungs. “I said, turn the radio off. I can’t take it!”
“What?” he shouted, then went back to repeating silently, Have to concentrate on driving, ignore that awful noise...
“Turn off the radio!” his wife screamed in desperation.
Oh, that was what she wanted.
“I can’t!”
“Why not?”
He gathered a big lungful of air in order to shout good and loud, “I can only do melachah to get Menachem to the hospital. There’s no heter to touch the radio.”
“Then turn it down,” his wife screamed. “It’s a chillul haShem!”
“No!” he roared back. “Kiddush haShem! There’s no heter to touch it!”
“What are you talking about?” screamed Mrs. Lerner.
“What?”
Even louder, “I said, what are you talking about? It’s a chillul Hashem!”
“No, it’s a kiddush Hashem. We’re willing to put up with it for the sake of Shabbos kodesh. Very few people get such a test. We absolutely cannot turn off the radio. Look, I gotta watch where I’m going now.”
Fortunately, there were hardly any other cars on the road. Denmark Square was the last traffic light before the hospital, and they had to stop for a red light. Rabbi Lerner was still wearing his satin Shabbos bekeshe. A group of teenagers on their way to the beach pulled up alongside and looked to see who was playing that cool music. The sight of a long-bearded rabbi with peyos driving a car on Shabbos and blasting rock music caused shock, not laughter. The kids seemed frozen in place, speechless.
Rabbi Lerner rolled down his window. He knew he had to talk, and fast. Sure enough, one kid recovered enough to shout, “Hey, dati (religious man), why are you breaking the Shabbos?”
He pointed to his bleeding son in the back seat. “It’s pikuach nefesh!”
“Maybe, but why do you have to play rock and roll?”
Rabbi Lerner wanted to explain, but before he had a chance, the light turned green and the other car sped away.
The emergency staff took Menachem quickly into the emergency room, where they put in some more stitches. He was all right by the end of Shabbos; the only lasting effect was a ringing in his parents’ ears that took until Monday morning to go away.
In later years Rabbi Lerner used this experience to teach his students at Yeshivas Aish HaTorah. “What would all of you think if you saw me driving a car on Shabbos with loud music playing? You’d say, ‘Maybe I can justify the car for an emergency, but why is he playing the radio?’
“But what looks like wrong is sometimes right, and what looks like right is sometimes wrong.
“In my case, what I was doing looked like a serious aveirah to people who glanced at it — driving a car on Shabbos with the radio blasting! But now that you know the facts you see it was the right thing to do. In emergencies you just have to ignore what people will think and do your duty.
“Often, too, things look like great ideas or important causes, but if they go against the halachah they’re wrong, no matter how attractive they are.
“A Jew has to find out what the halachah is and then just go and do it, without worrying about what anyone else might think. This is the fundamental principle of Torah-true living, which is why the Rema writes it at the very beginning of the Shulchan Aruch, ‘Don’t ever be embarrassed when people laugh at you for serving Hashem.’ That Shabbos I got some really good practice in doing that Rema.”