How a California wildfire put an Orthodox school’s values to the test
The theme of the school’s annual freshman-senior retreat is passing the torch. This year they had to avoid the flames, too.
At left, what the fire looked like from Camp Moshava Alevy at 1 p.m. on Friday. The photo on the right, taken by the onsite camp director, is what it looked like six hours after the campsite evacuated. Photo by Jonathan Ravanshenas (left)/Joe Zeveda (right)
By Louis Keene September 10, 2024
By the time Jonathan Ravanshenas, a faculty member at LA’s Shalhevet High School, got behind the wheel on Saturday, his SUV was already running. One of his non-Jewish co-workers had started the car for him. That didn’t make the next part any easier: Ravanshenas, an Orthodox Jew, was about to drive on Shabbat for the first time in his life.
The circumstances demanded it. A wildfire in the San Bernardino Mountains had spread to within striking distance of the campground where the Orthodox school was hosting a retreat. A local fire marshal had given the faculty only a few hours to evacuate with some 100 students. For many of them, that meant doing something previously unthinkable on a Saturday.
“It was surreal,” said Ravanshenas, the school’s dean of student life. “I’m on the freeway thinking, like, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe it’s Shabbat. I’m driving. This is really happening.’”
Shalhevet faculty members said they could see smoke rising from a distant mountainside when they arrived Friday afternoon at Moshava Alevy, a Jewish summer camp about 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles. A fire department official from nearby Running Springs initially told them the flames — some 25 miles away at that point — were unlikely to reach their area before Tuesday, if at all.
But the wind picked up late Friday night, transforming a manageable blaze into a menacing one. On Saturday morning, the fire department ordered the camp emptied by 1 p.m. When attendees of Shalhevet’s annual freshman-senior bonding event piled into buses and cars around noon, the sky was orange and raining ash. The fire had grown tenfold to 7,500 acres in less than 24 hours.
They were fleeing the Line Fire, which by Monday night had spread over more than 23,000 acres, making it the fifth-largest fire in the state this year. It came within a few hundred yards of Shalhevet’s campsite a few hours after the students and teachers fled. In a statement, Bnei Akiva, the Jewish youth movement that runs the camp, credited the fire department and “a miraculous rainfall” with halting its approach.
“The freshman-senior theme is literally passing down the torch,” Ravanshenas said in an interview Monday. “We were joking, like, this is really lighting the flame, huh?”
Shalhevet’s head of school, Rabbi David Block, said that he and the other adults did various things Jewish law normally prohibits on Shabbat because of the precept of pikuach nefesh, which permits or demands breaking other rules in order to save a life. But because they were given a little more than four hours for evacuation — and because a non-Jewish staff member was around to help — those attending the retreat were able to observe Shabbat even as they were breaking it.
Smelling smoke
When Block saw the smoke on Friday afternoon, he immediately reached out to Rabbi Jeremy Wieder of Yeshiva University, the school’s adviser on matters of Jewish law, for guidance in the event of a Shabbat evacuation. Block wanted to know about the minutiae: Did the exemption for pikuach nefesh extend to students packing their laptops?
“The goal was to ensure that we were doing everything we could to keep everyone safe,” Block explained to me afterward, “and when possible, to minimize the violation of Shabbos, because it still is very much Shabbos.”
Ravanshenas also made a crucial call when they arrived at the camp: He asked the bus drivers to stay with them on site.
That night, not long after Shabbat started, representatives from the fire department arrived and told the group to move inside because of low air quality. As the night progressed, retreat-goers watched the fire getting closer.
“It was three ridges over,” Ravanshenas said, “And then you could see it going over the first ridge, and then going slowly down that, and then slowly back up.” By 12:30 a.m., he added, “We all met as a group and said: This might be real.”
Around 8:45 a.m. on Saturday, a fire marshal from Running Springs, Rick Ellsberry, came to the campgrounds. He told the Shalhevet staff that his crew could not contain the fire, and that they needed to be out by 1 p.m. at absolute latest.
The school leadership considered relocating to a nearby motel, but that would likely come with a host of other prohibited actions on Shabbat, like signing forms and using electronic room keys. After weighing a variety of issues related to the minutiae of Jewish law, in consultation with Rabbi Wieder, they decided to head back to Shalhevet’s campus, in the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles. Daniel Weslow, the principal and one of the two non-Jewish staffers on the retreat, left first to start setting up the school.
Getting out
Not wanting to alarm the students too much, Block began morning prayer services as planned. When they got to the Torah reading, though, he announced the evacuation, telling the group to pack their bags, then grab lunch in the cafeteria.
The students were told to leave behind items considered muktzeh — a Hebrew word that literally means “separated,” or “set aside,” and in this context, things like electronics, money or musical instruments whose use is normally prohibited on Shabbat. Tushar Dwivedi, Shalhevet’s non-Jewish director of school engagement, would gather them separately. Then, they’d all board the buses and leave.
Aliza Katz, a Shalhevet senior, said that as they departed — still wearing their Shabbat clothes, and without their cell phones — conditions had worsened enough that many were covering their mouths with sweatshirts to avoid breathing in smoke. One teacher said it was 108 degrees.
“It was a little bit scary to have the camp be orange and smoky, but I didn’t see anyone panicking,” Katz, 17, said. “Rabbi Block made it clear that this was something we needed to do, but it wasn’t something we needed to be scared about. We were safe.”
“I had to remind myself of what I just told the students — that what we're doing right now is a mitzva; it’s obligatory.”Rabbi David BlockHead of Shalhevet High School
After Dwivedi packed up 100 kids’ laptops, guitars and hair dryers, he got to play valet for the Judaic studies staff. One by one, he started their cars, made sure the air conditioning was on, punched the school’s address into the Waze app on their phones, and opened and closed doors for them. He placed printed-out directions on their dashboards in case anything went wrong. All the teachers would have to do was get in the car and put it in drive.
(If they’d been given less time, Block made clear, he and the other observant Jews would have started the cars themselves and likely told students to just leave their electronics behind.)
Dwivedi, who is Hindu, didn’t need too much explanation — he’s been turning lights on and off at Shalhevet retreats for eight years. But he did learn one new rule.
“I don’t think I knew that tefillin were muktzeh,” he said of the leather phylacteries used in daily prayer services but not on Shabbat.
Keeping Shabbat
Block, seizing a surprise teaching moment, had told the students that abiding pikuach nefesh to break Shabbat rules like driving was, in its own way, observing Shabbat.
Still, Katz said, seeing the rabbi get behind the wheel of his car on Saturday was “crazy.” And Block — who had ridden in an ambulance on Shabbat but never before operated a vehicle himself — said that pressing the gas pedal the first time was almost painful.
“I had to remind myself of what I just told the students — that what we’re doing right now is a mitzva; it’s obligatory,” Block recalled. “And I really had to give myself that pep talk.”
Roughly two hours later, they arrived in the school’s parking lot, leaving the engines running for Dwivedi to turn off. The buses unloaded, and the group picked up prayer services at Torah reading. It was still — and suddenly, again — Shabbat.
“I know a lot of these halachas, for how to break Shabbat when you have to break Shabbat,” said Katz, the 12th grader. “But it was very — cool isn’t the right word, but it was a very interesting experience to be able to see it in person. There were so many tiny details, and I thought it was very well done.”
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