The Cigarette

On most days I don't believe that there is a supreme being. I certainly don't believe that there is an interventionist God who cares anything about what I do. But sometimes, on rare days, I do suspect that God takes an interest in me and that I may be part of her plan. On the rarest of days, I hold both beliefs simultaneously, and the internal dissonance bothers me not a bit. After all, if the universe can reconcile Newtonian and quantum physics, my simple brain can certainly handle a minor logical contradiction. On the day in question discussed here, I awoke as an atheist, and I retired with doubts.

I was drafted into the Israel Defense Forces in October 1977 at age 22, less than a year after arriving in the country. During my service, I was a "lone soldier", which is to say that while I was serving in the IDF my immediate family resided abroad. Kibbutz Matzuva, where I had spent six months studying Hebrew and working, had adopted me for the period of my military service, and that was a pretty good deal. Matzuva was a gardened oasis on a hill in the midst of cultivated fields, natural meadows, and thickets of planted conifers in the Western Galilee, about four kilometers west of the sea and two kilometers south of the Lebanese border. I had friends on the kibbutz that I had acquired while in the ulpan, Israelis and foreigners, and the kibbutz members treated me as one of their own. I had a cigarette allowance like other residents, which exacerbated a nasty addiction that I had developed towards the end of my ulpan studies. They gave me a room, fed me meals in the communal dining room, washed my laundry, and they gave me all of the support that a young soldier might need or want. One of the families "adopted" me, and we developed a strong connection.

My lodgings consisted of a single room in a wooden shack with four or five other rooms, all occupied by kibbutz kids doing their mandatory IDF service. The walls were thin, and sometimes I heard my neighbors' nocturnal recreation, activities that I would have preferred to remain unheard. There were shared toilets, and a shower whose water could be heated in an upright white boiler attached to the wall of the shower stall, fueled by kerosene which was freely available in tanks strategically located in each neighborhood. Occasionally, if kerosene dripped from the boiler, the floor might burst into flames, but they were easily extinguished by water from the showerhead which washed the burning fuel down the drain. My room had a bed, a chair, some shelves and drawers, and a writing desk. For heat in the winter, I had a kerosene-fueled space heater that had to be operated with a window opened a crack for ventilation to prevent asphyxiation. The winters in Israel were warmer than the winters I had experienced in the United States, but while in the States I could go inside to get warm, but in Israel it was never really warm inside, and I constantly felt cold.

One chilly gray Friday afternoon in January or February 1979, I returned home to the kibbutz after a week in the central Golan Heights where I was a combat engineer based at the 36th Division headquarters at Nafaḥ. After showering with hot water in the unheated stall, I took my dirty uniforms to the laundry and then retreated into my room, shutting the door and leaving the miserable weather outside. Beyond the closed window, rain fell from the sky. I ignited my kerosene space heater with a wooden match. The flames jumped and flickered and then subdued when the burner became hot and glowed orange. It was customary for families to gather for coffee and refreshment on Friday evenings before going up the hill to the dining room for Shabbat dinner. A few hours remained before I would walk to my adoptive family's house several neighborhoods distant for coffee. I briefly considered taking a nap in bed before deciding to read a book instead.

Selecting a paperback novel in English, I pulled up a chair close to the low flames of my space heater and started to read. Turning this way or that, I might warm my right leg or left. Perhaps, I might hold the book in one hand and warm the other, and after a few minutes shift my position to balance the distribution of the heat. When the numbness from the cold in my hands had passed, I took a cigarette from the pack in my pocket and placed the brown filtered end into my mouth. My preferred brand was Nelson, and the pack sported a blue uniformed image of the one-armed admiral. Cigarette between my lips, I extracted a wooden match from its matchbox. I struck the red match head against the black side of the matchbox. The match ignited and immediately fizzled out. "OK," I thought to myself. "It's a bad match." I withdrew another match and repeated the process. The same thing happened. Very strange. There had been no problems with them before, and they hadn't been dampened by the rain. I looked around for another box of matches and decided that I could light the cigarette from the flame of the space heater.

And then, suddenly, I realized what was happening. The space heater had been on for 15 or 20 minutes, and the window was closed. The matches wouldn't light because the oxygen in the room had been depleted. I leapt from the chair and threw open the door. Cold fresh air streamed into the room. To test my conclusion, I struck another match. It erupted in flame. I realized that if I had decided to take a nap or if I hadn't chosen to smoke that cigarette, I would have been dead. That cigarette had saved my life.

Another ten years would pass before I quit smoking. I don't know how much damage cigarettes did to my lungs, but it is perfectly clear to me that if not for a single cigarette on a cold winter day I would not be here to tell this tale. Some people might claim that this was God intervening in my life to serve some divine purpose. Others might say that it was purely chance. I don't know. I do know that on a cold winter day, decades ago, despite a complete lack of evidence for the existence of a Supreme Being, I had my own personal miracle.