(Ed. I originally wrote this 3 years ago here and the writing is fairly terrible, worse than it is now, I think. But don’t blame me, blame my yeshiva.)
A few bochurim use some serious ingenuity and overcome crippling lethargy to do something they’ve only dreamed of doing. Warning: this story is so exciting it will definitely give you wanderlust.
On those dreadfully long summer shabbos afternoons when all you can do is wait for shalosh seudos and of course when that comes you throw up from looking at the two-day old tuna fish and egg salad with too much water and not enough mayonnaise, on those shabbos afternoons you’re up for anything. I was up for anything. I hardly remember what I did on most shabbosim; I probably laid in bed most of the time and read books, heck that’s what I did all week, no reason to think I did anything different on shabbos.
There was one shabbos that was different though. There was a lake about five miles away from my yeshiva with a nice park on it and some friends and I had talked about walking there on a shabbos afternoon a few times. I had been there by bike once and thought I could lead the way, so one fine, hot sunny beautiful shabbos afternoon we took off our shabbos clothes, put on shorts, t-shirts and baseball caps, slipped out of the dorm and off we were!
Sure it felt funny to be walking in shorts and t-shirts and it especially felt funny to be doing it on shabbos but as the gemara so aptly points out; once you do something three times it becomes mutar so after the third mile we weren’t doing an aveira anymore, which is a good feeling. It’s cool to do something when it’s anaveira but when you know that after getting back to yeshiva you’re going to have to live with the terrible guilt of the dreadful deed you’ve done it feels better not to have to worry about being over an aveira.
It took us a lot longer to get to the lake than we thought it would, we even felt like turning around and going back, but we didn’t.
We got to the water, lounged around for about two hours and then headed back on our worn out feet.
Luckily we were back right in time for sahlosh seudos.
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