Dear Friend,
I just dropped my daughter Leora off at the main entrance to our community.  She groaned when she saw the crowds standing near the guard booth, knowing she had a wait ahead of her for a ride.  She was on her way back to her National Service in Tel-Aviv and she had her week’s worth of (now) clean laundry squeezed into her oversized backpack and she was in a rush.   She text-messaged me less than an hour later that she was already at work!  The first car that stopped for her took her to the army checkpoint, 5 minutes away, where she figured she’d have a better chance of a ride, being on a main road.   Within minutes, another car pulled over, this one going to Petach Tikva.  After a quick discussion of which highway he was taking, Leora got in, deciding to get off at the Yarkon Intersection where she’d wait for a more direct ride to Tel-Aviv.  This time, another car pulled up, waiting patiently as she got out of her second ride, to roll down his window and ask if she needed Tel-Aviv.  She did and he popped open his trunk for her large backpack since the car was filled with other passengers the driver had picked up along the way, and she was set.
I still find it amazing.  I grew up in America where hitchhiking was for T.V. movies about runaway teenagers and suspicious truckers.  Here, hitchhiking is a way of life for everyone I know.  For my friend, a pediatric oncologist, who counts on hitches every day to get to his job at the hospital; for kids who miss their busses and know they’ll still get to school on time; for soldiers making their way back to their base after a weekend home.
School’s out for the next couple of weeks for the Passover holiday and teenagers all over Israel take advantage of their vacation and the wonderful weather to travel around the country.   I love driving up north and seeing clumps of kids at every intersection, sprawled on patches of grass, dusty and dirty from climbing up mountains and sleeping under the stars.  They wait, baking in the sun, counting on the kindness of strangers, for a car to pull over and get them closer to the next trail, the next watering hole.  Some small communities in Judea and Samaria and some popular hiking spots have very limited or no public transportation.  But there is no such thing as a teenager limiting his mobility around bus schedules.  You stand by the side of the road and hang around till someone stops for you.
One evening my husband and I were driving to Jerusalem to a wedding of a neighborhood friend.  A half hour away from the hall, as we turned at a major intersection, we see a young man holding a folded stroller and a hanger with a crisply ironed white shirt.  His young wife was holding an infant and a diaper bag.  Pulling over, we laughed when we recognized them from our area.  They were on their way to the same wedding and, not owning a car, had started hitching, slowly making their way to the wedding, knowing they’d get there..
My kids say there’s a hitchhiking culture.  It’s a no-no to talk loudly on your cell-phone while catching a ride with someone, and when you’re waiting at a popular hitchhiking spot, there are basic rules of decency.  My girls get upset when people show up to wait and push their way towards the first car that stops, “cutting the (unwritten) line” so to speak, though no numbers are taken and no actual lines formed.  You see good deeds done even among the hitchhikers themselves.  People admonish youngsters with the unwritten order of preference, when they approach a car for a ride even though there are elderly people with shopping carts and supermarket bags waiting.
People say it’s dangerous.  And sadly, at times they have been proven right.  Tragedies have happened when the wrong kind of people stop.  Not everyone stops with good deeds on their minds. Not long ago there was a wave of kidnapping attempts by terrorists, dressed as Orthodox Jews, stopping to pick up hitchhiking soldiers and civilians on the side of the road.  And sometimes disasters strike when hitchhikers themselves are not who they seem to be.  Only ten minutes away from our community, a Palestinian suicide bomber, dressed as a Jewish hitchhiker, stepped into a car and blew himself up, along with the kind driver, and the other unsuspecting passengers.
Picking up hitchhikers is a wonderfully rich and wonderfully easy way to do good.  My theory is that if my car is driving somewhere anyway, why not fill it up?  The blessings I sometimes get for giving someone a short ride is disproportionate to the effort necessary to do the deed.  And I’m very happy to see that my three girls who already have drivers’ licenses are careful to stop whenever possible.  They know what it’s like to stand at a dark street corner in the rain, knowing no busses will pass again till morning.  They know the feeling of relief of seeing a pair of headlights slowing down and pulling over.
Sometimes I have to work on myself.  When I see a young mother holding her 2 year old’s hand with an infant strapped in a stroller, I know it’ll take time to get out, reposition my packages in the back seat, hold the baby while the mother straps in her toddler, fold up the stroller… it takes a few minutes, but so what? 
I’m spoiled.  I usually have a car at my disposal so don’t know the difficulties of making my way with rides.  But all I have to do is see those sweet young soldiers, their rifles and knapsacks slung over their shoulders, and I picture my boys in a few years, in uniform, making their way home to visit me after a month of military training.  I stop.  All I have to do is see those hopeful crowds of girls, school books in hand, and picture my own daughter Avigayil who spent three years in university, waiting at that same spot.  I stop.
There are so many good people in the Land of Israel, living up to the directive from the Book of Psalms: “For I have said, ‘The world is built by loving kindness’…” (89:3)
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