This is a draft of a piece for Ami magazine about my experience in the Palisades fire. It was written for a Jewish audience and includes my insights about this past week's Torah portion -- sorry that I did not manage to make my usual update.

The Palisades Fire

Joel B. Pollak

Tuesday, January 7, began as a typical day in the beautiful Pacific Palisades. We had been warned about extreme winds, so before taking my three-year-old to Gan Israel preschool, I checked everything outside our house that might blow away or break. I took down our American flag and my son’s pitching net. I drove to Santa Monica, dropped my daughter off, went to the gym, and stopped at the Starbucks to check my email before heading home.

Our nanny suddenly sent a text message to me and my wife. She had been walking our three-month-old infant around the neighborhood and she smelled smoke. She could also see a column of smoke nearby. She said she was returning to the house to protect the baby. I sensed that this was a potentially dangerous situation so I told them we should pack bags immediately in case we needed to evacuate. On the way home, I saw the smoke billowing in the high wind.

We packed quickly, throwing two days’ worth of clothing into a couple of suitcases. Our nanny packed baby supplies. I took essentials, including my tallit and tefillin, as well as everything I needed for work and my daily routine, including my volume of Sanhedrin for Daf Yomi study. I also packed our elder daughter’s guitar, our elder son’s baseball bag, and a few other things I knew that our children needed for their daily activities. I assumed we’d be away a few days.

My wife fetched our elder son from his public school. She had to wait 20 minutes because the staff were making parents fill out forms. The school principal, who is a very effective leader, happened to be away for family reasons. Anxious parents, anticipating an evacuation order and the need to pack, as we had been packing, begged the staff to let their children go. It was the first of many frustrating failures we would witness that day from our local government.

We initially planned to stay with a friend on the other side of Palisades. As we turned onto Sunset Boulevard, the traffic had begun to intensify. We decided to leave Palisades and stay with friends in Santa Monica. We took a shortcut through a driveway owned by a local club. Others had the same idea. As we rolled through their parking lot, we saw their employees spraying the hillside nearby with water. We emerged onto the Pacific Coast Highway and left.

As we were leaving, the first evacuations were ordered via smartphone. Later, we learned, the traffic was so bad on Sunset that people abandoned their cars and fled on foot. There were no police officers onsite to direct traffic, as fire engines competed for space with evacuees. In the end, the fire department had to use a bulldozer to move the abandoned vehicles. The delay probably cost them precious time as they struggled to fight the rapid advance of the fire.

We arrived in Santa Monica and settled in. I fetched our elder daughter, who attends a Jewish school, from her school bus stop. On the way home, we could see the flames in the distance. At night, the wind howled — apparently reaching 100 mph on mountain peaks. We stayed in touch with friends and neighbors. The friend who had offered to host us had evacuated as well. Some tried to fight the fires, but eventually gave up and left. It was a life-threatening situation.

We studied the maps on the Cal Fire website to see the advance of the blaze. Curiously, I noted that our house was just outside the perimeter of the fire. For the first few hours, we had watched house remotely on our security cameras, until the power went out. Around mid-morning on Wednesday, our alarm company notified us that our carbon monoxide detector had gone off. That meant we still had a house; it also meant the house might have been on fire.

With the wind abating slightly, I decided to try going back to investigate. I asked a friend at a local news outlet whether they were letting journalists into the area, and he said yes. So I drove back to Palisades, passing through the police checkpoints, debating whether I should brave the wall of smoke that greeted me. When I saw some cars emerge unscathed, I decided to take the chance. There were flames and smoke alongside the highway, and in the distance as well.

I drove up Sunset, through the path the bulldozer had carved through the cars, some of which had been completely burned. As I reached our neighborhood, I was horrified to see homes and apartment buildings fully ablaze. I turned onto the bottom of our street and was blocked by a downed power line. I parked my car and walked past the wires. The whole neighborhood was already a burned-out shell, with flames still roaring from the windows and frames of homes.

And there it was: our house, on the corner, somehow still standing. There was smoke alongside it: our fence was on fire, as were some trees on my neighbor’s property, and some logs from a retaining wall. But it was still there. I could not believe it. More amazingly, our garden hose lay, fully extended, across our driveway and back yard: a neighbor, or a firefighter, had evidently used it to put out a fire on our now-melted fence. Whoever did it had helped save the house.

I went inside: there was a pervasive smell of smoke, but nothing had been burned — at least, not yet. I decided I might save the house with a little more effort. I tried the faucets: there was no water. The hose outside wasn’t working anymore, either. But I remembered: every Friday, I give flowers to my wife for Shabbat. I still had the water in the vases. I took out the flowers and took the vases outside, pouring them over the logs and extinguishing some of the flames.

In the gutter, in the street, water was flowing — most likely from pipes that had burst further uphill. I filled my vases, over and over, and kept putting out the fire. Then I remembered that my son had a bucket of baseballs in the yard. I emptied the bucket and kept going. A pickup truck arrived: two guys, local handymen, hopped out and offered to help. They asked if I had more buckets. I remembered the two in the garage. We formed an assembly line and worked quickly.

We put out all of the fires on my fence. I also put out the fires in my neighbor’s yard and on his trees. Then smoke from the nearby school, which was fully ablaze, shifted in our direction. “We have to get out of here,” one of the guys said. “I don’t have your contact details to thank you,” I replied. “Don’t worry,” he joked. “We know where you live.” They drove off and I returned to my car after quickly retrieving a few more essentials from my house, avoiding the live power lines.

I explored as much of the burning town as I could reach safely. The destruction was horrific. I could see that whole neighborhoods had burned down. Firefighters were rushing to the fires that were most urgent, or to buildings that could still be saved. As I drove back downhill to leave, I saw a fire engine hosing down a building near the popular Lake Shrine meditation center (one of the few locations where the fire hydrants seemed to have good water pressure).

I returned the next day, and the next, to document the fire, which slowly settled down. There were all sorts of questions. Why had the Santa Ynez Reservoir, above Palisades, been almost empty? Why had businessman Rick Caruso been able to save the Village Mall, hiring private firefighters, while local officials had been unable to save almost anything else? Why was L.A. Mayor Karen Bass away in Ghana, of all places, after knowing extreme winds were coming?

Our house had been saved, as had two synagogues (though two rabbis lost their homes). But the community had been destroyed. Neighbors, knowing I had press access, sent me frantic messages, asking me to check on their homes, or even to help find their pets. I tried to help where I could. A few people managed to walk for miles, often along secret hiking trails, to enter their neighborhoods. The shock on their faces as they looked at the ruins was heartbreaking.

I began to feel anxious as Shabbat approached. I had to return to my family, but there was so much more to do. I helped a neighbor hang an American flag on the clock that he had built in the center of the community, raising funds through donations. Then I made my way back out. In some ways, I was dreading Shabbat: I knew that I had been running on adrenaline for four days, and I was worried about the rush of emotions I would feel when I had to take a break.

At the Shabbat table with a local rabbi, we ate and drank and cried and thanked HaShem and each other. I recalled my amazement at the chesed (kindness) of my neighbors, especially the anonymous person who had saved our house with the garden hose. On Saturday morning, though, I woke up with a heaviness in my heart, thinking of the incredible loss people had all suffered, and the challenges ahead — all the questions that we, and other families would face.

At shul, the gabbai asked if I would like to recite the Haftarah. I wanted to offer some words of Torah as well — I needed to share our story — but I had not even had time to study the weekly Torah portion. As I reviewed the text, it struck me that Jacob claimed to have conquered the city of Shechem "with my sword and with my bow” (Genesis 48:22) It was Simon and Levi who conquered it — and he rebuked them for it. Moreover, they only used swords. What was he trying to say?

I had the notion that Jacob might have based his claim not just on having destroyed Shechem, but having rebuilt it. Then it hit me that the Hebrew word for “bow” — keshet — is the same as the word for “rainbow” — like the rainbow HaShem placed in the clouds after the Flood, to reassure humanity that He would not destroy the world again. And curiously, though the school had burned down, two murals had survived untouched — both of which depicted rainbows.

As I chanted the Haftarah, in which an ailing King David is instructing Solomon, I paused at the word “bevarchi” — “when I fled” (I Kings 2:7). I choked up and could not continue for a minute. All of the connections suddenly hit me. David, too, had to evacuate his home — more than once. He had been sheltered by friends, and later returned. Moreover, the Hebrew word for “fled” has the same three letter as the word for “sword” — chet, reish, and bet, only in the reverse order.

The connections didn’t end there. The Hebrew word for destruction — “churban” — which had been on my mind lately, also has the same three-letter root. The Haftarah goes on to note that David had reigned first in Hebron — which has the same three-letter root. And within the word Hebron, there is also the word “chaver” — “friend.” The message: the only way we overcome a churban is through our chaverim — through the help and love that we share with our friends.

That is why David tells Solomon to reward Barzilai the Gileadite, who helped him with food and shelter in his time of flight. And that is why Jacob adds his “bow” to his sword: Simon and Levi destroyed, but the one who builds is the one with a true claim of ownership. In a way, Jacob is offering a prophecy about the Messiah: that we can bring about the ultimate redemption, an end to churban, by reaching out to help one another through acts of chesed and kindness.

I suddenly realized how valuable this Shabbat had been to me. I had needed to connect to HaShem and to these insights, as well as to my family. There were so many tasks ahead — filling out insurance claims, finding a temporary place to live, taking our son to a new school site — and, of course, the continued work of writing about the fire, and how to prevent such disasters in the future. Our day of rest was absolutely necessary to restore our strength.

We have a long road ahead. There is more heartbreak to come — and yet also comfort in the good news that very few people, in a community of tens of thousands, died or suffered injury. Many of us lost our homes and our possessions; all of us lost, at least for now, a wonderful place, a village within the city, where our children could play freely in the streets. But we still have each other, and that is the foundation on which we will build, the rainbow in the smoke.