Justice

Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree." (Bereshit 18.4)

This week of my summer is made possible by Amherst, Massachusetts, cats, and Netflix. For a while in my queue has been a documentary called Lord, Save Us From Your Followers, directed by Dan Merchant, who wears a jumpsuit covered with bumper-stickers throughout the entire 104 minutes. The focus of the film is America’s “Culture Wars,” and Merchant, himself an Evangelical Christian, travels around the country gently challenging people to respond to his various bumper stickers, as well as asking folks what they think about Christianity. The film’s tagline is : “If you were to meet ten average Americans on the street, nine of them would say they believe in God. So why is the Gospel of Love dividing America?” Without totally ruining things, because you should see the film, Merchant’s theory is that Christians percieve themeselves differently than how they are actually perceived, and proceeds to sniff out why that might be true.

At the end of the film, Merchant profiles a Portland, Oregon project called Operation Nightwatch, which addresses the needs of Portland’s homeless community. In addition to providing food, medical care, and other basic resources to folks, people can also socialize and build important relationships. St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church houses the project, and also offers Bible study and services. Folks involved tell Merchant that they would love for the people they’re helping to find Jesus, but in the meantime, they’re making changes and forming relationships.
Like any direct service project, there are problems with this, but there was a scene in this sequence that hit me particularly hard, and it featured one of the homeless folks having their feet and hair washed by a church volunteer. (No, the biblical significance of feet washing did not escape me.) My instinct was to try to remember if I could recall any Jews or Jewish organizations doing work like this. I’m not talking about direct service, or about helping the homeless, but rather, the level of intimacy that comes with physical contact.
There’s an anecdote in Rabbi Jill Jacobs’ new book in which a religious school teacher asks if there’s a place to just drop off the sandwiches the children have made for the homeless, because their parents don’t want them to have any actual contact with homeless people. Washing someone’s hair and feet is an act that requires confrontation with people we are afraid of, people we’re supposed to avoid. Why aren’t we collectively educating Jews about what it means to really have a relationship with someone?
Have we absorbed and internalized whiteness to such a degree that we think we’re above building relationships in such direct, unflinching ways? In Merchant’s film, it is white Christian men, the ultimate power base, at the helm of these projects. What would it take to change our own paradigm towards one of intimacy, mutual vulnerability, rather than what’s safe for us but keeps others at arm’s length?

10 thoughts on “Let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree." (Bereshit 18.4)

  1. You ask good questions, but introducing race into is a mistake. Do you think Asian, Hispanic, Black middle class families are free from concerns about direct contact with the homeless? The fact is, a very large proportion of the homeless are not ‘just like us’ but rather suffering from a number of additions, mental health issues and character flaws. Well I guess maybe they ARE like us….
    The point is, this isn’t a racial thing like you suggest at the end. It’s a class thing, or a protect my child thing.
    On a different but related topic, I will cross the street a block away to avoid a busker or beggar, just on the off chance that they are a homeless person. I do not want to be near homeless, addicted, crazy, or even street preacher types. I despise the kids who sell candy bars on subways, and the adults who profit from them. If I could, I would build a world so perfect those folks couldn’t possibly exist as they do now. God willing when the Messiah/world communist revolution comes, the wretched of the earth will no longer be wretched enough to make me cross the street.
    Oh yeah, music buskers too. Kick ’em out of NYC and the subways, and rents in Williamsburg go WAAAAY down. Win/Win/Win. They make it hard to understand what Ira Glass is talking about on my iPod.

  2. God willing when the Messiah/world communist revolution comes, the wretched of the earth will no longer be wretched enough to make me cross the street.
    Do you understand how awesome you are? Good shabbos.

  3. 2 things.
    1. When I was 10 my synagogue did a program where they housed homeless families with children during the holiday season (not Jewish families) and members of the congregation cooked dinner for hem and then the homeless families and congregational families ate together. The tearjerker moment came when we were driving home and my younger sister, then 5, announced that she had fun playing with the children, but where had the homeless people been? She hadn’t realized the girl she ran around with all night was a part of the homeless family we had broken bread with that night. Life lessons learned, etc.
    2. Might this have something to do with Maimonides’ ladder of tzedakah? That it is better to have an anonymous gift than personal contact with the person for whom you are trying to doing justice? Just a thought.

  4. 2. Might this have something to do with Maimonides’ ladder of tzedakah? That it is better to have an anonymous gift than personal contact with the person for whom you are trying to doing justice?
    This is something I’ve wondered about as well. Do others know whether this is unique to Maimonides? That is, is there anything in the Talmud that so sharply deprioritizes personal contact? My sense is that there isn’t.
    Could this be related to Maimonides’ philosophization/Aristotelianization of Judaism? Following Aristotle, for instance, Maimonides agrees that sense of touch is the most shameful of the five senses — that attitude wouldn’t necessarily seem to contribute to promoting ‘contact.’
    In other words, it would be one thing to argue for the superiority of anonymous donation in general, for instance, in relation to the dignity of the recipient — but it’s something else entirely if you’re coming to it from a presupposition that physical contact is undesirable.
    So maybe we should at least be more questioning of Maimonides’ rankings…
    On a note more inclined towards personal contact, the seder has us say ‘Let all who are hungry, come and eat.’ But I don’t know if this is often recited loudly enough for actual hungry people to hear it and to come into your house!

  5. There is a local Jewish organization where I live, Ve’ahavta (www.veahavta.org) that not only has people making the proverbial sandwiches for the homeless, but trains people, including teenagers to go out in vans that drive around distributing food, medical ( via a nurse) blankets and real conversation to the homeless. They have had events where homeless people were invited to a fun picnic on an island park with many other people- where there was socializing, food, music and zany picnic games- 3-legged race etc. They also hold a creative writing contest- with cash prize for homeless people. The awards ceremony is a fun, mixed social event. Not hairwashing but not shunning either

  6. I think the stream of thought that Maimonides was following is indicated in this passage from the Mishna:
    He who does not allow the poor to glean or allows one and
    not another, or helps one of them (in the gathering), robs the
    poor. Concerning such a man it has been said, “Remove not the
    ancient landmark.” -Mishnah Peah 5:6
    This passage is commented on in Open the Gates of Justice, the clergy report on Hyatt working conditions
    http://justiceathyatt.org/openthegates/openthegatesofjustice.pdf

  7. Do others know whether this is unique to Maimonides? That is, is there anything in the Talmud that so sharply deprioritizes personal contact? My sense is that there isn’t.
    I don’t think that Rambam is “sharply deprioritizing personal contact.” The concern is one of embarrassment. The Talmud, and therefore Rambam, presumes that one would be embarrassed to beg for money or to be given charity face-to-face.
    Each of the levels of Tzedakah according to Rambam are taken from different places in the Gemara. Most seem to come from Bava Batra, some of Sukkah, and a few from other assorted places, but none of them are the Rambam’s own creation. They are all sourced in Talmud.

  8. I think this post is a little unfair.
    The lack of personal contact could be a shortcoming of the ladder of tzedakah, but the way I always understood it was that you shouldn’t seek any credit for yourself or seek to aggrandize yourself through the way you help others.
    And in what I’m about to say, I might be a little unfair to the Christians in this movie, but I think one reason Christians do things like washing feet is to humble themselves. And to think that touching a homeless person humbles you is not exactly a benign view.

  9. I agree with Em that Maimonides is concerned about people using their charity as a way to promote themselves.
    Washing feet in ancient times is something that a servant would do for their master. Personal contact could have its own benefit but I do not think it is the primary point of feet washing, which I think is performing a function that you and society considers below your caste/class. Cleaning the toilet in the homeless shelter could be closer to the original intent of feet washing than anything involving personal contact that does not subvert class distinctions.

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