Reconciliation: 19

“Get to work or lose your benefits.” What a sentiment. At what ages, over five and under 70? At what stage of MS, cancer, heart disease, kidney failure, or other dread disease? Under what burdens of a disadvantaged childhood? Further, where shall we warehouse the miscreants?

My personal opinion is that Americans sometime make pronouncements that don’t stand up to rational scrutiny.

The truth is, recognizing the existence of, and caring for, the poor among us is a profoundly complicated issue. Even the Old Testament can offer contradictory direction. As Rabbi Jill Jacobs has written: "A striking feature of [ a passage in Deuteronomy] is the apparent contradiction between verse four, 'There shall be no needy among you,' and verse eleven, 'For the poor will never cease from the land.' We expect the omnipotent God of the Torah to keep promises; we are therefore surprised to hear the Torah promise to eradicate poverty and then, almost in the same breath, admit that this promise will never be fulfilled.”

The New Testament is clearer. The Galilean didn’t have much time for those who valued riches over honor, exhorting his followers to avoid eternal rejection, in Matthew 25, by caring for “the least of those among us.” Before that was written, though, the writer of Second Timothy urged us to be “a worker who needeth not be ashamed.” The Galilean himself was not kind, though, to the capitalists in the Temple who were engaged in what would be considered today an exalted and exemplary profession. It is no wonder that we develop contradictory feelings.

Without doubt, there are those who wish to live upon the charity of others. In addition those too lazy to work, we must include corporations and institutions that decline to pay a fair share of taxes, those who are protected from failure by the public, and even those who are publicly subsidized for home ownership, (often while voting for politicians who promise to end rental housing assistance for their poor fellow human beings). It just all fails to make common sense to me. That is why I must respectfully disagree with some dear friends whose conclusions are different from mine.

Let us once again turn to Rabbi Jacobs and note what she writes: “The overarching Jewish attitude toward the poor is best summed up by a single word of the biblical text: achikha (your brother). With this word, the Torah insists on the dignity of the poor, and it commands us to resist any temptation to view the poor as somehow different from ourselves.”

I conclude from my reading and study, that if are to say the all children must go forth and be self-sufficient and successful or “lose” our concern and assistance, we are forced into some perilous beliefs. We must believe, for example that a child in dirty diapers on the front porch of a shack in the Arkansas Delta, who waits for his mother to finish “turning a trick” for enough cash for her next meth hit, has the same chance at that self-sufficiency as the children of Donald Trump.

Believe as you will and serve whom you please. As for me and my household, we will help the poor whenever we can, and will support a government who does not abandon them. We don’t do it in hopes of obtaining a heavenly reward in return. We simply do it because we believe it is the right thing to do as members of a greater brotherhood and sisterhood: the family of humankind.

We are also touched by a story the Rabbi narrates concerning a group of passengers in a boat. When one pulls out a drill and begins boring a hole in the bottom of the boat, to the consternation and complaints of his fellow passengers, he says, “Why should this bother you? I am only drilling under my own seat.”

In the end, the bad or good we do in life flows across our communities like a destructive flood or a healing rain. It is our choice.

Back to the factories or coal mines?