Poverty and Boaz & Smug Jews

I am poor. I just quit my job because my boss was a demeaning, belittling, haranguing, nit-picking bully, and I ended up in the hospital, exhausted and dehydrated; I've been referred to a stress clinic. It was a brutish life. The setting was a garden centre, looking like a sumptuous Gan Eden, where I slaved under a makeshift greenhouse, in extremes of temperature, with half the manpower we needed, led by a viper who hates women and manages by confusion, degradation and intimidation. This meant 8 hours with no breaks. No lunch time, no nothing, eating on the run. Physical and mental stress did me in. I know what the Hebrew slaves in Egypt were up against. I would have died 40 days down the road, my body worth more as fodder for the bricks than alive.

But I was poor before. I was and continue to be one of the working poor. Working poor are people who barely make enough to live on, get no benefits, and live hand to mouth. When you're labouring to live, you find yourself too exhausted and emotionally numb to blog, or even to think, and your life becomes like the beasts in the field- groan and toil, eat and fall unconscious, and forget.

I have mused and marvelled, more than once, how our Sages could hold down a full time job of labouring, and then contribute all that light and fire to the Talmud. It's either a mystery looking to be solved, the answer to the universe, a guide to 7 easy ways to do sagacious work while digging ditches, or a miracle. But I'm feeling a tad skeptical that they did it all and did it so well all by their little, humble, wise, and learned selves. That they just came in from a hard day's smithying or cesspool cleaning and tidied up, grabbed a bite, and hurried to the great halls of learning to burn the midnight oil. And that's only if they were single. What about those fruitful and multiplying families? What about the wife?

Very few people with Jblogs know what it means to be really poor, grindingly poor, even though you have a job, and to be counting every cent, all the while knowing that this poverty may never end- that the future holds more of the same, and that "upward mobility" began sliding downhill when you got divorced and older, with distant friends, and no immediate family.

When you are poor people treat you as if you are stupid. As if your brains fell out of the holes in your pockets. No matter how learned or educated or wise you are. They treat you as if you can't possibly know much, or have an opinion that matters. They treat you like a project, or a mission, but they rarely ask you what it is you need or know or have to say or what your story is. They treat you like you have no taste, no refinement, no discernment. They treat you every which way but humanly. Wraiths possess more substance in fairy tales than the poor. People assume things about you because you have no money, and it's never anything other than embarrassing; history, remembrance, cease to exist for the poor. To be poor is to be powerless. To be poor is to have your experience, your life, and your person denied, diminished and dismissed. Yes, Virginia, amidst so much abundance, life can be that harsh- and privation is a reality, especially in the way others deprive you of your dignity, although you may very well be feeling damn fine about it!

I volunteer at a homeless shelter every couple of months- we cook loads of food and then serve it. I love doing it because it means I can commune with everyone- I'm in the zone and it's all flow. I'm also attracted to cooking vessels of extravagant proportions. I notice lately that we have a lot more in common, the homeless and I, than little. It is a privilege, not a chore, doing this small thing, for I love to cook and I love to connect and since I have no money and no home to set a table, to buy and cook food and to invite guests, this is, in retrospect, my Shabbat table. My granny actually cooked for an army, and now I do it, too.

Last time, we were "requested" by email, not to serve, because a mom and her 'on-the-cusp-of bar mitzvah' kid would be taking on the duties.

I was angry. Then I was sad. I love to serve. How come fly-by-night mom gets to dictate how things go down? I'm a selfish git about that, but that's why I'm there. And does anyone understand the meaning of a mitzvah? As long as there is any distance between you and the other, as long as you create differences and lines and boundaries and fantasies for yourself, then all you are doing is engineering something utilitarian in servitude to another thing that may look, smell, feel, even taste like a mitzvah, but, as an event, what is it, really? The homeless become tools. The mitzvah becomes form, not substance- one of those damned k'lippot, a broken vessel, an empty shell. What's so sacred about that?

You know that whole thing about "Adonai echad"? The Lord is One? How ideally, we should meditate on it, turn it round and round? I recite the Shema almost every day (and it's about all I'm doing these days), and I rarely dwell on it as I'm running for the bus, but I always wonder about it. And yet, sometimes it hits me, as it did with that meddling mom and her "get her son some volunteer experience knowing what it's like to serve the homeless project and he can put it on his resume and also he is going to be bar mitzvah and that looks good too but of course he has to own it, so everyone else, get out of the way, cause this is a serious project for her and sonny boy- this 'serving the homeless' thang". In one fell swoop she made it something else- not a mitzvah, but a "performance". Not human beings, but "projects". Not communal.

Instead of the kid merging with us, being one of us, just hanging out with us, another hand helping and working and sharing with our merry little band, she set him apart, off by himself with her, doing their little bit, seriously- oh the gravity of it! Later, the kid stood alone with mom, and faced "the homeless". So much for learning anything about I-Thou, so much for learning to experience (v the performance of) the mitzvot. MItzvah as achievement. As performance art. As a pencilled check on someone's score sheet. MItzvah without fun. Without lightness of heart, lightness of being. Don't we all need to unload that weight, when doing a mitzvah? Isn't that part of it? Isn't a mitzvah about elevation? Of everything and all?

If truth be told, for all her earnestness, there was no way to "serve" the line of people all by themselves, so chaos ensued, and then order, and then we were eating bits of cauliflower souffle, and breaded chicken and roast potatoes, and sharing brown sugar and honey-sweet baked apple, and before you knew it, the kid had melted into the crowd, no longer "different". What he took away from it, though, I fear to think. It was nothing. Except a sense of achievement, or relief. It all just makes me weep.

Here's the true test for every Jew that crows about their religion and its greatness and specialness and touts its supremacy and its "truth" and the superiority of mitzvot through elaborate and ingenious "proofs": how do you treat the poor person? How close have you come to a poor person? Do you think they have something to say? That they have wisdom? Would you hug them? Would you ask for their advice? Can you even look them in the eye?

When the Torah speaks of loving the stranger, the orphan, the widow....who is the Boaz among us, who invites the poor to glean in their fields and then marries them? That's the true test of what it means to be a Jew. Until it happens I will not be terribly convinced of the piety of most pious and proud Jews with their smug and largely frivolous content of what passes for true Judaism on blogs these days. Poverty humbles one, and concentrates the mind, fiercely. The truth of religion becomes very simple, indeed.

Continued: Beggared Lunacy & Shabbat


Addenda

1. On a personal note, I grew up on and around the poverty line in New York (depending on the month). I’m Jewish, highly educated thanks so my ability to work my way through College and now through grad-school–as have my younger brother and sister–so theoretically I’m doing great, demographics wise. But my family’s adjusted gross income is still hovering around poverty line. We ourselves don’t avail of the Met Council–we make it through the month–but just think, if we are where we are, how many other families are doing worse than us? I’d say a lot–which was so shocking about the statistic when I first got to know it.

Finally, I think it is important to say in this forum that it doesn’t matter who the poor person is–whether they’re secular like my family or Ultra-O like some of the families that for sure make up the over 100,000 Jewish poor in NYC–the problem is that poverty exists and that the main Jewish orgs aren’t finding it a priority makes me a bit queasy.

Comment #26 by Ariel Beery — 6/16/2006 @ 1:31 pm

2. It’s a constant struggle. As for my own level of observance, I am not shomer shabbos and I don’t keep kosher, but I go to (a non-Orthodox) shul and/or a shabbos meal most friday nights, and celebrate holidays (though not the way I used to). I also still learn with friends, but what’s different is that we feel comfortable syaing whatever we want and women are involved and equal participants. I hope I don’t sound too bitter here, but there are a lot of people in my position who really need help and support with basic life needs, so I just get frustrated sometimes about the $ being given to dubious cultural programs (which is not to say that there are not many meaningful ones out there, but a lot of is shallow, in my view).

Comment #32 by ffbguy — 6/18/2006 @ 11:05 am

Found at: Jewlicious. Poverty and New York Jews

Also see: Jewish Poverty