There’s a neighborhood grocery store two blocks from my house. It’s called Village Marketplace and, to many of us who reside in Skokie, it’s one of the best things about living here. It’s not a big chain, it’s independently owned, and best of all, I can walk there and back in 5 minutes when we need a dozen eggs.
Occasionally there are folks standing outside Village Market (locals drop the “place” in the name; in our family we refer to it as VMart in an homage to the great Detroit Tigers switch-hitting DH from the early 2010s, Victor Martinez): young women selling Girl Scout cookies or people selling “StreetWise,” the magazine written and produced by homeless people around Chicago.
But in recent years the folks standing outside have more often been migrant families holding cardboard signs asking for donations, a local reminder of a national and global challenge. We can see these migrants, refugees, in what feels like virtually every shopping center parking lot, at major street intersections, outside sporting events.
Like most people, when I’m in my car I drive right past them. But when they’re standing in front of me as I pass the entrance to the grocery store, that’s harder to ignore. Which doesn’t mean I don’t ignore them–it just means that doing so weighs more heavily on my conscience. While I often give them money, just as frequently I don’t have cash, and their cardboard sign doesn’t have a QR code to Venmo them. So I go into the store and exit it with a little aversion of my gaze, my modest attempt to diminish the pain of both internalizing their situation and my own moral self-judgment. (If my Spanish were better, I might ask them what they need from inside and buy it for them.)
Part of the mental story I tell myself during such moments is precisely that these people in front of me are manifestations of much larger systemic problems: our immigration and asylum systems, failed governments in far away places, foreign policy choices, climate change. My inaction toward them thus becomes justifiable: What good does helping one person do in the face of challenges that are many orders of magnitude larger than me or them? It’s like trying to boil the ocean–so I can just go on with my day. Perhaps this resonates with you, too.
There’s an article that’s been circulating on my social media feed this week by a writer named Rachel Cohen. She explores her own attitudes towards volunteering, and thoughtfully places them in the context of larger social trends and ideas of the last 25 years–Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Occupy Wall Street, climate activism. What she concludes is that many of us have been told, and now tell ourselves, that we should focus on systemic solutions, and that emphasizing individual actions is actually a distraction from doing so, i.e. we’re not going to recycle our way out of climate change. Yet Cohen thoughtfully interrogates this set of assumptions, and ultimately suggests that our individual actions–she starts donating blood regularly–are important not only for the actions themselves, but for the well-being and sense of connection they foster within and between us.
Among the commandments that are restated or elaborated in Parashat Re’eh are the laws of the sabbatical year. The Torah here addresses us as both individuals and as a collective, envisioning a society that sees and cares for those on the margins. “If there is a needy person among you, one of your kindred in any of your settlements in the land that YHVH your God is giving you, do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kindred. Rather, you must open your hand and lend whatever is sufficient to meet the need” (Deut. 15:7-8). Rashi, quoting the midrash, observes: “There are people who painfully deliberate whether they should give or not, therefore Scripture states, ‘you shall not harden your heart’; and there are people who stretch their hand forth but then close it, therefore it is written, ‘you shall not close your hand.'”
I certainly have been that person the Torah is talking about. Perhaps, like me, you’ve had a momentary deliberation about whether to give to the person in need standing in front of you. Perhaps, like me, you can recognize yourself in those brief moments of hesitation Rashi describes. So, first and foremost, I would just say: Let’s listen to the Torah, which plainly understands how our minds and motivations work, and seeks to help us respond to our own inclinations through mindful attention.
Beyond that, I would add that I think it’s helpful to think of the systemic as related to–not necessarily defined by, but related to–a sum of individual actions. “Don’t harden your heart” is clearly connected to the “listening heart” King Solomon asks for at the beginning of his reign, the same listening heart I frequently suggest is what we seek to cultivate as members of democratic societies. The king’s actions are rooted in his heart, and in a democracy all of us are kings–we all hold responsibility for the state of society, whether through our votes or through our actions in front of the neighborhood grocery store.
