Homelessness and the Jewish Tradition

(567 words submitted to Shema magazine for a contest to be published)


As a struggling artist, my father bought a building in a struggling neighborhood in Chicago. He needed a place to live and exhibit his work. Fortunately the East Village became the center of our small family real estate empire, but it also made us complicit in the gentrification of a neighborhood that no longer supported its original population, mostly poor Puerto Rican and African American families.
From early on, my dad chose to hire local trades’ people to help him fix up his properties. Torah teaches us about the ethical treatment of those who work for us and my dad was always guided by the mitzva, “You shall not abuse a needy and destitute laborer, whether a fellow countryman or a stranger…You must pay him his wages on the same day…for he is needy and sets his life on it, (Deut. 24:14-15)” The way my dad described it, it was a double good. The people in the neighborhood need the work and we want to be good neighbors.
When I took over the management of my dad's properties and bought some of my own, I found myself on the other side of two tenets of Judaism. Rabbi Akiva believed that poverty existed so that the more fortunate can do good, and in Torah it says that there will always be poor people. I believe that this was one of those rare times that Rabbi Akiva was sorely mistaken, and I was driven to disprove this Biblical conception of inevitable poverty. Why did there always need to be a class of poor people?
As a doctoral student of education, at the time, I decided that what kept poor people in their place was a lack of education. Nobody chooses to be poor, but these people were disadvantaged because they didn't have the tools to improve their lot. I continued to employ the people my dad had helped for over two decades, but I introduced something new to the mix. Together with our tenant, the local Alderman Walter Burnett, Jr., I started a Friday afternoon book club and hot lunch program.
The Chicago Avenue Book Club lasted for two years as I wrote my dissertation and ended abruptly when I took a job as an Education Director in a synagogue 20 some miles from our property. During that time I learned that literacy is a key to overcoming poverty. Literacy is not just the ability to read and write text. It is the tool, as the great Brazilian educator Paolo Freire wrote, “to read and write the world.” In the Book Club, we read Torah, wrote poems, spoke of our hopes and dreams, packed food for Katrina victims, learned about AIDS and dirty needles and shared our stories. Most of all, the book club members, of which there were several dozen, were listened to. Their voices mattered and they experienced self-esteem.
Of all the Jewish values that apply in fighting homelessness, self esteem is clearly the highest and I see its source in the commandment, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This commandment is not about doing onto others as we want done onto ourselves. It means you must love yourself in order to love your neighbor. Maybe if we can work on our own self-esteem as a society, we will begin to treat our homeless as people made in the same image of God as we were made in.

Here are ten minutes about my book club made by the members and me.