By Miriam Darnowsky

Perusing an old New York Times article led me to discover the Slavery Footprint website, which allows you to take a survey, and, based on your answers to questions about food, clothing, electronics and other items you use and/or own, it determines approximately how many slaves “work for you.” The website encourages people to become more involved in the movement to end slavery, especially through contacting companies and asking them to investigate their labor chains to see if there is any slavery involved.

I became so intrigued by the topic that I decided to do a paper for my sociology course on modern day slavery. According to the International Labor Organization, there are currently about 21 million people in forced labor; 5.5 million of these modern days slaves are under18 years old and 4.5 million are sexually exploited. Reading the statistics on child labor, sex trafficking, and other types of forced labor is distressing.  Even more painful was reading the books A Crime So Monstrous by E. Benjamin Skinner and Half the Sky by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, which, in addition to statistics on modern day slavery, also contain victims’ personal stories.

The magnitude and severity of the abuse of the weak and underprivileged is enough to make one almost lose faith in the goodness of humanity and to give up in despair. What sorts of individuals force adults and children into labor, often under dangerous conditions, and without pay? What kinds of people lure young girls into prostitution, beating them into submission when they refuse to obey?  And what kind of person am I to continue living the way I do, knowing that through my purchases of certain products, I am indirectly supporting slavery, abuse and exploitation?

It is easy to become jaded and apathetic. One can come to the conclusion that the problem is too big to solve, and therefore one must continue one’s life and not think about such things. When I brought up the topic of modern day slavery during a Shabbos meal the complacent attitude displayed by others was unnerving. The most common reactions were:  “Well, we’re not directly involved, so it’s not our problem” or “Everyone everywhere is being taken advantage of to some degree, that’s life.”

As an American who believes in liberty and justice for all, and as a Jew who believes that all human beings are created in the image of G-d and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, I cannot ignore this atrocity. While I wish I could discover or create a magical, cure-all solution to slavery, I cannot. However, that does not exempt me from investing in the cause to end slavery. There is a famous quote attributed to Edmund Burke: “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.”

There are ways to become involved in the struggle towards freedom, through spreading awareness, buying products which are manufactured ethically, (- like those from Fair Trade,)contacting companies that you purchase from regularly and  asking them to investigate their labor chains and eradicate any slave labor involved (you can do this on the Slavery Footprint website, or on the Chain Store Reaction website) , and donating to organizations fighting against human trafficking. Together we can all take small steps towards eradicating one of the most horrific realities that exists today. Some websites to explore to learn more, and for suggestions on how to get involved are: Free the Slaves, End Slavery Now, End It Movement and Destiny Rescue.

***Learn more about abolishing slavery next Monday, March 18th at Uri L’Tzedek’s next Social Justice Beit Midrash, “Exploring our Obligations in Modern-Day Slavery” Keelie Sorenson, human rights activist, will discuss our obligation to end slavery today. Rabbi Shaul Robinson, Rabbi at Lincoln Square Synagogue will speak about the Torah perspective on slavery. Lincoln Square Synagogue (200 Amsterdam Ave) at 7pm.

By: Andrew Scheer, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Student and Army Chaplain trainee

In prison, there are no Orthodox Jews.  Neither are there Conservative nor Reform Jews.  There are no Hasidim, Misnagdim, Sephardim or Ashkenazim.  What there are, are people with a Jewish meal card.  For all of the difficulties I witnessed inmates encounter, I was overwhelmed by the tremendous sense of egalitarianism and yachdut pervading the gym  synagogue where I led High Holiday services this year at Rikers Island.

To give you a sense of what I mean, I’ll tell you about the first day of Rosh HaShana when my friend Josh was blowing shofar and we’d asked everyone to gather close as the guards kept a suspicious watch.  Josh started out strong but like every ba’al tokea does, started fumbling halfway through the 20^th blast or so.  Exasperated, he pulled the shofar away from his face, bright red, flustered and frustrated.  In other synagogues I’d heard shofar, ‘on the outside,’ this is when the hushed murmuring would no doubt begin.  “What’s wrong?  Why did he stop?  Doesn’t he know how long these services are?”  But in Rikers, among the 40 or so prisoners assembled, all I heard was a shout, 2 or 3 rows back, “Rabbi Josh, You got this!”

Josh stood up straight, licked his lips, pulled the shofar close and confidently blew the remaining blasts.  That moment of encouragement, those three words, ‘you got this,’ encapsulate the tremendous camaraderie I felt among the inmates at Rikers Island.

Before I stepped foot on the island, I was apprehensive.  My inner dialogue was torn.  ‘Will the inmates listen to me?  I’m 26, what do I have to teach about life, and during a time of deep introspection all the more so!  Will my service be too traditional, not traditional enough, too much Hebrew, not enough English?’  I’m going to change gears for a second and speak to where I think these feelings of doubt and anxiety come from and why I felt so unprepared to visit, let alone lead a service in a correctional facility.

We live in a throwaway society.  I read an article recently saying that most of what populates our landfills is packaging.  We don’t buy bunch spinach anymore, it comes out of a plastic bag.  When we buy a soda from a convenience store, it comes in a plastic bag which we use for the 10 seconds it takes to get from the store to the corner where we throw it out.  That bag was designed, manufactured, processed, shipped, paid for and provided to us gratis to be used for a fleeting moment, at which point it ceases to become useful and becomes garbage.  Garbage that collects…somewhere else.  The instant that bag is tossed into the trash receptacle, our relationship with it ends.  To us, it is as if it simply disappears.

But of course, it does not.  Another human being comes in a truck to pick it up, then drop it off on a barge to be taken to a landfill.  Half a dozen more people may interact with that bag before it finds its ultimate resting place.  But we don’t see that, and we don’t care.  And why should we?  After all it’s only a plastic bag.  However, the notion that we as a society allow items with which we were attached albeit ephemerally, to ‘collect’ somewhere influences our attitude not only towards inanimate objects but also towards our actions and ultimately human beings.  One of these places where people simply ‘collect’ is jail.

Before I committed to leading high holiday services at Rikers Island, I thought about it and realized I knew absolutely nothing about the place or the people who inhabit that imprisoned island.  This despite Rikers Island’s use as a jail for over 100 years before I was born, with an inmate population of over 10,000 in addition to guards and staff and an annual budget of over $800 million.  And yet, despite being a lifelong New Yorker I never stopped to consider what goes on there.  The criminal justice system is an anomaly in that we as a society pay a high price for it, but if it works properly, the hope is we go through our whole lives never having interacted with it.  The hope is that criminal justice is invisible.  It is a bill for living in a city where it is safe to walk down the street.  But much like the plastic bag sitting in a landfill, there are hidden costs which we at our most ignorant moments don’t see, or most troubling moments choose to ignore.

Over the high holidays this year, I was afforded an opportunity very few people ever get.  A chance to glimpse over the barbed wire to see how a correctional facility operates, an overnight guest of the New York City Department of Corrections.  I was neither incarcerated nor tasked with guard duty.  What I witnessed at times shocked me, like the display of shivs and worn in riot gear, and at times inspired me, like the inmate whose Yom Kippur silent amidah, devotional prayer, lasted well into the chazzan’s repetition as he struggled to read every word of the Hebrew text and afterwards the English translation.

The strongest takeaway from my time in prison remains that folks who are incarcerated are not a class of citizens for whom this was their only possible destiny.  Who here in this room hasn’t committed some indiscretion that we’ve ‘gotten away with,’ never having to pay the consequences of.  I’m reminded of a young woman I met, a Russian émigré who moved to America with her parents when she was 7.  By all measures, she is a bright girl and she was on a path towards a good life, a normal life, the one we all enjoy, when at the age of 15, the van she and her parents were riding in broke down on the side of the highway.  She got out a little too quickly and her mother, realizing she was in danger, jumped out of the car, pushed her daughter out of the way and took the full impact of a vehicle at highway speed, perishing.  When this woman who was sitting in front of me came to in the hospital, she didn’t even know her mother had died.  She’d blacked out from the force of her mother’s push and still suffers brain damage to this day.  Without a strong female role model at home, and with a father who took to alcohol and loose women following the death of his wife, this woman’s life descended into a deep spiral of which she has not yet reached the bottom of.  Chas v’shalom, but this could’ve happened to anyone sitting here today.  One minute your prospects couldn’t be brighter, the next it’s as if all the windows and doors of opportunity are locked up, far away from you, forever.

But then, what is the goal of incarceration?  What purpose does it serve society and how much does society owe to those who we choose to imprison?  On the one hand, I hear the argument as expressed by Warden Norton in ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ that the only things the public are willing to pay more for in prisons are bars and guards.  Why should we allocate more resources to people who have convicted of crimes against others and the state while the purse strings for education and the like are being pulled back more than ever?  However, on the other hand, it benefits us to think about the long term consequences of sacrificing programs that aid in prisoners’ reentry back into society and prevent recidivism, ultimately saving the state’s funds.

I’ll give you one last quick story.  Josh and I were mere hours away from leaving Rikers Island after Rosh HaShana when we decided to invite any interested inmates to our room to celebrate the end of the holiday and speak to them about what life is like ‘on the inside.’  One of the most shocking things I heard, and I should mention that this man is a 32^nd generation descendent of the Rambam, was the standard procedure for release after an inmate serves his or her time.  He was placed on the only bus out of Rikers, the Q100, with a $4.50 metrocard and whatever money was left in his account from the Rikers commissary.  To someone who has family that cares about them or resources on which to live, they should be fine.  But for the vast majority of the inmate population, who use public defenders at their trials and are by many measures some of the most indigent and vulnerable people in our society, they have nowhere to go and no one who cares about them.  And then we’re shocked when they reoffend.

I read an article in The Economist dated May 19^th 2012 which quotes California’s prison boss, Matthew Cate as saying “America has seen prison as a place to throw people away,” says Mr Cate, whereas “Europeans see prison as place people will return from.”  Let’s change that.  Let’s change the fact that America contains 5% of the world’s population but almost 25% of its prisoners.  There’s a line at the end of Doctor Zhivago that I feel is poignant to the issue we are all here to discuss today.  “One day she went away and didn’t come back. She died or vanished somewhere, in one of the Labor Camps. A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid. That was quite common in those days.”  Let’s get together and make sure that when somebody is incarcerated, they do not merely vanish, that they are not nameless, they are not forgotten and that we have the responsibility to look after each other, not only when it’s easy, but especially when it’s difficult.

Rabbi Eliot Baskin

Jewish Community Chaplaincy & Rafael Spiritual  Healing Program of Jewish Family Service of Colorado

I recall the “shamas” of the FCI Englewood, CO Jewish community.   He was from Oklahoma and committed a federal crime of threatening the President in a letter which he maintained is a violation of free speech.   He faithfully lit candles every week and said the kiddush over grape juice, frequently by himself as even in jail it is tough to corner up a minyan.  He counted every day until his release and said the only time he felt free was on shabbat or when I visited on the holidays of Chanukah and Passover and discussed the miracles of dedication and liberation.  He taught me that physical bondage may be imposed, but that spiritual freedom is always possible for those who have faith.

In commemoration of Yosef’s prison sentence, starting in Parshat Vayeishev and ending in Parshat Miketz, Uri L’Tzedek has declared December 9 – 15 Jewish Prison Reform Week. Join Uri L’Tzedek in raising awareness about the need for prison reform in America this December.  Please read here for contextual information and a list of action steps you can take this week.  Use the reports , talking points and texts to get started.  As a community, we can make a difference through education and action!

By: Liz Traison, Program Fellow at Hazon

I would like to share with you one of the proudest, most powerful moments of my life. Inside a small gymnasium with air conditioners blowing on high, a poetry reading took place involving myself, a group of inmates, and our small lien-cleared audience. I nervously started reading a poem I had written for the group of boys I had gotten to know quite closely over the months of the semester. When I concluded I was met with a wave of orange jumpsuits as the boys, mirroring me, moved from sitting to standing in applause. This poetry reading was the last night I would ever see “my boys”, as I affectionately referred to them over the course of our weekly visits, because the law forbid us from keeping in touch with each other when the semester ended.  The energy that passed between us at that moment, as I looked at them while they showed their appreciation, was so alive that it didn’t matter that we were also legally forbidden from embracing. It was a feeling I will never forget.

Through an organization called the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), on a weekly basis during my time at University of Michigan, I had the incredible opportunity to facilitate a creative writing workshop in a prison. Growing up in a Jewish community in suburban Detroit, prison was hardly a part of my vocabulary. Prisoners were a foreign, far away population even though in reality they were physically very close. I had no particular reason for becoming involved in the organization other than having always had a passion for social justice, although when I began PCAP I’m not sure I totally understood what was not socially just about prison.

It’s incredibly easy to not know about prison, to not investigate the complexities and prejudices of our justice system, and the enforced inequalities of our education system that is inevitably intertwined into it all. It’s easy to think that people do bad things and deserve punishment, to define someone by a crime rather than as an individual, and think that we play no part in it all. But if you take a minute to inform yourself of the horrifying realities–the US holds less than 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prisoners, or that about 50% of US prisoners suffer from a mental illness, or that 90% of women in prison are single mothers or that 7% of African American children has one parent in prison–I challenge you not to care.

As Jews, it’s potentially even easier to turn a blind eye, and I’m constantly asked why I focus my energy in prison when the Jewish community has it’s own internal responsibilities and problems to fix. I agree, and struggle with what causes I find to be important, but prison reform has struck a chord with me. As a result of my upbringing, I had begun writing poetry in 3^rd grade. In a correctional facility in downtown Detroit, I watched a 17-year old boy cry as he completed his first poem. He never knew it was something he could do because he hadn’t been to school in years, and even if he had I’m not sure it would have made a difference. It was never a question that I would graduate from high school, but 68% of American prisoners don’t have a high school diploma. It was never a question that I would graduate from college; it was a question of where. The reality for the boys I wrote with during my first semester in college was that by the time I would get my diploma, they would most likely be back in prison, or dead.

The biblical word for prison, סוהר בית, is mentioned only once in the Torah. It appears in this week’s Parsha, Va’Yeshev, when Joseph is sent to jail after falsely being accused of having an affair with Potifar’s wife. In prison, Joseph, a born leader, was put in charge of the other prisoners (verse 21). In reading this story with new eyes, I see some of the incarcerated individuals I have met in Joseph. A man I know spent most of his life in prison. He has the hypnotically inspiring and soothing voice of a reverend, and I frequently used to tell him I wish I could record him speaking and listen to it on my iPod. A natural born leader like Joseph, this man was forced to spend years in solitary confinement, sometimes strapped naked to a bed because the corrections officers feared his natural leadership abilities.

Joseph was an incredibly talented individual with a knack for interpreting dreams.  It is this talent that ends up saving his life, when Pharoh’s butler remembers Joseph and calls on him to interpret Pharoh’s dreams. For Joseph, there was an opportunity for creativity in prison. I am constantly amazed at the way modern day American prisons are on the whole a vacuum suck of creative energy. Yet, some are able to find the ability to create and perhaps even heal in a way that never existed before. Another man I met had never picked up a paintbrush before he was sent to prison, but through a fluke, while he was there he began painting with watercolors. He says the artwork he has created since he returned home is less passionate, and that prison actually fostered more emotional work.

Through PCAP I have seen beautiful art, theater, and writing be born from the darkest depths of prison, I have watched people mourn and heal through their expression, and have cried so many nights knowing that all of that is stuck behind cell walls unless I do something about it. Pharoh’s butler was physically able to bring Joseph out of prison, but in our modern world this is obviously not an option. Instead, I feel it is my job to remind the world that there are actual individuals in prison—people with names, with families, with talent.

In accord with Uri L’Tzedek’s week of prison reform awareness, let this week’s parsha be a starting point to start thinking about prison reform, to remind us that there are people behind the walls of these facilities.  Let us not label each other by the worst thing we have ever done, but by the things we are best at.   Rather than being a holding cell or kippah of Rabbinic lore, let’s push to have prisons be a place for creativity and rehabilitation. Let’s continue to bring stories from the inside out, to raise awareness, to educate and to celebrate the freedom of creativity.

The Yom Iyun was a huge success.  Participants plan to take what they learned to their communities.  We are excited to plan another Yom Iyun for the spring.  Please contact Yael.Keller@utzedek.org if you are interested!

Over the past few days, I have spent some time on the Lower East Side of New York, coordinating and handing out materials to those in need.  I have seen a lot of need, anxiety and desperation – and I hope our actions helped diminish those feelings.  But, I have also seen a community come together in a way that is giving and kind.   We have been lucky to work with some amazing people –yesterday Uri L’Tzedek met with 40 volunteers before dividing up to hand out supplies.  Today, there are groups from Hadar and Uri L’Tzedek back on the streets and Yeshiva University sent a bus full of students eager to help.  I hope everyone will join this conversation and add their experiences to my own below:

When we first arrived on the corner with 5 huge packages of bottled water we were suddenly surrounded by residents of the Lower East Side who desperately needed water.  As we explained that these supplies were specifically for homebound seniors, I was worried that we would have a riot.  To my immense relief and surprise people immediately began yelling out housing complexes and specific apartments faster than I could write them down.  Someone whose father was wheelchair bound in Apt 25C; an older woman in apartment 12A; an obese woman who can’t take the stair in 13B – the list kept growing.  These were people who had no electricity or running water and hardly anyone tried to convince us to give them the scarce supplies we had brought, leaving them for the housebound.

As the volunteers went out and returned throughout the day, they brought their experiences back to me as well.   One volunteer, in particular, stood out.   On her visits, one woman opened the door, crying, with a screaming baby on her shoulder.  She didn’t speak English but wrote down a note for the volunteer, who promised to return.  The volunteer went to the street and translated the note to learn the woman needed baby formula.  She walked the streets until she found an open bodega, purchased the formula and returned to the woman.  Because of her true dedication and compassion she was able to help and connect to someone who didn’t come from her background or share her language.

The hallways were pitch black but as we knocked on doors, residents would come into the hallways to lend their flashlights so we could carefully distribute supplies.   In one such hallway, on one of the last visits of the day, we discovered an elderly woman who was in trouble.  She had a full time aid but the aid had run out of her own medications and needed to return to her home.  They couldn’t reach the aid agency and were starting to panic.  The toilets weren’t working and they were living in an unhealthy state.  We entered the home and used our cell phone to call her son, who is also home-bound and terminally ill.  We sat with the woman and the aid to calm them and ended up calling 911 to make sure the woman got the necessary care.  When I followed up with her son that evening, I learned she had been taken to a hospital where someone can care for her until her electricity returns.

I want to leave you with an image of a black woman wearing bright pink cargo pants.  She is setting up a table on the corner we have been stationed at all day.  The table is filled with candles, food, water and – most coveted – batteries.  Her name is Regina and she stands in front her table, warmly greeting people by name and handing out warm hugs along with cans of soup and bottles of water.  She carefully dispenses to those in need so the supplies last.  We brought over the last remnants our supplies and she accepted them with a smile, telling us she was here to look out for her community.   Until the power goes back on she will set up shop and help hand out goods but she can’t do it alone.   Please take a few hours to make a donation or go down to the Lower East Side with the supplies Regina needs to keep feeding her neighbors.

And, as the power comes back on I want to remind myself (and hope you will listen) that the need is not always as easy to see but it is always there.  I hope that I can take the energy and inspiration I have gathered over the last three days to continue to help those in need in the many days to come.   You can start by joining me a Social Justice Beit Midrash on November 13^th that will look at systemic challenges that affect the elderly and learn what we can do to alleviate them throughout the year.

-Yael Keller, Program Associate, Uri L’Tzedek

Report from Ariel Fisher, Director of Summer Fellowship, NYC 2012:

This past Friday we completed the fourth successful Uri L’Tzedek Summer fellowship in New York. The Uri L’Tzedek summer fellowship is our premier program that trains the next generation of Orthodox college students in how to be social justice community leaders in the Orthodox world. To that extent the fellows had a number of fantastic opportunities to learn with leaders in the Orthodox world, such as Rabbis Yitz Greenberg and Dov Linzer, as well as to meet a whole array of interesting and influential leaders in the lay and nonprofit world; ranging from community organizers, to journalists and board members.

Another component of the summer fellowship was the continuation of Uri L’Tzedek’s flagship program, the Tav HaYosher. This summer, the Tav work that we did took a slightly new tactic focusing on a new initiative called the “Tav Pledge.” The Tav Pledge is a new attempt to get individuals and organizations to pledge to either only purchase from or make a number of future purchases from Tav certified restaurants. This is a communal way of showing these restaurants that we truly do support them and the fact that they are upstanding exemplars in our community. If you are interested in taking the Tav Pledge yourself, click here or if you are involved in an organization that wants to take the Tav Pledge, please click here.

In addition to working on the Tav pledge and attempting to sign up new restaurants for the Tav HaYosher, the fellows also focused on an exciting new initiative that Uri L’Tzedek is launching called the “Just Simchas” campaign. The idea behind this campaign is to encourage the Jewish community to be more socially conscious when spending money on simchas. As our fellow Miriam Darnoswky put it, the vision is that “When somebody leaves a simcha they shouldn’t just say, “What a great party” but rather should say, “This event was a true reflection of Jewish values and makes me proud to be Jewish.” Keep your eyes open for the “Just Simchas” guide that will be available soon.

In short, this was another exciting and successful summer for Uri L’Tzedek filled with many great accomplishments that we are so proud of our fellows for. We are getting ready and excited for the start of this next year’s collegiate AMOS Fellowship, which will begin on September 4th – there are still some spots available so you can sign up here if you want to and are looking forward to an exciting summer in 2013!

Earlier this week the Uri L’Tzedek fellows in New York volunteered for Dorot. Our volunteer work consisted of us escorting some seniors to cemeteries to visit their deceased loved ones. Some brought flowers, others love and prayers. What was so eye opening to me about my experience, was the orientation; people had to be taught how to speak to seniors.

I must tell you, that it chills me to the bone, the thought of not going to see my grandparents during the chagim, family yahrtzeits, Thanksgiving, or even for the periodic visit just to say hello. Our grandparents and their generation are living history and are what connects us to the past.

So why does Dorot feel like they must have an orientation before we speak to the seniors? Unfortunately it seems like people just aren’t connecting to the past generations and as a result to their history.  Perhaps this is why many have identity issues; they have no “home base” to connect with. This is part of a greater problem with today’s society, we cannot connect to the past, and we are constantly pushing ourselves away from it.

Now that we are entering the Nine Days, I think it is most apropos that we reflect on the past. If we would have learned from our mistakes from the first churban Ha-Beit, then perchance there never would have been a second churban. The Beit Ha-Mikdash was also destroyed because of sinat chinam, and I don’t think there’s any better example other than this, people not caring about others just because they have a little more life experience. This even comes to the point to where they don’t even know how to talk to them. Then when they do decide to “do the noble thing” and “help a senior” they have to be reminded to how to interact with these seniors.

Yes, they might have a bit more life experience than you, and most likely they listen to different music, but at the end of the day you have a lot in common with many seniors. You just have to simply talk to them like the human beings. Not only might you learn more about your history, roots and really about yourself, you might even make a friend. So the next time you see a senior, remember that one day you’ll be one too.

-Jonah Keyak, Uri L’Tzedek Fellows 2012 – New York City

Every so often in elementary school, my teacher would pass around the blue JNF box. The coins in it were real, and jingly, but I never knew where they went, and I never thought much about that. It was just a box.

When we studied tzedakah, it was similarly abstract. We learned that one of the most important ways to be Jewish was to help others. But blue box or not, I didn’t feel like I was impacting anyone’s life.

Still, those lessons made an impact on me, because I’m more comfortable with the word tzedakah than with “charity”. Charity, in my mind, is what you drop into a beggar’s hand, and careful now, don’t touch him, you don’t know what that grime is. I internalized Maimonides’ teaching that anonymous giving preserves dignity for both parties.

Because that’s a Jewish principle, and because tzedakah is a Jewish word, I imagine a leveled playing field when I hear it. An act of giving that is less of a transaction and more of an invitation to a better life.

When Maimonides ranked different types of tzedakah, he praised anonymity, but he wrote that helping someone become self-sustaining, the proverbial fishing lesson, is the best kind of gift. These two models seem to contradict each other. How can I teach people the tools to support themselves if I isolate myself and don’t understand others’ needs? But isn’t it difficult to enter into these kinds of relationships? Maybe I should stick to little blue boxes.

Uri L’Tzedek’s Los Angeles office is a few doors down from a food pantry, and many mornings on my way to the fellowship, I pass a long line of people waiting for the kitchen to open. I never know whether to acknowledge them with a smile or to avoid embarrassing them with extra attention. Which reaction preserves more dignity?

And then one day last week, as a fellow Fellow and I walked through the neighborhood recruiting restaurants for the Tav, an elderly woman asked me for tzedakah. I’ve been approached for money dozens of times, but never for tzedakah, so I didn’t immediately register what she’d said.

“Tzedakah,” she repeated.
“Oh,” I replied. “Oh. No, I’m sorry.”
“Aren’t you going to give me some tzedakah?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry,” she sneered.

When I recounted this conversation to Aviva Bellman, our fellowship director, she echoed the reasoning I’d had for refusing the woman’s request. It feels bad to say no, bad enough to apologize and mean it, but social service agencies can often have a more constructive impact on a poor person’s life. More of a Maimonides level one effect.

But where does denying tzedakah fall on Maimonides’ list?  And when the woman used that Hebrew word, how much did she care where our interaction fit into the rubric of a medieval philosopher? She needed money, and to get it, she was willing to forgo anonymity and even be rude.

For my part, I wanted my apology to acknowledge her need and maintain her dignity. Ultimately, though,  I don’t think I gave her anything at all.

- Sarah Rogozen, Uri L’Tzedek Fellowship 2012 – Los Angeles