One morning this week, on a visit to New York, I was walking down Broadway on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, en route to a fundraising meeting. A significant part of my job involves offering wealthy people the opportunity to support our work at IJS, and in this case I was headed to the apartment of one such person—who, I hasten to add, is not only a wonderful supporter, but also, unsurprisingly, a wonderful, caring, and generous soul.
It was a beautiful fall morning. The air was crisp and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was one of those mornings when, in my experience, New York itself can feel a little more generous.
That atmosphere of abundance may have contributed to a mitzvah I witnessed. An elderly man in an ill-fitting suit and a golf cap was walking slowly, pushing a cart. He appeared to be on his way to the drug store. As he came in my direction, he turned aside to another man who was camped out in a sleeping bag above the exhaust vent of a building. The old man took out a dollar bill and gave it to the man on the ground and said something kind to him.
I noticed this interaction as I kept walking towards my fundraising visit in a fancy apartment building with a doorman. And the questions began to churn: I wonder what motivated the old man to do that. I wonder how the guy on the ground felt. I wonder what that dollar means to each of them (given that there’s not a lot you can buy with a dollar these days).
And then some bigger ruminations began to take shape: The building whose grate was providing heat to the man on the ground cost tens of millions of dollars. The price of an apartment in that building is itself millions of dollars. And what am I doing? I didn’t stop to offer the guy a dollar. In fact, I’m on my way into one of those fancy apartments to perform what some of our donors lovingly refer to as a “cashectomy,” moving (with the patient’s consent, of course) dollars out of their account and into that of the not-for-profit I lead—a portion of which goes to pay my own salary.
The thoughts spun for a while, swirling around capitalism and inequality and the ways I’m personally caught up in the whole system. And then I took a breath, let the thoughts settle, and decided to keep a mental snapshot of the moment.
While I don’t live in Manhattan now, I did as a young adult. And the sense I get whenever I visit these days is a feeling of a hollowed out middle. You can see it in the skyline. You can certainly see it in the mayoral election, which is making the news well beyond the Hudson River. Before I moved to New York as a young person, a mentor of mine told me, “To live in New York you need to be young or wealthy.” From what I can tell, today it can feel like even the “young” part of that statement isn’t so true.
While we think of it as a story about an ark during a flood, if we read a little more deeply we may find that Parashat Noach is a reflection on what it takes to maintain a shared society. What does it mean to be created in God’s image? How do we think of human beings in relation to other species, and to the planet itself? What are the basic norms by which we’re going to live? And, in the story of the Tower of Babel that comes after the flood, how do we maintain the languages and cultures that make us unique while also abiding in a sense of shared humanity?
At the outset of the Torah portion, the Holy One tells Noah, “the world is filled with violence because of human beings” (Gen. 6:13). The Midrash comments that this verse teaches that the generation of the flood took corruption to a particularly sophisticated level, stealing from one another not only through brazen acts, but in less detectable ways: “This is what the members of the generation of the Flood would do: One of them would take out a basket filled with beans [to the marketplace]. Another person would come and take less than a peruta worth [of beans] and another one would come and take less than a peruta worth [i.e. less than the amount for which one would be able to collect compensation in court].”
The Saba of Slobodka, Rabbi Nosson Zvi Finkel, observed that this midrash teaches how deeply we have to work on our character, our spiritual core: “How very much are we obligated to improve our actions!” On the one hand, it means letting go of the desire to hold on to even a peruta, the smallest amount of wealth. And on the other, I might suggest, and as the old man I saw on Broadway embodied, it could mean recognizing the value of that peruta to another—and freely and generously giving it away (much less giving many perutot).
The beginning of the verse from Genesis that I quoted above reads: “The end of all flesh has come before Me.” Perhaps on the deepest level, we read the story of the Flood to remind us that, while we may delude ourselves, ultimately we can’t take any of it with us. We are gifted the opportunity to sojourn on the planet for a short while. The question for each of us individually, and for all of us collectively, is, How can we be the best possible custodians of that gift—not only for ourselves, but for us all?
