Within the OU and its departments, we are focusing meaningful effort on considering and addressing the issue of sinat chinam, providing both food for thought and practical action points that can help us begin to demonstrate care for each other and ameliorate our nation’s divisions by adjusting both our thinking and actions. We invite you into this process in the hope that you may find it meaningful and helpful, add your own energies to this effort, and be in touch to contribute your own thoughts and ideas. Thank you to all who have already shared their thoughts and ideas.
We began by pulling out our ear pods to try to notice those around us a bit more, and then went further to provide someone with a sense of “imach” by taking a bit of time to check in. What is the next step?
When I was a student, every Friday afternoon a bus from the local Jewish nursing home would come to pick up students from the yeshiva to bring them to visit the residents. We would go from room to room and floor to floor, smiling and saying hello, bringing a welcome youthful presence and some Erev Shabbos cheer. Our measure of success for that hour-long visit was the number of people we reached and brought joy.
I later observed someone who regularly visited the same nursing home but used a different approach. Instead of going from room to room and bed to bed, this person came every week to spend meaningful time with one resident. She forged a friendship with that person and would spend a half hour or more with her in conversation. Those visits were not chesed calls but meaningful conversations with a friend. When that friend passed away, she identified another homebound individual and began to spend time with her each week. While our visits were a one-directional delivery of virtuous kindness, hers created a mutually rewarding and dignifying friendship and relationship.
Our prophets (Yeshayahu 58:7) and sages (Avot 1:5) guided us to not just feed the hungry but make them part of our households, making our homes into places where the downtrodden feel like members of the family. This approach extends beyond the poor, in line with the Talmudic adage that kindness is greater than charity as it benefits even the wealthy. As not everyone has the blessing of a whole and supportive family to come home to, the opportunity is there for us to provide that strong, secure, and protective sense of home and family to someone who does not have it elsewhere, to make them feel valued and at home in our homes, extending the boundaries of our families to let others in.
Rabbenu Bachye (Shemot 25:23 and in Shulchan Shel Arba pt. 1) records how in ancient France it was customary for the pious to instruct their families to use the wood of their dining room table to construct the casket in which they would be buried. This beautiful practice underscored their belief that their greatest contribution to the world and the ultimate value they would bring before God was the goodness and generosity they had shared with those whom they welcomed around that table.
We too can consider how we can maximize our family table as a vehicle to build high level relational kindness. As we approach the Yom Tov season of umpteen festive meals, we recognize that this period is dreaded by many in our community – the divorced, widowed, unmarried, and orphaned – without a family table of their own. How mutually rewarding would it be for us to make them part of ours, welcoming them for a meal or for many, having them feel as part of our family and that our home is in some measure theirs.
But the table is just one tool to build those relationships. The Surgeon General describes America as experiencing an epidemic of loneliness with a raging hunger for close friendship. Only 17% of people report having at least six close friends, down from 49% in 1990. With phone calls and coffee dates, walking partners and visits to the homebound, each of us can build and maintain mutually meaningful friendships, becoming someone that another can turn to when they need to talk and can rely on when requiring a ride to the doctor. While I have never been to a funeral where the coffin was fashioned from a dining room table, perhaps one day it will become customary to bury a person with the cellphone they had used to build treasured friendships. What greater value could we wish to bring before God?
Each of us is the solution to another’s loneliness. Let’s do this. Let’s reach out and become a friend, invite someone in and become family.