Delivering a Fresh Batch of Hope

By Susan Esther Barnes

I actually wrote the following story over a month ago, but I didn't want to post it until after it was published in our synagogue's newsletter. All I did was take out a few names in the interests of privacy.
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These days, teenagers lead busy, complicated lives. What with homework to finish, social and athletic activities to participate in, and numerous text messages to send, it seems they have time for little else. Why is it, then, that every Tuesday night Monica can be found baking cookies she won’t even get to eat?

Monica and her mother, Jessica, have always enjoyed spending time together in the kitchen. When Monica was preparing for her bat mitzvah last year, she was able to use her cooking skills when her class made a meal for the men staying at our synagogue as part of the temporary rotating winter shelter. “The best part was hanging out with the guys after they ate,” Monica exclaims, “I learned a lot of things from them that I wouldn’t have assumed. One of them even spoke Hebrew!”

Monica’s Torah portion, T’zav, was about making sacrifices, so for her mitzvah project she decided to sacrifice some of her time and energy each week by baking cookies for the men she had met at the homeless shelter. Now that it’s more than a year later and her obligation to do a mitzvah project is long past, Monica has faithfully continued to bake for the men every week again this winter.

“She does it all,” says Jessica, “All I do is drive her there to drop it off.” Asked why they do this every week, she says, “Everyone wants to do good stuff, but sometimes it’s hard to know what to do. At the synagogue they make it easy to do things for other people.”

Jessica also finds meaning in a term Rabbis Lezak and Kushner use, “hiddur mitzvah,” or “beautiful mitzvah,” which is about not only doing a mitzvah but doing it in a beautiful way. As Rabbi Kushner explains, “It is the difference between doing kiddush with a paper cup or doing kiddush with a cup a child made or someone gave to you.”

As Jessica describes it, “For me giving is purposeful and fulfilling. If someone took the time to help me and my family, it would give us a tiny bit of hope. You can’t live in your own head, in your own bubble. You can’t wait for someone else to do it.” And so, week after week, Jessica drives Monica to the synagogue to do a hiddur mitzvah; to drop off a freshly baked batch of hope.

More than Shelter

By Susan Esther Barnes

During the cold winter months, our synagogue is participating in a temporary rotating shelter for homeless men. The organization running the shelter provides the men with transportation to and from the synagogue and staff members to supervise them overnight. They also arrange for an organization to prepare and provide the men with dinner.

Our responsibilities are to provide a space in which the men can sleep, a restroom, tables and chairs where they can eat dinner, and a few people to coordinate with the shelter workers, to help serve the food, and to clean up after dinner.

If we were to do nothing more than fulfill our responsibilities as a volunteer organization under this program, it would be a great mitzvah, and I don’t imagine anyone would complain. We could treat these men as charity cases, but Jews don’t believe in charity. We believe in tzedakah, which many mistake as charity, but it means “righteousness,” and therefore it is not just about giving; it is about giving righteously.

So we have made a conscious decision not to treat these men as recipients of charity, but to treat them as guests. Our tradition tells us it is not enough to merely feed and house guests. It tells us we should make guests feel welcome, and we should provide them with entertainment.

When the men arrive each Wednesday night, they do not cross an empty threshold. Like members and visitors arriving for services on Friday night, they are met at the front door by volunteers who look them in the eye and welcome them as guests.

When they enter the social hall, they not only find a hot dinner prepared for them, they also find an array of fresh-baked snacks and desserts awaiting them, delivered earlier in the day by congregants they will never see or be able to thank.

During dinner, volunteers sit among them, eating the same food, and making conversation, as they would with dinner guests in their home. After dinner, congregants continue to chat with the men, or they play chess or other games with them. Those who wish to can view a movie on a large screen TV while they munch on hot popcorn.

Why do we do these things? Maybe it has to do with the tradition of welcoming the stranger. Maybe it’s because it makes us feel good. Maybe our traditions of remembering what it was like to be slaves in Egypt and what it was like to be thrown out of our homes and our countries help to remind us it is only through the grace of God that we have a roof over our head tonight.

And what does it matter? Does a look in the eye, a little conversation, a game of chess make any real difference? Rachel, one of the volunteers who comes every week with her two young sons, wrote, “Last year we were told that some of the men stay clean on Wednesday nights because they love coming [here].” And it strikes me that if even one man can cast off his addiction for even one day because of what we do, then it means, perhaps, we have given him some hope. And yes, it makes all the difference in the world.

Standing Together

By Susan Esther Barnes

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

- Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller


The poem above is a cautionary tale about what can happen when we don’t stand up for each other. On October 25 we will hold the Founding Convention for the Marin Organizing Committee (MOC), an organization of religious and secular institutions dedicated to standing together for the public good.

One of the issues the MOC has been working on for the past two years is the need for a permanent open shelter for the homeless in the County. Unfortunately, progress on this issue hasn’t been as fast as we would like, and there isn’t enough time left to put such a shelter in place before winter comes this year. As a result, about a dozen churches and synagogues in the County have agreed to step up and provide a rotating temporary shelter for the homeless for this winter.

The County supports the plan for a permanent shelter, as well as the plan for an emergency rotating shelter for this winter, as long as the churches and synagogues providing the temporary shelter in incorporated areas obtain the necessary approval from their own cities and towns. The only place where this appears to be a problem is the City of San Rafael.

Apparently, the City of San Rafael is the only jurisdiction in the County that requires a Conditional Use Permit to provide a rotating shelter for the homeless. This means that the five churches in the City which want to participate in this program each need to pay between $6,000 and up to an estimated $9,000 or more to the City in order to get the City to process their application. Even if they pay these fees, for a total of $30,000 to $45,000 or more, there is no guarantee that any of the permits will be approved. This strikes me as particularly ironic. Since taking care of the homeless is a public good, it seems the City should be paying the churches to do this; the churches shouldn’t be paying the City.

Last night on the agenda of the San Rafael City Council was an item to discuss the possibility of waiving the fees for these churches. Before the City Council meeting, the MOC held a pre-meeting to prepare for their presentation to the City Council. The room was full. When those who were there from the five San Rafael churches were asked to stand, less than half the people in the room stood up. Why? Because MOC is not an organization in which individual member institutions stand alone. More than half the people there did not attend in their own institution’s interest, but were there to support those churches facing this dilemma.

We agreed that, instead of a host of different people expressing different opinions and possible solutions to the City Council, we would have just two people speak. Those two people read their prepared statements to us. Not everyone in the room agreed completely with those statements. But we all came to the City Council meeting to support them. Why? Because we are practicing the discipline of standing together.

In the City Council meeting, we sat quietly while the City staff presented their case about why the permit process and the fees were necessary. When the time came for our two representatives to speak, about 80 of us stood to show our support. We stood respectfully and silently through their statements, and when they were finished, we respectfully and silently left the Council chambers. Unlike the infamous town hall meetings held throughout the country over the summer, there were no outcries, no shouting matches, nobody attempting to stop anyone from being heard.

In San Rafael last night, we stood together for decency and for the common good. And for the first time in my life I felt that if, God forbid, some time they should be foolish enough to try to come for us, it is possible that we may not stand alone.