Three Acts of Kindness

Facebook and the blogosphere have been filled with so many negative political postings of late; I have started to wonder if Facebook is more harm than good. If everyone keeps posting about what is wrong with the world, when do we get to read about what is right with the world, or at least what can we do to make what is wrong right? I want to mention here three things that I have witnessed that shows what is right in the world. Two of these I witnessed and the other one happened to me personally.

1. Today I was running very late for work. Yesterday I went in late on purpose and I forgot to reset my alarm clock back to its normal 5:15 am. So I woke up at 6:15 and quickly got ready and made the train about 30 minutes later than my normal train. This train turned out to be a local so I was not almost 45 minutes behind my usual schedule. The one major thing I like about commuting at 6:15 am is that the trains are usually light. I can always get a seat and when I get out in NYC, there are not many people around. Fast forward 45 minutes and you get a very different experience. I got a seat fine on the train out of Edison, but the PATH train in Newark was very full and the subways were already packed. Coming upstairs from the PATH, I found hundreds of people pushing their way through the area to get to their offices, the subways or shopping. As I made it to the end of a long narrow corridor everyone was rushing to make it across Church Street before the traffic safety workers form the World Trade Center site closed the chains (for those who do not work in this area, during rush hours there are traffic safety workers rather than traffic lights). I got across the street and they had already closed the chains. There was one person in a wheelchair trying to get across the street the other way. This man looked older and much disheveled. He was very likely homeless and had very little in this world. With the flow of the pedestrian traffic is was almost impossible to stop and go back to this person, but out of the blue, one commuter did just that. He stopped, risking being pushed to the ground by other commuters, walked back to this man, and wheeled him across the street before any problems could arise from this.

   This anonymous person did not need to do this. He gained nothing from it and probably got to work a few minutes late because of it. But he saw another fellow human being in distress and he realized that it was his responsibility to help this person. In this way he was doing his part to fulfill what we read in the Aleinu, l’taken olam b’malchut shaday, “When the world will be perfected under the reign of the Almighty.” This tiny act of kindness from one stranger to another will help to bring future redemption.

1. I have not made any secret of my family’s struggle with our son’s autism. It has made many things difficult in our life and we are still learning how to lessen the struggle. The other day I reached out via email to someone I had met many years ago when I was still at Rutgers. Since then, he has become a very well-known Rabbi and a major public figure. I reached out to him because he, like I, has a son with Autism and there are many issues that my family is dealing with that I knew he had already dealt with in his life. I introduced myself and asked if he remembered me. I explained in brief our story and a little about our struggle with Jewish education, our Synagogue life and our son’s difficulties with our chosen religious lifestyle. To be honest, I really did not expect much of a response. I figured that maybe I would get a nice email back with a few sources to look up, or a contact to call and a Shanna Tova. That ended up being far from what I got. Not only did he respond, he forwarded my email to his wife and the two of them have reached out to us an offered to speak with us on the phone, or through skype to help us learn from all the struggles that they have already overcome. At that moment I felt such joy at being part of the Jewish community and knowing that, in the words of this extraordinary Rabbi’s equally extraordinary wife, “We are all in this together.”

   Like in my first example, he did not need to spend more than a moment to reply to me. In fact, he did not even need to respond, but he did and we have had multiple emails back and forth on a few different topics. It has opened a new lifeline of communication that could end up being very helpful to my family. Hillary Clinton wrote that “It takes a village.” I am finding that our village goes so far beyond my own town. I hope that this will continue to be a source of help for us.

1. My third example comes from something I recently that was extremely moving. A certain person that I know has been afflicted with a disease similar to Parkinson’s disease. This is a man who is a speaker who was well-known for his fiery lectures on political topics as well as brilliant talks about Judaism and Jewish life today. When you were at one of his talks, you would never fall asleep. He kept everyone listening to his insightful words whether you agreed with him or not. Now, a year later he is very frail. Walking with a walker, a helmet on his head for protection and an aide holding his arm, he can only get from place to place with much assistance. He has trouble communicating so his days of speaking are over. I saw him listening to another speaker giving a lecture at a time and place where he was to have spoken. He sat next to his wife and children and I saw the expression on his face and how it clearly pained him to not be able to be doing what he so loved. You might think that the act of kindness that I am going to write about was done to him. In this you would be very wrong. While he was pained to be sitting in a seat listening to someone else, his wife was unable to keep her emotions in check and she cried for her husband. She could not bear the fact that her brilliant husband was not able to lecture like he always did and that his body was totally failing him. What happened next astonished me. This great man, who had every right to be angry with God and the world, comforted his wife and told her it was ok. Even as I type this I cannot fail to be moved by this. He was not thinking of himself, he was thinking of his wife and the comfort that she needed, despite the fact that he needed comfort and prayer more than most. This was perhaps the greatest example of kindness I have ever witnessed.

As we continue through the holiday season I pray that we can all find it in ourselves to add some kindness to the world like these three people did. I am starting a Facebook page that is going to ask people for one day to refrain from political posting and focus instead on postings showing off the good in the world. Please join with me on October 4^th for a day without politics on Facebook. http://www.facebook.com/daywithoutpolitics