Commissioner Rene Gonzalez prohibiting first responders from distributing tents is unethical — so is turning away from 'grim and murderous reality'
In January 2017, a woman lost and alone in a Portland snowstorm suffered through the agony of labor by herself. Without a home, without shelter, she gave birth in the freezing cold. The baby was stillborn.
We live in an awful time. Not only because we fear rampant disease and social violence but also because too many of us can read a devastating story like this and turn away, telling ourselves that she must have made the wrong choices. Or perhaps she was just unlucky. Either way, we avert our eyes and tell ourselves that it’s nothing to do with us.
Sociologists will tell us that the scale of our urban lives has brutalized us; economists will tell us that it’s the depredations of capitalism. Historians may tell us that we’re trapped in a cycle much larger than anything we can do.
The philosopher Hannah Arendt once wrote to her friend Gershom Scholem that compassion is a human emotion that cannot possibly be directed to more than one other person at a time and that, therefore, cannot ground public policy. Compassion, literally defined as “co-suffering,” would indeed kill us on the scale of what we know.
But so should the story of one human being that died at birth because of the utter social neglect of those of us who have given up on suffering with others.
We don’t want to die; therefore, we cannot be indifferent when others are in danger of dying. In the wisdom literature of my people, we are taught that if we would live and thrive, we must not do to others that which is hateful to us.
We cannot simply blame our city and county leadership. They are not uncaring nor without human feelings. But they can only do what we direct them to do, and we spend too much time and energy looking away. As long as we allow them to criminalize sleeping outside in a tent when there is demonstrably no other alternative, we are accessories to those who sleep in tents because they have to, rather than you and I when we choose to.
It’s painfully ironic: I have a tent packed away in my home in case of the catastrophe of a major earthquake. But those who have already experienced their disaster and are using a tent to survive are persecuted by sweeps. No, tents are not the answer, but to take them away from first responders is to look away from the grim and murderous reality that we have not created housing. Only tent manufacturers and shippers profit from this tragedy.
The first death in the Bible is a murder. A firstborn child kills their sibling and then, when confronted, responds by asking a rightly famous question: Am I my brother’s keeper? The entire exchange, more literally translated from the original Hebrew, is even more significant: when God asked Cain “where is your brother?” Cain responded, “I do not know. Am I guardian of my brother?” (Genesis 4.9)
Cain tried to look away from his responsibility. As a result, he was punished by exile — not only because of the death that he had caused but because he compounded the wrong by attempting to look away from it.
Look. This is how human beings are suffering because we look away. Look. Otherwise, what exile from others, and finally from your ability to connect to others, awaits you next?
If we learned nothing else during our lockdown away from each other, we learned that we need each other to survive. You may choose to look away from that truth, but take care: there are fewer and fewer places left to look that will not reflect back at you the ancient truth that hasn’t changed — that you are your brother’s keeper.
Rabbi Ariel Stone has served the Portland Jewish community since 1996; she is the spiritual guide of Congregation Shir Tikvah. She is active in a number of community venues dedicated to social justice, and in 2018 was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement award by the city of Portland’s Human Rights Commission. Her mother was homeless when she was a teenager.
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