Profound Gratitude

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

A belated shavua tov.

First, I’m overwhelmingly grateful to this community. I was truly afraid to write my last two columns. I didn’t write anything last Monday because I couldn’t write anything else, but I was afraid to write on those topics.

On Monday evening, I had a conversation with my mother in which I shared this fear with her.

“This is what I’m feeling the need to write, but I’m afraid,” I told her.

“Write it,” she said. “You have to write it.”

“There’s a 43% overlap between my newsletter and The Free Press. I could lose half my readership.”

“You have to write it,” she insisted. “You have to write the truth.”

Well, in this life, my mother’s integrity is my true north and she is never wrong.

And yes, again, a couple dozen people did leave, but the exodus was nowhere near what I imagined and many other people let me know those columns resonated deeply. Others had bones to pick with this or that aspect of what I wrote, which is fine. That’s what inter-community conversations are for.

In any event, the overall response last week deepened my appreciation for all of you so much. We have a national addiction to what I call ragertainment — popularized by Rush Limbaugh and turned into a billion-dollar empire by Fox News. But it’s not exclusive to the right. The antizionist movement and the far left in general run on the same fuel.

We have to be careful not to become what we despise. I have to be careful, myself. I know how good it feels when someone goes after my enemies. When I write genuinely-felt rants against the far-left and people enjoy it mightily, it’s like political heroin for both my readership and myself.

There’s nothing wrong with indulging this once in a while but we need to resist an addiction to it — and again, I’m talking to myself here as well.

Okay, so I also want to let you know some of the latest uses of the tzedakah fund to which so many of you have so generously contributed.

During the suspension of SNAP, as I previously detailed, we helped 8 Jewish families meet their most basic needs. When SNAP resumed, I followed up with them and asked if they needed further assistance. It was so heartwarming to me that most said no. I think most people would find a reason to take free money whether the direst need was truly there or not, but that did not happen. These are all amazing people.

Since then, I’ve been able to send money to Jews with small monetary requests — to buy food until payday, to pay for a child’s field trip so he wasn’t left behind all by himself, etc.

But the funds left over have also allowed me to address the ongoing issues faced by an older, very medically beleaguered and disabled Jewish friend in NYC I’ll call J.

J. was homeless for years. Whenever I came to town, I would take her to dinner and if I was able, I’d give her money toward lodging. Once I even found a place for her to stay for a few weeks. But I could not pull her out of her situation in any meaningful way and it haunted me continuously.

She finally got highly subsidized housing for the disabled and I was so relieved. She was among the vulnerable people I reached out to during the SNAP freeze because I knew she survived on food stamps. My heart sank when she also let me know she was already behind on the rent as well. She was among the initial people I sent money to, in order to make up that shortfall, but I knew based on the info she gave me that it would just keep happening.

She told me her social security and disability payments gave her $1400 to live on a month, and her rent was $1200.

Obviously this was not sustainable, so when I was in NYC several weeks ago, I sat down with her and her caseworker to fight for a lowered rent.

The caseworker — let’s call him C. — seemed quite uninterested in doing more than the bare minimum. But he let me know that the program J. was in gave participants a $60 voucher per week on top of a reduced rent.

I got out a notebook and began making a list of J.’s monthly expenses.

Rent was $1200 and it included utilities. Her phone was another $90. Her medical care came through Medicaid and her food came through SNAP. But her major monthly expense after rent was what she paid for storage. When she became homeless, she put all her possessions into two storage lockers. It cost her $350 a month to keep it all there.

I said, “J., it’s time to go get your belongings. You have housing now. It’s crazy to keep wasting money on storage. You have $110 a month left over after paying the rent and the phone bill, and with the vouchers, you have $350 a month. If you stop paying for storage, you’ll have $700 a month after paying for everything. You have no dependents, so if rent and utilities and healthcare and food are all taken care of, you can live on $700 extra a month. You absolutely can.”

She hesitantly agreed with this, and C. said to me, “Hey, you’re good at this. You should be a caseworker!”

I’m afraid I rather rudely replied, “Actually you should be a caseworker, since that’s your title and you’re the one getting paid to help her figure these things out.”

Here J. told me that she knew she needed to go get her stuff, but it was all the way up in Riverdale, and she had no vehicle, and she would never be able to lift the boxes herself, and she couldn’t afford a mover, and as an elderly person with all kinds of medical ailments, she felt overwhelmed by the idea of unboxing and going through it all.

So here is where your generosity comes in. I said, “J., we need to get the boxes or what’s going to happen is: you’ll never get them and years from now you’ll die, and everything in the boxes will just go into a landfill. Meanwhile you will have thrown thousands and thousands of dollars down a rat hole, and you’re going to be homeless again because you won’t be able to live without that money.”

But even as I said this, I knew that realistically, given her age and poverty and health issues, she couldn’t be expected to go out there and retrieve her own boxes and deal with them herself. I said: “Here’s what I’ll do. There’s still money in the tzedakah fund for the SNAP freeze. I’ll hire someone to get your boxes with you and help you with unpacking and sorting them. There are people out there who specialize in helping hoarders decide what to keep and what to discard and what to donate and so forth, and they haul stuff away for you and distribute it for you. I know you’re not a hoarder, but you need someone like that.”

She was overwhelmingly grateful for this and I have set the process in motion with a Jewish ally whose skill set matches J’s needs precisely.

The process will likely take several days and I’m earmarking $1500 for it — but the good news is that it’s a one-time solution for a chronic problem and I think it can genuinely help J. stay housed for the rest of her life.

Fam, it’s very rare that we can ever help another person in any kind of permanent way. A lot of homeless people have substance addictions or profound emotional health struggles and there’s no quick fix for the hole they’re in.

I believe J. is an exception. She’s addicted to nothing and in fact, she is very hardy and resilient and fastidiously neat and clean. I believe she will have a roof over her head now for life if we can get her into a place where she has an adequate amount to live on after paying her rent in full.

And it’s absolutely and all because of you. I could not help her in these ways if it were not a community effort.

Okay, beloved Yidden, I’ll be back with you very soon with more good things to share.

Much love in the meantime.

Am Yisrael Chai.