guide to the jewplexed
 
 


In a Close Election, Ancient Hospitality Wins

At the town hall presidential debate on Long Island, audience members with surnames of Katz, Epstein, Green and Greenberg, asked the questions, seemingly coming together --reworking Romney's debate phrase--as a binder full of Jews.

Binding these undecideds were questions about jobs, the future, and a desire to have the candidates examine how the electorate viewed them.

For the decided sitting at home (around 66 million of us were watching according to Nielsen Media Research) we each had our own more partisan questions. At one point, with the candidates circling each other, I even found myself shouting one at the TV.

The morning after the debate, I wondered, with all of that political passion, and Jews supporting each candidate, regardless of who wins in November, how are we going to come back together as a Jewish community?

A few days before the debate I had been in Cambridge, Massachusetts, visiting Harvard and a small but fascinating institution called the Semitic Museum. After the debate, I realized that one of its exhibits suggested a potential solution. On display as part of an exhibit called "The Houses of Ancient Israel," was a reproduction of a two story wood pillared house, "representative of private houses in ancient Israel and Judah from about 1200-586 B.C.E."  It was a reminder, of a far more hospitable place and time.

On my visit I had noticed, walking around the house's exterior, a small stone depression worn into one of the paving stones. The display explained its function: "Hospitality-"Feeding and offering protection to people outside one's family - was a sacred duty," it said, and "foot washing was a social necessity since people normally walked barefoot or in open sandals. The footbath in the front left corner of the ground floor is emblematic of the obligations of hospitality. Here visitors would have been invited to wash their feet before being led upstairs to the meal."

In other words, the wash basin was a practical application of the Jewish concept of hachnasat orchim, bringing in of guests --of showing hospitality to the stranger.

Not that after the election I expected die hard Republicans and Democrats to become all welcoming and washing each others feet. But taking a step or two from that idea, maybe we need to be cognizant somehow of the distance many of us must travel ideologically to keep a community intact.

Perhaps the host does not need to provide a hose in the driveway for washing the car-- after all the slogans don't wash off--what's needed is more like a conceptual basin, something in which to temporarily wash away our anger and frustration before sitting down to dine.

In earlier times, Jews vigorously examined several sides of an issue, with debates and arguments on religious issues of the day recorded in the Talmud. But even after the battles, the sides often kept studying and discussing.

These last months leading up to the election have made many of us strangers, and it's time to begin again showing that ancient hospitality, pouring out not water, but perhaps a little of ourselves to those at our doors, be they standing on their right foot or their left.

 

 

Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate. In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association."