By Micha Odenheimer
One Friday in January, on a makeshift stage in a crowded high school in Kathmandu, a 16-year-old boy performed a short play with tears flowing down his face. He had written the scene himself; it depicted how he had helplessly watched his father die when his family lacked funds for medical treatment. He had never been on stage before—nor had the 17 other children who acted that day. Most of them worked as porters, waking up at four in the morning for an eight-hour work day of carrying heavy loads in the vegetable market, interrupted only by six hours of school.
The children had been guided in the process of turning their raw experiences into theater by two twenty-something Israelis who had worked with the teens for the previous three months. The young actors worked diligently during the one and half hour window each day when they were not carrying loads or studying. The Israelis, along with a team of fourteen other Israelis, American and Canadian Jews, were part of a program I founded called Tevel b’Tzedek—a phrase from the Psalms that translates as “the earth in justice.” The program was designed to introduce Israelis and Diaspora Jews to the complex and heart-wrenching reality—and struggles—of impoverished populations in the regions once known as the Third World.
The idea to create Tevel b’Tzedek was sparked during a two and a half month trip through India that I took with my family in 2004. Traveling through India’s Himalayan north, we saw ample evidence of what has become a huge phenomenon among Israeli youth—the post-army trip to India, Nepal, South East Asia, Africa, and South America. More Israeli young people travel through these areas for long periods of time—sometimes six months or a year at a time. Along with the urge for freedom and exotic frontiers after an arduous and insular army service, I sensed that the trip was also connected to a thirst among Israelis to know and to touch this other side of the human world from which we are conventionally separated.
Tevel B’Tzedek participants choose to forego the typical post-army experience, and instead live together, study Jewish texts on social and environmental justice, learn about Nepal’s culture and politics, and study the effects of globalization on the poor. Over the course of the program, participants work on projects that bridge their community with that of the local impoverished Nepalese. These projects expose them to a range of strategies and ideas meant to create a better world by changing society in the direction of greater equality, justice, and sustainability.
Most Israelis and Jews who hear about the project immediately identify and empathize with its intentions and goals. But some are troubled. Something bothers them about the project. These people express their unease with the same question: “Why aren’t you doing this project in Israel? After all, don’t our sources say: ‘The poor of your own city should be given first priority when it comes to tzedakah?’”
There is an angst behind this question, which articulates the sense shared by many that the Jewish people, at least in Israel, are themselves in dire straits. They face poverty, environmental woes, and military threats. But there is also a sharper edge to their challenge. Isn’t it a sort of betrayal, they say, to turn to the tending of foreign fields when there is so much to be done at home? Isn’t this the kind of universal concern typical of misguided Jews who care about everyone except their own people?
One answer to this question is that in a world where we are all part of an encircling economic system, in which the food we put on our table, the coffee we drink, the clothes we wear, and the fuel in our cars likely comes from China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria—or Nepal—the definition of “the poor of one’s own city” is in flux. As technological innovations advance and globalization brings the entire world to our own doorstep, we are compelled by Judaism and by our collective humanity to act. The suffering of the poor in Israel is real. Still, poverty in the developing world is of a different order. Children die of curable diseases due to lack of clean water, thousands of children live on the street, and chronic undernourishment, if not starvation, is the fate of hundreds of millions.
What is our responsibility towards people who live outside the worlds we usually inhabit, whose cries we hear in muted tones, if at all? Traditional Jewish literature abounds with teachings that call for us to tear down the walls that muffle the voices of the Jewish and non-Jewish poor. A Talmudic story tells of a righteous man who was on such a high level that Elijah the Prophet, who in Jewish tradition never died and serves as a gateway between the spiritual realms and the human world, used to visit him regularly. One day, the righteous man constructed a small guardhouse in front of his courtyard which, even though it might not have been his intention, prevented the poor from approaching his door and shut out their cries for help. Elijah the Prophet ceased visiting him. By shutting himself away from the poor, he also blocked the gate between heaven and earth.
Historically, concern for the poor has been a central component of the Jewish religion. Where I grew up—in the 1960’s United States—empathy for the poor was a Jewish absolutism. I remember how my mother, a devout Orthodox Jew, didn’t buy lettuce or grapes for years because the United Farm Workers who represented impoverished migrants from Mexico, were on strike.
Today, much of the Western world’s poverty has been “outsourced” to Africa, Asia, and South America. Our civilization has put up guardhouses that prevent their cries for help from being heard. For the sake of the spiritual health of the Jewish people and in order to return to our own basic values, we must break through these guardhouses and once again connect our lives to those whose vulnerability is greatest.
Tevel b’Tzedek was created in the hopes of adding another dimension to the Israeli presence in places like Nepal. It serves to connect the Israeli love affair with what is often called the “developing world” to the rich knowledge and experience of American and other Diaspora Jews, for whom tikkun olam is a central concept in religious life. Increasing our knowledge and understanding of the half of humanity whose lives usually remain hidden from our view does not signal an abandonment of Israel or Jewish issues. Rather, it can return us to Israel or the Diaspora with a renewed hunger to struggle within our own nation and community for a more beautiful and equitable world, and a belief in our power to do so—as Jews.
Micha Odenheimer is a rabbi and journalist and the founder of Tevel b’Tzedek. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the London Times, Haaretz, and other magazines and newspapers.
