Martin Buber's wonderful book Tales of the Hasidim may have slipped out of fashion but it deserves to be widely read and become popular once again. It matters much less to me that the stories may be incomplete or more the product of Buber's expansive mind than taken in full measure from the Hasidim or the Hasidic communities. Reading Buber's stories today we want to interrupt with good and necessary questions about Hasidic prejudices, racism, and misogyny. But we also have to let many of the stories speak gently for themselves and take what is best in them into our hearts. The strength of many of these stories is their ability to touch the heart, open its doors, and move in.
There is one story from Buber's collection that recently came to mind. The story concerns Rabbi Zev Wolf of Zbarazh, his wife (whose name we are not given), and a young servant (also nameless) employed in their home. Rabbi Wolf's wife had a quarrel with her servant over a broken dish. She wanted the servant to pay for the dish, the servant refused, and the argument became rather heated. The rebbetzin decided to take the problem to the court of arbitration of the Torah. She quickly dressed in order to meet with the rav of the town, the rabbi who could competently decide between her and the servant. Rabbi Wolf saw his wife preparing to go to the court and also dressed in his sabbath clothes.
The rebbetzin protested that it was not fitting for him to go to court and that she knew what to say and how to make her best case without him present. Rabbi Wolf responded, "You know it very well, but the poor orphan, your servant, in whose behalf I am coming, does not know it, and who except me is there to defend her cause?"
This story came to mind because I discovered that a local institution that I take part in uses a law firm that helps evict people, defends corporate clients against charges of sexual harassment, and opposes unions even as that institution tries to help the houseless population and is good on civil rights issues. On the advice of this law firm the institution has moved to contracting with people to provide certain services and will no longer have these individuals on the institution's payroll. A local leader in that institution grew up in a hard-pressed union family and knows something of the dynamics of class struggle.
If you read this blog regularly you will know that my values run very much against what this law firm supports. I'm struggling with how complicit the institution that I take part in is with this firm's terrible work and how complicit I am in all of this. Am I contributing to an institution that works, directly or indirectly, against my own values? If I am, how do I respond?
We can take these issues one by one and argue over them. Maybe there are somewhere terrible tenants who refuse to pay rent and wreck their apartments, maybe someone somewhere has filed sexual harassment charges out of malice, and I know that some people would rather be contractors than direct hires. Unions sometimes drop the ball, and not all union staff and leadership are fully competent all of the time. The exceptions should not make the rules, but those are other matters to take up elsewhere. My guiding point here is that people of faith should consider Rabbi Wolf's example. Defend everyone, even the guilty, against those in positions of power, take dramatic action when necessary, and contradict or shame those in positions of power for the sake of the weak ones and the oppressed. Take the long view and go to the roots of the problems at hand with liberation and salvation in mind.
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