A minor mitzvah to unite neighbors and strangers
Surprising myself, I did a minor mitzvah this month. Surprising because for local civic action, I’m only about as engaged as the next person. And up to now, my political activism hasn’t delved into the subject of the changing climate.
On a morning walk through Glen Ridge, I spotted a massive old oak at the curb whose absence of all leaves so early in the season and eroded trunk bark were a forewarning of a real hazard in this fall’s storm season. “Someone should do something,” I told myself, and in the next couple of days, I found the email address for the town arborist and sent a tip. Days later, I encountered the homeowner at that spot during another walk, and she told me that she had been trying to get the county to take care of that tree for a while and was very frustrated with a lack of action. Walking past this Glen Ridge home, I was reminded of the destruction of my family car and the garage next door in a severe nor’easter earlier this year. We still have not completely recovered from that misfortune. I asked myself, “Why should this family needlessly suffer a similar hardship if I could do something further to help?”
My next email went to a county commissioner with whom I have a nodding acquaintance. He quickly wrote back, thanking me and saying he was mobilizing his colleagues to get the public works department there. And what do you know? Just days later, three county trucks took the dying oak down and removed the threat to homeowners and passing traffic. I saw the homeowner again, and she was happy. Minor mitzvah.
In this moment, one mitzvah — no matter how small or large — speaks to the responsibility we all should take for the safety of neighbors we may not yet know. My reaction to that dangerous tree reminded me of the responsibility of the American Jewish community to step up and respond to the shameful way that immigrants in this country have been scapegoated by Donald Trump and his followers as part of their political agitation and demonization campaign. I can’t forget that most Jewish Americans are the children and grandchildren of earlier generations of immigrants. These ancestors, like the hard-working Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were ready to make large contributions to their new country. Like the Haitians, Jewish immigrants also experienced pervasive discrimination and outright racial violence, such as intimidating KKK and Nazi marches here that were especially common in the 1920s and 1930s, even as the Holocaust was brewing abroad. It’s certainly not coincidental that when Trump and his running mate started posting lies about immigrants eating house pets, the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe, which had already marched through Springfield with swastika flags, was gleefully boasting on its social media that they had become “mainstream.” Bomb threats — reportedly dozens since the Trump lies — quickly multiplied too.
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What is the appropriate mitzvah in such a case? We shouldn’t just let other immigrant groups get victimized the way we were. I applaud the outpouring of solidarity for the Haitian community from local Springfield citizens flocking to patronize Haitian-American restaurants and upping donations to community centers. This is also in the spirit of the great Jewish legacy organization, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which has admirably extended its services in the modern period to all immigrants in desperate circumstances and refused to bow down after the murderous antisemitic attack on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue made the agency the focus of vicious far-right violence.
Unfortunately, the phenomenon of severe weather and a changing climate has now been similarly and dangerously politicized too.
The health of our world and the health of our nation’s politics hangs in the balance this November. Good deeds have never been more important for the Jewish community, immigrants from all walks of life, and others.
MAGA politics continue to put minority groups in danger, including the American Jewish community. Much like the manufactured story about Haitian immigrants, Republican lawmakers have gone so far as to invent stories about the Jewish people to fuel the hatred driving their politics. Rather than call it what it is — climate change — MAGA leaders like Marjorie Taylor Greene have insinuated that Hurricane Helene was engineered and controlled by Jews. Such vitriol is a danger to American Jews everywhere. And just as we must stand up for our neighbors, so too must our neighbors stand up for us.
Where should American Jews be in all this? Hopefully contributing to the nationwide relief efforts that are a bedrock tradition in our country. But also batting down the rampant misinformation and efforts to divide the country as they come forth. And hopefully drawing the proper conclusion about our political direction and voting. There are much larger mitzvahs crying out to be done amid this kind of dangerous incitement than my small one with the oak tree.
Mark Lurinsky of Montclair is recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.
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