Even if it is said kiddingly, it is such a nice thing to be called a tzadik that I never knew how to act when someone called me it, so I’d started straightening Emmanuel’s collar with my free hand because that way I could make a face like I was concentrating and not look at his eyes.
He touched my cup and said, “Did you just eat at that pizza place Pizza? With the swastika guy?”
Emmanuel was referring to a guy called Mongo who sometimes worked behind the counter at Pizza. Mongo had a swastika on each of his wrists, but it wasn’t how it seemed. Mongo was Indian — you could tell by his accent. He wasn’t a Nazi. The tattoos were religious.
Mongo’s Indian, I said.
Emmanuel said, “That’s what I used to think: he’s Indian, the swastika means something else. But even if it does mean something else, he’s cruel about it. My grandfather took me there over the summer,” he said, “to Pizza. We were thirsty and we knew they had soda in cans. And my grandfather asked the guy, ‘What are these tattoos for? What do they mean?’—he was trying to understand. And the guy said, ‘I owe you no explanation.’ So we left without getting any cans of soda because even though it was true he didn’t have to explain anything he didn’t want to explain, so what? If he was nice, he would explain. If he was nice, he’d understand he was making an old man uncomfortable, that the old man was only trying to get comfortable, and that all it would take is a couple words to make the old man comfortable. Because what? It’s my grandfather’s fault the Nazis stole this guy’s religious symbol? What if some old guy from Mississippi came into Pizza in a Confederate flag bandanna and said to Mongo, ‘You coloreds are wonderful’? Do you think Mongo would say to himself, ‘It’s okay he says coloreds because he’s saying he likes me and coloreds used to mean something different when this guy was young, and all his bandanna stands for is Southern pride?’ Do you think Mongo would be thrilled about serving this guy pizza? I think Mongo would pore Borax into the cheese of such a guy’s pizza, but then you have my grandfather, who all he wants is Mongo to say, ‘Swastikas used to mean something different,’ and he’ll be happy to talk to Mongo, and Mongo won’t explain? What kind of name is Mongo, anyway? You sure it’s Indian?”
Loose slats on the tracks clunked and the whine of metal rubbing metal bounced between the stairwell walls. “You getting on this train with me or what?” said Emmanuel.
We ran up the stairs and got on. I was going to ask him if maybe his grandfather didn’t ask Mongo about the swastika as nicely as it seemed like he had; if it was possible that, with his voice, Emmanuel’s grandfather made the question sound like an accusation, like when someone says, “Are you a Jew?” but then there was this homeless guy with no thumbs. Not even nubs where the thumbs would have been. Two smoothnesses. He stuck out his hands and said, “I was born this way.”
I gave him a dollar and he took it with his pointer and swearfinger, then turned to Emmanuel, who gave him another dollar.
The guy blessed us and walked off.
Emmanuel said to me, “Why’d you have us give away our fathers’ dollars?” He said it in Hebrew, and that is the language the conversation continued in.
I said, That man was cursed with thumblessness.
Emmanuel said, “By Whom, though?” = “His thumblessness is the will of Hashem.”
I said, So maybe the thumblessness was a blessing. Maybe that man’s homelessness was not caused by his thumblessness — maybe he’s homeless for some reason we don’t know, and Hashem granted him thumblessness so more people like us would give him dollars.
Emmanuel said, “Is that different than saying the Shoah may have been a blessing for us because, without it, the West might not have backed Israel in 1948?”
The train stopped. I was in the seat to the left of Emmanuel and two men in yarmulkes got onto our car through the door to his right, then went to the right so we didn’t see their faces and couldn’t tell if they knew us.
Emmanuel tried to make himself invisible with slouching and it didn’t work, so I switched to the seat to Emmanuel’s right and became as wide and tall as I could. Emmanuel nodded = “Thank you,” and once he’d relaxed a little, I said to him, It is not much different to say those two things. But I think you answered your original question with your new one. I said, Should not the West have helped Israel in 1948 regardless of the Shoah? Is the Land of Israel not rightfully ours? Should we, when we see a man without a home, not help him survive as best as we’re able, regardless of whether or not he is somehow crippled? Is life not rightfully his?
The men in yarmulkes leaned at the sound of my academic Hebrew. I didn’t see it happen, but I felt it on my back, their attention, and Emmanuel ducked his head even lower than it had already been ducked.
“Fair enough,” he whispered, “but then there’s the how of it. There’s giving fish away, and teaching the skill of fishing, and we have all heard it said that not only is it better to teach the skill of fishing to the hungry so that they may perpetually eat, but that it may actually harm them to give them fish. Being given fish, we have heard it said, may prevent them from learning to fish, for they may think, ‘Why should I learn to, when I get my fish for free?’”
I said, Who do you know that thinks that way? Who would rather rely on someone else’s help? Would that not be a kind of sickness in itself? And even if everyone was sick that way, I said, does that mean that if we can’t teach them to fish, whether because we don’t know how to fish ourselves or because we don’t have time, we should let them starve? I do not know how to give a homeless, thumbless man a home or thumbs, let alone how to teach him to get a home or thumbs, so if he believes a dollar can help him, and I don’t believe a dollar will hurt him, should I not give a dollar?
Said Emmanuel, “I see your point, Rabbi, but I have walked with you many times — I think of these times often, and miss them, and wish, even now, as I sit beside you on this train, they were not so impossible to reclaim with regularity — so many times, Rabbi, I have walked with you past homeless people to whom we did not give away our fathers’ dollars. And so I can’t help but to wonder: Why did we walk past them? Because they had thumbs? Might they not have been crippled in ways we couldn’t see or understand? And were they not, either way, homeless?”
I chugged my coffee, leaving only one sip. I liked to drink the last sip while I stepped off the train, then victory-spike it into the garbage barrel at the station = I am finished with this part of the day!
I said, I don’t know why we walked past them.
Emmanuel said, “Maybe because there are so many homeless, and so few dollars, we save the dollars to give to those who need them the most?”
I said, I don’t know that we save.
Emmanuel said, “Maybe we save the dollars to give to those who will use them best?”
I said, I don’t know why we save them, if we save them.
“And how do we know who needs them most or will use them the best?” said Emmanuel. “There is no law about it. There is no law that says it is worse to be thumbless than alcoholic, or, for that matter, better to be sober and homeless than drunken and homeless. How do we know what to do?”