How many of you know who David Bratton is? About a year and half ago, Christmas
week, 2001, I brought David Bratton, a black homeless man to a Friday night,
shabbat slam service, at which time he captivated all of us in attendance with
his magnificent voice and soulful presentation. He also touched our heart with
his story which led to a kind of communal adoption of David, an effort which I
tried to coordinate.
Many times since that winter of 2002 I have been asked: "whatever happened to
David Bratton?", and I have shared parts of the story. Today I want to use
David's story as a parable, in the way that traditional Jewish
magids, itinerant preachers of Europe, used parables to teach important lessons
to the Jews of their era. The parable, while in this case true, is but the
backdrop for the lesson of the morning on, what I call, "the privilege
gap."
It is Christmas Day, 2001 and my son Danny and I are spending the day volunteering for Food and Friends, a social service agency downtown that brings food and companionship to shut-ins throughout the city. We get trained, receive our home visitation assignments and drive off with baskets of foodstuffs in neighborhoods where middle class Jews would normally, fear to tread. The stops are, in and of themselves an education. One of my activist rebbes is Harold Moss. A black scientist who worked as a researcher at the National Institute of Health, and was, as a teenager, a ranked tennis player, he walked away from his comfortable middle class life to become a homeless activist. He spent some years as a lieutenant to Mitch Snyder at the Center for Creative Non-Violence, one of the largest homeless shelters in the country housed in a building which Snyder wrested from the federal government through a combination of creative non-violence and supreme chutzpah.
Anyway, as Danny and I made our visits, one of the lessons I
learned from Harold Moss kept ringing in my head: "You can't begin to
help until you start to understand; and you can't begin to understand until you
get closer to the pain."
Jews have an enviable track record of compassion for the downtrodden. We
express it in a variety of ways. Yet for most of us, it is done at arms length,
several steps removed from the pain. Check writing has taken the place of chesed
work, face to face acts of compassion. It is certainly safer that way. But the
Talmud tells us that if we are looking for the messiah, we will find him by the
the gates of the city, bandaging the wounds of the lepers. The lesson the
Talmud is teaching is that there is no global salvation until we engage in one
to one acts of lovingkindness. Or, perhaps more accurately, saving the
world is secondary to personal acts of chesed, of compassion. If
enough people gave priority to chesed work, we would make the messiah's
work unnecessary.
Danny and I made our last drop off and we were in the neighborhood where Harold
Moss established a group home for an assemblage of activists and homeless folk.
The house is called the Olive Branch. It is a place for a wild assortment of
his lieutenants for the war he wages against homelessness in DC--from guys he
has pulled off the street to young people who have dropped out of college or
run away from their middle class homes to save the world. We stop in, I find
Harold and we enjoy catching up with each other's lives. He invites us to
Zachaeus Soup Kitchen, run by the Olive Branch out of the basement of First
Congregational Church at 10th and G Streets. It is Christmas day and the Olive
Branch will be throwing a party for the homeless in addition to providing a
Christmas dinner. It is only after we've spent some time talking with the
homeless at the soup kitchen and we were getting ready to leave that one of the
homeless guys steps up to the stage where a band had been playing to liven up
the party. The guy takes the mike and sings a song called "Dance like David
Danced", an African-American spiritual with which I was unfamiliar. It is a
song about King David and the joy of prayer. I am mesmerized.
The guy is David Bratton. I approach him, compliment him on his singing and he
beams. He proceeds to tell me a little about his life. Raised in DC, got
into some trouble with drugs, did jail time for robbing a bank, found Jesus in
prison and then, with the help of a prison chaplain, spent some time at a
seminary in St. Thomas after serving his sentence. He came back to DC to care
for his ailing mother but had not yet found work. David was living on the
street. Moved by his story and drawn by his personal charisma, I did what any
rabbi would do. I invited him to come and sing a couple of songs at an Adat
Shalom service. I was leading a friday night service in two days. David
was ecstatic and he was game. I gave him $20, my phone # and told him to
meet me at White Flint metro at 4pm on Friday.
He arrived exactly on time, reinforcing the trust I had placed in him over the
skepticism of some of my closest "advisors". I brought him to the house to wash
up, offered him some clothes and then we planned how he would plug into the kabbalat
shabbat service. At the service itself, David sang two songs, one, "Dance
like David Danced" and an original composition he wrote about the challenges of
growing up in an urban ghetto. I encouraged David to say a few words about
himself between songs and he was characteristically candid. At the oneg, David
attracted a crowd of admirers and well-wishers. By the next week when I
posted a summary of the story on the Adat Shalom listserve and make the
suggestion that we set out to help David get back on his feet, I was flooded by
offers of money and job leads.
Truth be told, I am not new to the enterprise of adopting
the homeless. The organization that I lead, PANIM, brings groups of Jewish
teenagers from around the country to Washington for leadership seminars on
Jewish values and social responsibility. Some years ago I started to bring them
onto the street to bring clothing and food to the homeless. But the handouts
were only the excuse for the conversations that I encouraged the teens to have.
Week after week I would see middle class Jewish teens sit on the ground next to
a homeless person asking them to share their story. They heard about
lives that were far removed from their own experiences: they heard about men
who fought in Vietnam and came back, broken in spirit with no real job skills;
they heard about people whose dependency on drugs or alcohol made them
unemployable; they met people who were raised in broken homes and dysfunctional
communities and who never had the support or the opportunities that these
Jewish kids took for granted; they met scores of individuals who actually
worked at minimum wage jobs but who did not earn enough money to pay both for
housing and food. The experience was Economics 100, Sociology 100 and Psychology
100 all rolled into one. Even more importantly, the experience allowed
the teens to put a face on "the homeless", to personalize it. They came to
appreciate the humanity of those who had fallen to the fringes of our society.
They empathized with their stories, felt more than a tad self-conscious about
their own privileged status, which they neither earned nor appreciated, and
were motivated to do something to help. Because of these critical
lessons, I called the program, which we still do to this day, Street Torah.
Having orchestrated hundreds of encounters between Jewish teens and the
homeless, I suppose David Bratton was my attempt to take the experience one
step further. What would happen if someone like me, a person with not an
insignificant amount of resources, contacts and commitment, would take a person
who was born into totally different circumstances under his wing, and helped
him turn his life around. Don Quixote, watch out!
Our family got close to David Bratton. Some might say, too close. We didn't
leave the oneg shabbat until 10:30pm. I didn't have the heart to send David
back downtown to spend the night on the street in the dead of winter when just
an hour earlier he stood on our bimah and inspired us. With Sandy's permission
we brought him home for the night. We learned a lot more about David that
night. With our kids around the blow-up mattress in the family room, David told
us about being raised by a single mom. With no father in his life, he joined a
gang with strong male role models, and all the wrong kinds of lessons. He
was party to numerous crimes well before he was caught and convicted for bank
robbery. He fathered a son who he hadn't seen in years. His siblings were knee
deep into criminal activity as well. He got into drugs, though since he found
Jesus in prison, he was clean. Not your typical house guest! By the
time we brought David to the metro the next morning, we had gotten a crash
course in urban America and an introduction to the life experience that
is the lot for tens of thousands of Americans who live within a few
miles of our homes.
Over the next few months, I became David's sponsor and friend. He came to call
me, "brother Sid". With money that our congregation contributed, I
co-signed a lease for an apartment in Northeast DC and put down a month's rent
and a security deposit. We moved him in. We got David a half-dozen job leads
and he got a job as a classroom assistant at a private school in Virginia
specializing in troubled kids that the DC school system couldn't handle.
Several of our members spent time with David, helping him negotiate and access
DC social services, a procedure that is mystifying and daunting to many who are
most in need. We gave David money for transportation and food, asking him to
sign a note promising to pay it back, following Maimonides' dictum that a loan
is preferable to an outright gift to the poor as it helps to preserve their
dignity. During this time, David reconnected with his 15 year old son and
took him on some outings. While I had my share of frustration working with
David, I thought we were making some progress in getting his life together.
I believe that the privilege gap is the central moral
question of our time. In 1960 the income of the richest 20% of the world's
population was 30x greater than the income of the poorest 20%. Today it
is more than 80x greater. Over 1.3 billion people in the world live in abject
poverty, earning less than $1 a day. Every day, some 30,000 children under the
age of 10 die of hunger or hunger related diseases. That is more than 1,000
chidren per hour!
In America, one in four children grows up in poverty. Over the past twenty
years, the social safety net which was long a commitment America made to those
at the bottom of the earning spectrum, has been devastated. With much of the
responsibility turned over to the states, it is now harder than ever for
poor people to qualify for food stamps, for low income housing, for health
care, for aid to families with dependent children, for subsidized day
care, and the list goes on. The rare state that is not facing looming budget
deficits today, dares not be more generous to the poor lest they become a
magnet for more poor to move to their states. A person working 40 hours a week
at the minimum wage of $5.15/hour cannot afford to both feed and house
their families in urban America so you have working poor in shelters or on the
street. The minimum wage today is 21% lower relative to costs than it was in
1979. At the behest of the current Bush Administration, our Congress just
passed the largest tax cut in history, primarily favoring middle and upper
income individuals. And the promise is that more of such tax cuts are ahead.
America, a country that prides itself on equal opportunity, has, over the past
30 years become less and less equal. The bottom 20% of Americans earn 4% of the
national income. The top 5% of Americans earn 21%. In 1973 the top
5% earned 11 times more than the bottom of 20%. Today they earn 20 times more.
Yet despite the growing affluence of the privileged few, any candidate that
suggests that we use taxes as a way to redistribute income and narrow the gap
between rich and poor, cannot win an election. What we have learned over the
past 30 years in America is that when middle and upper income Americans are
given a choice between being able to shelter more of their long term capital
gains so that they can buy a second home, or an upscale car, or take a more
exotic vacation versus allowing poor people to live with a modicum more dignity,
most of them will choose the more self-serving alternative. The ongoing
statistic that poor people give a higher percentage of their income to charity
than the wealthy is the most conclusive evidence that their is no more stubborn
addiction in America today than our addiction to money.
Let me now bring this a bit closer to home. Jews, as a group, are in the top
tier of wealth and income in the wealthiest country in the world. We have
traveled a long distance from the pain that Harold Moss taught me about and
which is so critical to raising consciousness and effecting moral behavior. Not
surprisingly, most Jews, are happy that that distance is there. And I worry for
our Jewish collective soul.
This year I gave a group of Jewish teens a hypothetical problem in a talk I was
giving. Assume that you are a first year attorney in a Wall Street law firm
earning $90,000 a year. After your first three months on the job, the janitors
in your office building go on strike and form a picket line. They are asking to
be paid a living wage because they can't support their families on the minimum
wage they are bringing home. What do you do? So I wait for some socially
conscious and Judaically based answers to spew forth: take up a collection to
support the workers and their families during the strike; offer pro-bono legal
advice to the union; approach the firms partners with a plan for everyone to
reduce their compensations by 1% so that the janitors' pay could be raised to a
living and livable wage. The first hand goes in the air. I call on him. His
plan: fire all the strikers and find others to take their place for the same
wages, if not less.
Don't worry. I stayed calm and other students in the room took on my first
respondent. But these days, I find Jews not only increasingly callous to the
growing privilege gap between themselves and the rest of humanity but unwilling
to even acknowledge that it is a moral problem. If most of the world suffers
from not enough--not enough food, not enough water, not enough health care, not
enough literacy, not enough adequate shelter or housing--Jews suffer from too
much of everything. We have become the poster children for American
consumerism.
In today's haftarah we read the prophet's Isaiah's words: "It is not the fast
that I, God, desire. Rather it is freeing those who are oppressed, breaking the
yoke of servitude, sharing your bread with those who are starving, bringing the
poor into your house, clothing those who are naked, not hiding yourselves form
those who are in need."
The first covenant that we, as Jews, entered into was via Abraham who promises
God in Genesis ch. 18 to "extend the boundaries of righteousness and justice in
the world". We now welcome young teens into that covenant--the Bar/Bat
Mitzvah--with lavish parties, booty dancing and an extravaganza of consumerism.
Ironically, the party has, indeed, become the greater indicator of the teens'
future lot than is any lesson that the hapless rabbi and teachers try to impart
to the child. Is it any wonder that we have lost our way!
All of
which brings me back to David Bratton. If Hollywood had gotten their hands on
this story, David would have gone back to college, earned a Ph.D., and
discovered a cure for cancer, or gone on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his
work turning inner city kids around. But Hollywood is not real life. David has
been dismissed from three jobs in the time that I have known him. He was thrown
out of the apartment we moved him into when the other residents complained that
he was stealing their food. He never paid back any of the money we loaned
him and still calls me for money periodically, a request that I now deny
because of his lack of accountability. He alternates between sleeping in shelters
and in the streets. A few months ago he was stabbed and he has spent some time
in hospitals. He still calls me and while I don't offer him any money, the call
ends with him telling me that God still loves me anyway. I tell him that God
loves him too.
Was I a fool? Naive? A do-gooder? A hopeless idealist? Probably a bit of each
of these. But I refuse to conclude that I failed. David is probably more or
less where he would have been without me or Adat Shalom, except that for a
time, maybe even until today, he experienced someone who cared about him and
wasn't trying to hustle him or rip him off. He has had too little of that
in his life and it one day, that experience of friendship and of being cared
for may form a bridge that he will use to get himself to a better place.
Maybe all of this was part of some larger plan, the hand of God which needed me
to have this experience, if only to tell you the story. Every day I ask myself:
"by what grace of God was I born into a middle class family with a strong set of
values instead of being born as David Bratton, a person of color, in an urban
ghetto from which there are few, if any exits."
Judaism teaches us that life is about sharing and giving and reaching out to
those who don't enjoy the privileges that we enjoy. It is about working to
change the policies of a society that has turned its back on the poor because
they don't make campaign contributions and they don't vote. Its about
recognizing that every human being is made in the image of God and deserves to
experience a warm bed, a good meal and human love and caring.
David Bratton is certainly no angel. But he was an angel for me, a messenger, reminding me yet
again about who I am and what I must do.