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Practicing True Responsibility The U.S. has elected a new president. Although not all people may be happy about this, we can all be responsible. Barak Obama urged the electorate, repeatedly, “Ask what you can do for each other.” Several middot relate to his request. I would like to focus on one of them: responsibility (ach-ray-ut). Casually, we think of responsibility as keeping our promises, following through, being on time. Some speak of the dimension of preparedness: response-ability – ability to respond to the circumstances of life, what we think of as accountability. The root is said to be “achar” meaning “after.” I think I’m pretty good at these aspects of responsibility. However, others say that the root is “acher” meaning “other.” It is not enough that I take care of my commitments and their aftereffects. I must also look to others and see how I can assist them in their needs and concerns. As Rabbi Hillel asked “If I am not for myself, who will be for me, but if I am only for myself, what am I?” This was a new twist on responsibility for me, and perplexing. Won’t this make me a busy-body, interfering, or worse yet, co-dependent? So, I took on the question “How do I do for another?” as my morning meditation and as my affirmation to say during the day, to keep the question present. I wrote it on an index card and carried it in my purse, in a place where I would run across it as I was looking for other things. I took on the exercise – the kabbalah – that I would do at least one act of achrayut for another each day. The following day it turned very cold. I went to my monthly knitting guild meeting, which I had been anticipating eagerly. We met at a local church. I was running a few minutes late, and as I rushed into the lobby I couldn’t escape noting to myself that being late and rushing weren’t really being “responsible.” “How do I be responsible for another?” crossed my mind. In a corner of the lobby, I saw a dowdy woman sitting in a chair. Normally I would have just kept walking, focused on getting to my meeting and avoiding contact with her. “How do I be responsible for another?” popped up. I looked straight at her, and she looked hesitantly up at me. I smiled “hello.” She didn’t smile back, she looked very sad. Slowly she got up, came a little closer to me and asked, in broken English, “You have phone?” My knee jerk reaction was to say “no” and go to the meeting. “How do I be responsible for another?” “Yes, I have a cell phone,” I said, fishing it out and handing it to her. “Here.” She fumbled through her bag, and finally found a piece of paper with phone numbers scribbled on it. She made a call, crying and talking in a foreign language, and finally hung up. I was awash in her pain and also my own confusion about what to do. After much back and forth I surmised that she was homeless and was trying to find shelter on that freezing day. I had never been in such a situation, never homeless, and never trying to help someone who was homeless. Even though in the past I had given myself kabbalot to be kinder and more generous, I had managed to avoid homeless people. To make a long and repeatedly difficult story short, I ended up finding a homeless shelter and driving her to it. After I left her there, I was besieged with second thoughts,
I realized I had more questions than answers about achrayut. I went home, took out the Everyday Holiness material, read it again, went searching in other books, and talked to my chevruta about it. That night, I wrote quite a lot in my Chesbon haNefesh (Accounting of the Soul) journal about the episode and pondered the questions that the situation had raised for me. What I’ve been noticing since then is that I’m taking more care of others, my family, my friends, and people I don’t know. Acrayut has become embodied in me. I invite you to ask how you can apply your Mussar practice to Barak Obama’s request. |
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