Working with people experiencing homelessness, I often start to feel numb, hardened to the injustices that brought me into the work in the first place. I also often start to feel distraught, drowned under those injustices’ weight, sometimes at the same time. As of late, when I tip too far in either direction, I touch back to a midrash—a piece of commentary on a Jewish religious text—that I read recently. In it, a third-century rabbi named Rabbi Yehoshua travels to Rome and, there, notices something peculiar. First, he sees thick, marble columns wrapped in blankets to protect them from the heat and the cold. Right beside them, he sees a poor person laying on a single thin reed mat and covered by another. He comments because he cannot understand this difference. To Rabbi Yehoshua, a society that takes better care of its riches than it does of its people is simply unconscionable.
This scene remains all too familiar, especially in D.C. Street Sense Media’s offices are half a mile from the White House, and a new couple just pitched their tent on our block the other week. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. One of my clients had to defend herself and her neighbors from an encampment clean-up last month. Another wanders the streets in the dead of night, pushing her broken walker. A year into homelessness, another has started to turned to substance use. Another, a returning citizen, doesn’t have a reliable place or phone number for his parole officer to reach him at, so he lives in constant fear that he’ll be ambushed by cops with a warrant out for his arrest. The wife of another calls me every day to ask whether I’ve seen her husband, and every day I tell her that I haven’t. Clients constantly tell me that they’ve been robbed or beaten up, or that they’ve been unable to sleep soundly or find a warm meal for nights and nights in a row. On outreach, sometimes I’ll ask which of my supplies someone needs—hats, gloves, hand warmers, toe warmers…—and they’ll respond, “Yes.”
This is a list of horrors, one after the next, and it is my job to listen and act on them if I’m able. I often feel crushed by the ways society discards my clients and yet, in the same moment, have to tell them that I can’t help, for the problems are often much larger than my two-person department can handle. It’s only natural that it’s hard to keep my head above water, and I’m not even the one being forced under. Being relatively new to this line of work, it’s difficult to envision a future in which I don’t become either too traumatized by or too immune to clients’ pain to continue on.
But that’s not a foregone conclusion. I want to build myself up to a point where I can shoulder these problems, sustain my work, and channel that energy toward lasting, systemic change. That’s where this midrash comes in. Again, Rabbi Yehoshua’s answer isn’t as simple as giving the column’s blanket to the poor person; the thrust of his reflection is on what this man’s plight says about society as a whole. As such, the solution must be the transformation of our world into one that values and honors people over property. That’s easier said than done, but it must be the center of this work, of my work. And from that grounding, I can source the resilience to help my clients persevere when we can’t yet find a weak spot in the city’s priorities and to fight with them tooth and nail when we can.
