That Best Portion of a Person’s Life

A few short weeks after my back surgery, my wife, Sharon, had toe surgery, leaving us with a total of two good feet between us. The surgeries brought us closer together in one way, since, after mine, she drove me around wherever we had to go, and after hers we switched. Closeness has limits, though, so thankfully we both can drive now, giving each of us a bit more independence.

When Sharon checked in for her operation, she went through the usual identity verification process, including giving her date of birth. And when she did, the intake nurse exclaimed, “You’re having surgery on your birthday?!?” Of course she deserved a better birthday present, but that’s how the dates worked out best for us.

As I was waiting in the visitors’ lounge during the operation, one of the nurses came over to me with colorful birthday wishes to Sharon signed by everyone in the surgical center. I gladly added my signature.

When she woke up from the surgery and they gave her the card, she unsurprisingly appreciated it. More surprising to me, though, she REALLY appreciated it, commenting on it many times to all who asked about the operation. True, it was just computer-generated Happy Birthday wishes, but it deeply touched her as small acts of kindness so often do.

Kindness is not, of course, only individual; there are communal kindnesses as well. Our local community recently experienced deep sorrow when Sammy Roth, a vivacious high school student, fell ill with cancer and died within months. There were, I am certain, many individual acts of kindness to both Sammy before her death and to her parents, brother, and the rest of the family throughout their ordeal. But their community — consisting mainly of their shul, Congregation Rinat Yisrael, and her school, Yeshivat Frisch, though far beyond that as well — also provided comfort and kindness.

One day, when the situation had turned dire, we received an email from the shul announcing a special Tehillim gathering that evening for Sammy. It was a weekday, and the notice was pretty last minute, but by 8:15 p.m. the sanctuary was packed. The community gathered not just to pray for Sammy’s recovery, but also as an expression of friendship and comfort to Sammy and her family; it was a communal act of kindness when kindness was, sadly, almost all we had to offer. And I know the family deeply appreciated the community’s actions.

There is, thankfully, another side of this coin — communal acts of kindness in celebratory circumstances. My son-in-law Allen’s grandfather, Henry Glenn — Zayde to the entire family — recently celebrated his 100th birthday. A special occasion for anyone to be sure, but a truly extraordinary day for someone who, after surviving the Shoah and the loss of many family members, was able to build a thriving business from almost nothing, create a wonderful family, and become an emblem of resilience and fortitude to the entire Englewood community, where he has lived for more than 40 years.

How do you commemorate such a singular birthday? Well, as the Glenns do everything, with a sense of style. They celebrated at Congregation Ahavath Torah at a sefer Torah dedication in his honor and in memory of his beloved late wife, Ester. And the community turned out en masse to join him in celebration; how could any of the many people whose lives he touched not take the opportunity to add a few drops of ink to a letter in that most unique sefer Torah? A multidirectional kindness played itself out that morning — kindness from the Glenns and Zayde to the Englewood community, and kindness from Zayde’s many friends and neighbors who gathered to honor and celebrate with him.

There also can be national kindness, when a nation and its leadership treat those on the lower rungs of the economic and social ladders with care and compassion; with soft words, a caressing touch, and helping hands. But if that’s too much to expect in our current crude and vulgar society, I would have hoped that our nation could act with basic decency or, at the very least, avoid cruelty. Sadly, that appears to be a futile wish, because cruelty expresses itself in too many areas of national American life.

This is especially true in the area of immigration, where the infliction of pain — both real and psychic — lies at the heart of how our leadership treats immigrants. I understand that immigration policy is difficult to devise and implement, with many conflicting pros and cons to be weighed and considered. But whatever the underlying policy is, there is no reason for it to be implemented with the rampant cruelty that has been present since a new administration took over the reins of power in January 2025.

Families have been torn apart and people grabbed off the street by masked men and transferred thousands of miles away from friends, family, and legal assistance, to be incarcerated in detention centers here and abroad that belong in a Dickens novel. All undocumented/illegal immigrants are falsely attacked as the worst of the worst, though the majority have no criminal records, have raised families, held jobs, and paid taxes for decades, and were, indeed, following the rules when they were ignominiously hauled off. Due process is treated as an annoyance to be evaded rather than as a basic element in our rule of law. And even legal immigrants are treated with disdain as rules are changed to make fulfilling the American dream by those without resources so much more difficult than necessary. And there’s so much more; this is only the tip of the iceberg.

And as bothered as I am with this cruelty, what equally concerns me deeply, as I’ve written about earlier, is that this is taking place with nary a peep of protest from the religious leaders of our community which was once known as rachamanim bnei rachamanim (an inherently compassionate people). We are a community that was targeted by and felt the sting of the 1924 racist immigration laws, and thus supported illegal Jewish immigration from 1924 to 1965 — immigration that numbered in the tens of thousands if not more. But because we are not (yet) the target of the current cruel immigration policy, we turn a blind eye and sit by in silence.

The Torah does, in fact, have a message that should replace our leadership’s continuing silence. As Rabbi Saul Berman argues in his prescient and majestic 2019 article “Immigration: A Perspective from Biblical Narrative and Law,” biblical legislation regulates threats to the life, sexual assault, economic exploitation, and emotional well-being of immigrants as well as ensuring them legal protections. Yet I’m still waiting for sermons, articles, or adult education classes and lectures emulating Rabbi Berman’s scholarship and sensitivity about an issue of current relevance to the life of our country and the ethics of our community.

As a columnist from time to time I return to several topics and quotes about those topics that speak deeply to me. One such topic is kindness, and one such quote is from my teacher and, dare I say, friend R. Shai Held: “If you are blessed with children, do they know, truly and unambiguously, that whether or not they are kind is what matters most to you? That you value kindness more than success; that you value it more than brilliance or mitzvot like Shabbat and kashrut?” How wonderful it would be if our moral leadership would preach that message. Similarly, I was recently moved by a commencement address by George Saunders, whose takeaway line was “what I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” In fact, his specific example supporting that sentence could have been written by me; indeed, in some ways it already was.

In our personal and intra-communal lives we try, often successfully, to emulate God’s attribute of kindness (Ex. 34:6). But we, and our religious and moral leaders, need to apply Rabbi Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel’s brilliant 17-word sermon to our national lives: “When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.”

If only we could have kind leaders to admire and wise, moral leaders to show us the way.