By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — My parents did not do everything right (nor have I) but I do remember the basic values of human dignity and the work ethic that they brought with them when we emigrated from Israel in 1962. This morning, at a car wash, I saw a thin Mexican man, after exerting himself at vacuuming, scrubbing, and wiping off my late model vehicle, take my $5 tip into his hands. My throat lumped in both pride and shame when he grasped the bill, looked at a couple of his fellow laborers with wide and beaming eyes, and then walked away while making the sign of the Cross upon his chest.
It may very well be that the recent loss of my mother and now my grappling with the realization, so empty and final, that I will never have my parents again, has turned me into a sloppy sack of tears and sentimentality. I hope it’s more than that. I hope that what I saw this morning, a small act of gratitude that would seem to have no context in the world in which so many of us dwell, a culture in which too few regard a damned five dollar bill as something worth summoning a rite, a prize, a prayer—I hope that my own value system will be further informed and regulated.
This is not even remotely a column of self-congratulatory indulgence or a patronizing little missive of liberal hyperventilation. It is the expression of good fortune at being able to witness up close how dreadfully separated we are from each other in this hyperbolic land of opportunity and how inextricably linked we are as God’s children under the heaven.
It’s not about five dollars. It’s not about wealth. It is about moral currency—something that now, at the age of 60, having failed disastrously at some things and succeeded modestly in others, is just about the only thing a person really has left to rely upon.
When was the last time most of us had five dollars in our hands and actually invoked God?
And if we did, were our hands that clutched the bill dirty from grease and other people’s filth and grime? Were we regarded, if we suddenly had a measly five dollars in our hands, as a human, a living soul, as somebody’s son or daughter by the rushed, impatient, distracted portfolio of a person who handed it over?
Did we consider that the working man or woman to whom we flipped a gratuity had a name, a lineage, a history of any kind that preceded the privileged moment we tossed away in dutiful obeisance to a ritual that we usually resent—just as our image of that child of God is biased by his/her color, unattractive teeth, worn sneakers, and beaten cap?
I did nothing special this morning. Truly. But I witnessed something that makes me feel special. It is a bittersweet amalgam of inspiration and the prevailing sadness of human life. And I can only aspire to know the depth and relief and sincerity and liberation of the anonymous man who cleaned my car today and turned a gasoline station into a sanctuary.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com