A Mitzvah For Mary
Growing up in Latin America and then Wisconsin did not give me much opportunity to meet Jewish people. Strangely enough, my first Jewish friend was Michael Feldman, who I met when we moved to Poland Spring, Maine. South-Central Maine is more like Appalachia than the typical postcard of Bar Harbor. Michael was there because his grandfather Saul owned the Poland Spring Resort, one of the oldest resorts in America, dating back to the late Eighteenth Century when the colonial crowd used to come up to take the mineral-free waters and revive themselves. The reason Poland Spring existed where it did was because of the spring water. The reason the Feldman’s were there was because Saul got a bargain on an old dilapidated resort complete with America’s first eighteen-hole golf course (the famous Fourth Hole, a downhill pine-lined chute with magnificent distant views of lakes and mountains, that was a popular postcard shot of Vacationland as Maine was calling itself). The water business was still pumping, but in 1966 who knew where bottled water was headed (maybe Saul did since he was very shrewd). The reason we were there was that Saul had leased the resort (minus the golf course) to the U.S. Government so that my mother could set up the first women’s Job Corps Center as part of the Great Society push by Lyndon Johnson. There were not a lot of other kids to hang with on that hilltop, so Michael (a few years my junior) and I became pals.
The next Jewish friend I had came as a collection of guys on my Freshman dorm floor at Cornell, where NYC Jewish overachievers comprised a disproportionately large part of the student body. I joined a predominantly Jewish fraternity and by senior year my five roommates (not to mention my girlfriend, pre-med Robin Ostrowitz from Flushing) were all Jewish. When I went to work in banking after business school, I joined Bankers Trust Company, one of the “white shoe” banks that had been traditionally run by WASPS, but was starting to integrate more and more Jews, especially in the trading area. In fact, the hot-shot trader was a guy named Jay Pomerantz and he not only fit the stereotype of a NYC Jew with is Jewfro hair and his brilliant sense of humor, but he was actually an ordained rabbi. For my twenty-three years at Bankers Trust I befriended and worked with many Jews. I even went on at one point to work for an Israeli company run by Orthodox Jews and was the only member of senior management that was not Jewish. At one point I was contemplating a deal with one of the wealthier Jewish real estate families in America, the Ghermezians of Mall of America fame, when the old man, when told I wasn’t Jewish, asked me, “how come you’re not Jewish?”
It’s hard not to pick up a fair bit of Yiddish and Jewish customs over the years when your path intertwines with so many Jewish people. One of those words and customs is the mitzvah, which is one of the 613 commandments of the Hebrew faith (luckily that got distilled down to ten for the rest of us). A mitzvah is simply a good deed. Technically it is supposed to be a religious duty, but my Jewish friends tell me there is latitude to include any good deed. In Christianity we have The Golden Rule and the Good Samaritan creed, but I’m not sure there is a perfect analogy to a mitzvah and I think maybe there should be. Being of service to others is important for the soul. We need more good deed doing, especially at this moment in history. And clearly our President, who is known to wonder why people would join the military and risk their lives for others and has verbalized this as “what’s in it for them?” doesn’t get the concept of a mitzvah. Maybe he would be a different kind of president if he did.
Yesterday I was feeling energetic, so I took out my power-washer and set to work cleaning the driveway of the black tire marks left by various trucks and especially the stone-cutter’s tractor. While doing it, Kim walked up the driveway with our next-door neighbor, Mary. Mary is a widow, having lost Mick, her husband of many years, about five years ago, We are very friendly with Mary so when she said, “when are you going to do my driveway?” My reply came immediately as “tomorrow.”
Well, that was yesterday and tomorrow was today so I took my extra daylight savings hour and was on Mary’s driveway at 7:30am. I had never noticed it before, but Mary’s driveway was much dirtier than I had imagined and the good news was that the difference between clean and dirty was stark (always good to feel one’s accomplishments). The bad news was that this was a big three-car driveway and was going to take some time. Power-washing is my kind of chore since the machine does the heavy lifting, but sooner or later your back does start to feel the combination of being on your feet a lot and wrestling the power wand around. Mary came out repeatedly and asked if I was sure I wanted to do this, but I was committed at that point and determined to do the job.
Kim brought me a breakfast burrito and I had a supply of Gatorade and given the mild weather, the day passed quickly. Before I knew it it was 3pm and I realized that even with Mary going to buy extra gas, I was going to run out of gas (as in, poop out) after eight or so hours of power-washing. I got the majority of the bad areas done and Mary declared that she felt like she had a new driveway. She also said that she hadn’t realized how long it had been since Mick had power-washed the driveway. This last comment made me particularly glad that I had done this for her. She apologized for using up my entire Sunday and doing it with such a mindless task. I told her I has no plans for the day and that this was as good a way to spend it as any. And as for the mindlessness of the task, I explained to her that it gave me time to think great thoughts. None of that was untrue. I truly did not have anything else pressing to do and I do enjoy mindless menial tasks at times since they give me some zen meditation time.
In this case, my thoughts went to the importance of being of service to people you care about and perhaps sometimes for those who you don’t. The world is in a precarious point right now and I hope Jared and Ivanka can spare a moment to explain to Donald the importance of a mitzvah. In a few days he will find he has lots of time on his hands and plenty of reasons to repent.