A home for all?

The Ukrainian refugee crisis has generated much sympathy from those fortunate enough to live outside the war zone. More than that, it has prompted many people to open their homes to the fleeing Ukrainians and offer them hospitality.

Pirkei Avot has something challenging to say about opening one's home to the needy. At the beginning of Avot 1:5 Yose ben Yochanan ish Yerushalayim teaches:

(i) Let your house be open wide and (ii) let the poor be the members of your household ...

[The mishnah continues with a third teaching, on the manner or extent to which a man should engage in small talk with his wife. Though some commentators have sought to link that topic with the first two, I do not propose to discuss it here but will leave it for a later post].

So what can we say about Yose ben Yochanan's guidance on hosting the poor?

Every child who receives a Jewish religious education is likely to encounter the popular story of how the desert tent of Abraham, the founding father of the three major monotheistic faiths, was open on all four sides in order to facilitate the entry of travellers so that he could offer them the hospitality and kindness for which he was famed. This tale, which is regarded as the paradigm of the sort of conduct that Yose ben Yochanan had in mind when composing this Mishnah (see Bartenura and Anaf Yosef) is deeply rooted in Jewish tradition and is of ancient origin (see Avot deRabbi Natan 7:1). Essentially, one’s hospitality should be available to all comers and it should be furnished on the basis of the needs of others, not the convenience or personal preferences of the householder.

This noble aspiration is not absolute: it is even subject to fine-tuning elsewhere in Avot, being subject to the qualification that one must exercise caution and discretion when contemplating whether to welcome a wicked person into one’s home or to keep him out (Avot 1:7).

Can we aspire to the lofty level of Abraham today? To keep one’s home as a truly open house to which all are welcome is a laudable ideal – but it is one which in practice very few people feel that they can live up to. Distrust and suspicion of strangers is nowadays both normal and accepted, following the breakdown of traditional communal and family bonds that has occurred in the decades following the Second World War, Additionally, contemporary householders have come to expect and appreciate a degree of privacy and personal space that was unknown and unimaginable in bygone times.

There is also the question of cost. For those who are so rich that they can afford to offer unlimited hospitality, and for those who are so poor that they have nothing at all to lose, keeping open house poses fewer problems. However, for the very large number of people in the middle, the prospect of welcoming all and sundry – and in particular the poor, who cannot be expected to pay their way – is a prospect that is filled with financial threat and menace.

Householders may also be preoccupied by a further worry: what if the prospective beneficiary of the hospitality, being unknown to his putative host, is a criminal, a fugitive from justice or a person of bad character? Here we have to balance the advice to avoid associating with the wicked against the conflicting obligation to give people the benefit of the doubt unless their track record makes this impossible (Avot 1:6). That too is a laudable ideal, though being required to give others the benefit of any doubt as to their character is not the same as having one’s personal anxieties or suspicions quelled.

None of these issues and worries invalidate the ideal of keeping one’s home open, as Yose ben Yochanan urges us to do, and we have to appreciate that the guidance in this mishnah is one of several pieces of advice in Avot which, if we are honest with ourselves, we struggle to perform properly. The Torah itself concedes that the poor are always with us (Deut. 15:11) and, however many deserving and impoverished people we can shelter, there will always be more whose welfare lies beyond our means. Even so, this mishnah can be read together with the wise observation of Rabbi Tarfon (Avot 2:21) that the fact that a person cannot complete a task does not exempt him from starting it: in other words, each of us should do what we can, when we can, to assist and if necessary shelter those who cannot help themselves.

I should like to conclude with an observation on times of war and peace. During the Second World War and its aftermath, literally millions of people were displaced. For the most part they were impoverished, desperate for sustenance and clothes, and much in need of emotional support. Many were assisted or saved by the brave and often illicit hospitality and shelter offered by others, irrespective of considerations of religion and race. These courageous and meritorious actions have been the subject of countless books, movies and memorials. They also invite us to consider why it is that in wartime conditions, when it is so much more difficult to protect and succour the poor, so many people were prepared to put themselves out, sometimes at risk to their own lives, when it seems that far fewer people are able to rise to the same level of hospitality during periods of relevant peace and security.