Diapers on the doorstep

A couple of days ago I was surprised to find a neat bundle on my doorstep: a small white bag containing some used diapers. It was not difficult to trace their origin: we have close neighbours with a small child who is as yet not house-trained.

The immediate question I faced was that of what to do.

Had this happened to me in my pre-Pirkei Avot days, I know how would have responded. My first feelings would be those of anger bordering on outrage, fuelled by the fire of righteous indignation. How could anyone dare to do this at all, let alone to a close neighbour! I would have contemplated a number of vigorous responses. These would have included (i) ringing at the neighbours’ door and demanding an explanation while dangling the offending bag in front of whoever had the misfortune to answer the doorbell, and (ii) posting the bag into their letterbox. These initial feelings would have been suppressed only with some difficulty and in the knowledge that, if I utilised the letterbox option, I might be spotted by another resident of the building and branded a trouble-maker.

Now, as a Pirkei Avot man, I find the situation much easier to resolve.

Placing a bag of used diapers on a neighbour’s doorstep is not a usual form of behaviour. Indeed, during the three years in which we have lived in such proximity, this has never happened before. Our relationship with our neighbours, though never close, has always been polite and respectful. Neither they nor we are noisy folk and, to the best of my knowledge, none of us have done anything that might give rise to offence.

In the absence of any evidence that our neighbours were evil or motivated by malicious intent, this seemed the ideal opportunity to judge them favourably in accordance with the precept of Yehoshua ben Perachya (Avot 1:16).

But what reason might they have which could exculpate them? Hillel teaches (Avot 2:5) that one should not judge another person unless one is standing in his or her place. Our neighbours look to me as though they are in their early 30s.  Truth to tell, I can hardly remember anything of being in my 30s at all: the decade was a constant round of broken nights, stressful days and of dashing from one crisis to another as I tried to build a career while bearing my share of responsibility for babies and small children whose demands were many but who lacked the vocabulary to express them. Perhaps our neighbours were struggling, just as I had done, with similar burdens and had inadvertently dropped the diapers on our doorstep when they were interrupted by an emergent crisis and later forgot that they had not taken them all the way down to the refuse bins.

This was all very well in terms of exculpating my neighbours, but I was still left with the unwanted bundle. What should I do with it? When Rabbi Yose HaCohen is asked (Avot 2:13) to identify the good path that a person should choose for himself, he answers that it is the path of being a good neighbour. Now what would a good neighbour do here? I would forgive my neighbours, make sure not to say anything about this incident at all unless it became a regular event, and take the bag down to the refuse bin myself. End of story.

The best part of this little episode is that, by saying nothing to our neighbours, I avoided the risk of falling out with them—and that I avoided both getting angry and wallowing in those feelings of righteous indignation that feel so good at the time but can be so destructive.