Thinking about chesed

I hope some of you are still reading - it has been quite a while since I blogged. Partly this was because of feeling a bit ill and having several out-of-town visitors including a brief visit from my parents. But mostly it was an old problem that has kept me from ever regularly keeping a journal - having way too many topics I want to write about and not just sitting down to write! (At the moment I have about six articles/posts that I want to comment on saved as drafts.) So I am just going to start with the following:

Renegade Rebbetzin had a post that expressed so well a topic I have talked about before and one which led my husband and I to move across the country a year ago. What does it mean to really help people?

Cool Yiddishe Mama wrote about her friend (whom I know) who is struggling to get help with finding a job and having a place to live and food in the meantime. I have another friend, "Jacob", who has also struggled with extreme financial difficulties for quite some time. A small number of friends have repeatedly helped him out, but he could not seem to find support and help from the community at large. What do these two people have in common? They are both gerrim, not long-standing members of a specific shul community, and have the kind of financial problems that people don't connect to their fellow Jew sitting next to them in shul. Poverty is something that happens to people in Israel or some widowed mother with ten children (chas v'shalom), not to the guy who I see in shul but have never introduced myself to. The rabbis who were involved in the conversions basically abandoned them after a few months. Jacob practicallly begged his rabbi to help him meet people at shul. The rabbi e-mailed about five guys to ask them to invite him to meals. He got one or two invitations, then nothing - even the rabbi only invited him once, and when they got seperated during kiddush he went home for lunch without his invited guest! As Jacob cannot afford to move to the more expensive area near the shuls, he was walking over 2 miles to get to shul. With no invitations, he then turned around and walked back home. Then he was seriously injured and could not attend shul for a long time, and no one noticed.

I could go on -- I could write ten posts about how I was treated as a newcomer when I married my husband and went to NY for him to continue in yeshiva, how we were treated when we tried to get $3000 in pay that was owed to my husband from a rabbi at the yeshiva, how we lived in a building owned by the rabbi of the shul across the street and with a frum manager but neither treated us as fellow frum Jews -- but instead I will try to cntinue tomorrow with examples of things that DO represent how Jews should treat each other and help each other. (There are at least three of my readers that will find their actions in my post!)