Small acts of kindness
[Setting: Standing on line in a bakery on Friday afternoon, casually eavesdropping on two women having a conversation behind me]
Woman 1: I’m running really late today… I wonder if they’ve already locked the cash registers
Woman 2: ‘Locked the cash registers?’ What does that mean… they won’t take our money?
W1: Yeah… basically. 30 – 45 minutes before they officially close, the owner goes around to each cash register and locks the drawers… and then goes home. The cashiers have instructions to tell anyone coming after the drawers are locked that they have no way to accept money so whatever the customers have picked out is free.
W2: I don’t get it… why would the owner do that?
W1: Don’t you see… it’s just like in Machane Yehuda [the open air produce market in Jerusalem] where a lot of the vendors who sell perishables slash their prices an hour before closing for shabbat. That way the poor people can ‘buy’ the things they need for shabbat with dignity… and the vendors basically give things that can’t be stored over shabbat to a worthy cause. And because some of the people doing last minute shopping really are simply running late, there is no shame for the poor because nobody knows who is who.
W2: Wait, so you’re telling me it’s an open secret that poor people come here during the last hour before closing and they get their baked goods for free?
W1: Exactly, only everyone’s dignity is protected by the fact that some shoppers are actually running late… and by the owner’s little charade of the locked cash registers. This way everyone wins; The owner of the bakery performs a ‘chesed’ [roughly translates as an act of kindness]… the cashiers get to take part in the act… and the recipients can just as easily be genuinely running late as poor… so there is no embarrassment to anyone at being on the receiving end of the act.
W2: [after a brief pause] Y’know… sometimes I love this country!
[Author’s note: Me too!]
While driving home from the bakery my mind replayed the conversation I had just heard… and then wandered to a memory of a wonderful fish restaurant in Brooklyn that Zahava and I used to frequent. This kitschy little kosher seafood place had an incredibly wide selection of really fresh fish on the menu at all times, and the owner would often come to the table to recommend new selections or advise diners on interesting new ways to have their old favourites prepared.
After one of our dinners there I was raving about the place to a friend who also knew the place, and I wondered aloud how this little restaurant could afford to have so many different kinds of fresh fish on the menu. Surely the law of averages suggested that they must end up throwing out a lot of fish since not every portion of every type of fish would be ordered by the customers every day.
My friend’s reply was an eye-opener.
He explained that every night at ‘closing time’, many of the poor, and/or homeless people from the neighbourhood knew to come to the restaurant. The manager personally seated them at tables set with clean linen tablecloths and napkins, and had his chef prepare for them whatever fish would not be perfectly fresh the following evening. Rather than let the fish go ‘off’ and be thrown away, he opted to have his chef work an extra hour preparing it for people in need of a good meal.
Someone doing a strict cost analysis might say that the owners of the bakery and the fish restaurant are smart businessman seeing as whatever ‘wasted’ food is leftover at the end of the day is more than paid for by the increased customer traffic and loyalty derived from the larger selection. A cost accountant wouldn’t really care about where the ‘wasted’ food went at the end of the day… because gone is gone, and an old loaf of challah is the same as day old fish to someone looking only at a ledger.
I like to think that these business owners are keeping two sets of books (and not in the criminal sense); one that tells them how they are doing right now… and one that will only be checked when they are audited at the end of their days.
I’m sure there must be thousands… maybe even tens of thousands… of stories like these floating around out there. Such ‘small’ acts of kindness must occur every day under our very noses, yet unless we overhear someone talking about them in a bakery line… or have a friend fill us in about what happens to leftover fish at our favourite restaurant… we may never hear about them.
And that’s a shame.