Opening the Gates

July 16-17, 2010/ 6 Av 5770

By Rabbi Jonathan Kelsen

This coming week we will mark the fast of Tisha b'Av, commemorating the destruction of the Beit haMikdash (and additional national tragedies). This year, I find myself reflecting on the very notion of a bayit, a house. The Mishnah (Bava Batra 1: 5) rules that one who dwells within a courtyard (itself connecting numerous individual houses) may be compelled by his neighbors to help build a 'gatehouse,' a structure designed to house a guard for the courtyard and separate it more definitively from the public thoroughfare. While in part the gatehouse adds to the security of the courtyard, it also serves to isolate its residents from those outside it. Given that context, we can appreciate the Gemara's opening lines on this Mishnah (Bava Batra 7b):

There is a story of a righteous person with whom the prophet Elijah spoke regularly.  Once he built a gatehouse, Elijah no longer spoke with him.

Rashi comments:  

And Elijah no longer spoke with him: For the gatehouse gates off the poor people who are crying out and their voices cannot be heard.

As pointed out by Moshe Halbertal, this short Talmudic story problematizes the ruling of the Mishnah. The latter text seems to frame the gatehouse as a positive phenomenon, and therefore allows a community to compel its members to contribute towards its construction. Yet, we learn in the Gemara, this very same structure has (instead? additionally?) a negative valence: it serves to disrupt the relationship between even a righteous man and his regular interlocutor, Elijah, the herald of redemption. By building the gatehouse, the righteous man isolates himself from the cries of the poor (as Rashi explains), and as such loses the merit of speaking with the prophet. 

Gatehouses (and houses generally) provide us with security and privacy, features which are justly held up by society as desiderata to be pursued. Nonetheless, our houses, individual and communal, literal and figurative, must be constructed cautiously, lest they lock out the voices of the outside crying out in need, and with them any hope for own ultimate redemption.

I was recently privileged to participate in the recent AJWS Young Rabbis' Delegation service trip to Muchucuxcah, Yucatan, Mexico (see http://ajws.org/who_we_are/news/archives/press_release/ajws_sends_its_first_interdenominational_group_of_rabbis_to_mexico.html). Muchucuxcah is a small, rural village, whose economic stability and ability to provide for its basic human needs have been severely compromised. Adequate nutrition and access to health care, resources which many of us thankfully have, are far less prevalent for these farmers an laborers, due to a variety of economic and political factors.

AJWS grantees work in the this region and others throughout the Global South, implementing policies and strategies designed to empower these communities to develop sustainable food and broader economic security. These types of ventures are examples of systemically focused efforts by the people of Muchucuxcah (aided by AJWS) to express their dignity and drive for a better future in productive, efficient, and sustainable business venues, through which they can provide for themselves and their children. That ability is a human right, and yet for so many that right is denied.

Hotels and apartment buildings often have two entrances: the front door, designed to make an elegant first impression, and a hidden service entrance which gives access to the "help" with as little visibility as possible. AJWS showed us the 'side entrance' of Cancun, and indeed of our incredibly globalized bayit/world-- the entrance through which those who remain unseen and unsupported come in and out, supporting those who use the ‘front door.’ The economic forces at play in constructing and sustaining this situation are complicated, and determining the proper response to them is perhaps even more so. Yet it is clear that we must, at the very least, hear these cries of human pain and deprivation, study their causes, and consider our response. We dare not drown out those cries via the construction of gatehouses, structures so sturdy that our communal home becomes utterly insulated from the calls of conscience.

We are taught that the Messiah is to be born on Tisha b'Av. If we are to merit receiving him, along with Elijah, then we must find a way to hear through our individual, communal, and national gatehouses, and expose ourselves to all that is not yet right in our world. And by reconstructing our own houses, may we merit the rebuilding of the house foretold of in the prophets: "And it shall be called a House of Prayer, for all nations."