36 | OCTOBER 28 • 2021

I

n 1966 an 11-year-old Black
boy moved with his parents and
family to a white neighborhood
in Washington. Sitting with his two
brothers and two sisters on the front
step of the house, he
waited to see how they
would be greeted. They
were not. Passers-by
turned to look at them,
but no one gave them a
smile or even a glance of
recognition. All the fearful
stories he had heard about
how whites treated blacks seemed to be
coming true. Years later, writing about
those first days in their new home, he
says, “I knew we were not welcome
here. I knew we would not be liked
here. I knew we would have no friends
here. I knew we should not have moved
here …”
As he was thinking those thoughts,
a white woman coming home from
work passed by on the other side of the
road. She turned to the children and
with a broad smile said, “Welcome!”
Disappearing into the house, she
emerged minutes later with a tray laden
with drinks and cream-cheese and
jelly sandwiches which she brought

over to the children, making them feel
at home. That moment — the young
man later wrote — changed his life. It
gave him a sense of belonging where
there was none before. It made him
realize, at a time when race relations
in the United States were still fraught,
that a Black family could feel at home
in a white area and that there could
be relationships that were color-blind.
Over the years, he learned to admire
much about the woman across the
street, but it was that first spontaneous
act of greeting that became, for him, a
definitive memory. It broke down a wall
of separation and turned strangers into
friends.
The young man, Stephen Carter,
eventually became a law professor at
Yale and wrote a book about what he
learned that day. He called it Civility.
The name of the woman, he tells us,
was Sara Kestenbaum, and she died
all too young. He adds that it was no
coincidence that she was a religious Jew.
“In the Jewish tradition,” he notes, such
civility is called “chesed — the doing
of acts of kindness — which is in turn
derived from the understanding that
human beings are made in the image of
God.”

Civility, he adds, “itself may be
seen as part of chesed: it does indeed
require kindnesses toward our fellow
citizens, including the ones who are
strangers, and even when it is hard.”
To this day, he adds, “I can close my
eyes and feel on my tongue the smooth,
slick sweetness of the cream cheese
and jelly sandwiches that I gobbled
on that summer afternoon when I
discovered how a single act of genuine
and unassuming civility can change a
life forever.”
I never knew Sara Kestenbaum, but
years after I had read Carter’s book, I
gave a lecture to the Jewish community
in the part of Washington where she
had lived. I told them Carter’s story,
which they had not heard before. But
they nodded in recognition. “Yes,”
one said, “that’s the kind of thing Sara
would do.”

ACTS OF CHESED
Something like this thought was surely
in the mind of Abraham’s servant,
unnamed in the text but traditionally
identified as Eliezer, when he arrived at
Nahor in Aram Naharaim, northwest
Mesopotamia, to find a wife for his
master’s son. Abraham had not told him

Rabbi
Jonathan
Sacks

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

The Kindness
of Strangers