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