“Eikha — how have we allowed this?”
Lonely sit the ones
once crowned with dignity!
The ignored, abandoned, and abused
have been made unwell,
unhoused,
addicted.
A man fashioned with a divine soul now pleads with Heaven
at the bus stop.
From a safe distance, we listen
— afraid —
as they weep and rage.
Utterly alone, save for a dog
who knows how to stay.
All who should have sheltered them have turned away.
exiles among us;
alas, we do not mourn.
In this vast city, swollen with greed and with ego,
bitterness and isolation have birthed our moral collapse.
We step over.
We walk past.
We hold our breaths —
as if their scent and sorrow were contagion.
They are not our foes —
alas, we do not see their full humanity.
“We are here! We are human!” they cry,
their breath turning to frost in the winter air.
Mothers hold babies on subway floors.
“Hello, notice me! Notice us!
PLEASE! NOTICE US!”
We smile sheepishly —
a counterfeit mercy;
alas, we do not stop.
Who among us do we count as precious?
Not the one dealt a bad hand;
tarnished gems with hidden beauty;
we bless God for sparing us their fate
and call it gratitude.
To us, they are disgraced;
wrapped in blankets,
Like armor.
Sheltered in tents,
a tattered sukkah.
Our greatest cities sin through indifference;
and so they falter beneath their own weight.
The hearts of their inhabitants – turned to stone –
are calloused by self-interest, by power,
by the ache of powerless onlooking.
Who will save them?
For we have become dehumanized,
numbed by noise, flooded by need, drowned in too much seeing.
Overstimulation, oversaturation, overexposure.
with none to comfort us, how shall we comfort the stranger?
A woman whose sense of sanity has escaped her
pees openly on the platform at 96th Street.
The city recoils —
tourists and locals turn away in disgust,
words of comfort, acts of compassion evade us,
astonished by the horror of her humiliation
which we name “Indecency.”
I recognize her from three years ago,
when she revealed herself again —
as she has likely done a thousand times unaided.
We blame her, but whose sin is this to carry?
Among us walk the quiet righteous —
ladling hot soup, handing out soft bread,
gathering coats, opening doors to warm spaces.
Through their small mercies, they become human anew,
and in their rebecoming, they can once again discern the divine spark in others.
“For the work of righteousness shall be peace,
and the effect of righteousness, calm and confidence, forever.
Then my people shall dwell in peaceful homes,
in secure dwellings,
in untroubled places of rest.”
They fight an unrelenting windstorm
this city has long refused to calm.
Yet their efforts cannot stem the tide.
the powerful turn against the immigrant,
the addicted, the battered, the dispossessed.
“The devil is at work in the shelters,”
says the tearful man, desperate for sobriety at the Community Kitchen —
as if we ourselves had not crowned the devil king.
By our own hands,
we have wrought a land numbed and depleted—
overmedicated, under-resourced.
Those who should heal us —
politicians, insurers, hospital magnates,
pharmaceutical giants, private doctors —
profit from our suffering,
Feast on our despair.
“Here’s a pill for your loneliness,”
They offer,
“A shot for your helplessness.”
When mental illness rises up in anguish,
and those who witness call the police,
the afflicted are answered with violence
rather than patience,
rather than the mercy of a listening ear.
They proclaim, “They posed a threat!”
No — our investments are the enemy.
Thus says the Teaching:
Thou shalt not oppress a stranger:
for you know the heart of a stranger,
seeing you were strangers in the land of Mitzrayim.
Now!
Invest your wealth in psychiatric units,
Invest your wealth in psychiatric units,
for social workers, therapists, and nurses
use their ears to hear the unheard.
Invest your wealth in schools, for children will one day speak the world into being.
Invest your wealth, for money reaches farther than our hands.
The goat of Azazel offers no relief.
We cannot wash away our guilt,
nor shift it to another.
We are no different from the other;
we are the women on the street,
mourning our numbness rather than our unseen lives.
We are the men in the shelter,
clinging to our greed rather than the bottle.
We are the children with empty lunchboxes,
yet hungering for the nourishment of connection.
We are the same as the other,
yet blessed with resources to soften our afflictions;
sustained by the arms of family;
treated with dignity, and daring to believe we deserve it.
For those who have lost hope;
for those who place money above humanity;
for those who no longer believe in their own worth;
for those who step over bodies on the sidewalk —
For these I weep.
