The most overwhelming thing spending a morning making deliveries with Serge, Table to Table’s veteran truck driver and delivery guy, is not fighting the traffic in and around Tel Aviv. Heavy traffic, one-way streets and careless drivers can certainly make the experience a harrowing one, but spending time on the road with Serge is a great way to get to know the city and he is a real character, one who keeps his passenger-for-the-day laughing.
No, the frustration of fighting traffic all day pales in comparison to the humbling realization that it is very, very easy to ignore the phenomenon of poverty in Israel.
Looking without seeing
On the face of things, it shouldn’t be so easy to ignore poverty. Poverty statistics periodically make the news, either because the government has released the latest numbers, because there is an election campaign or because a group of Holocaust survivors living in poverty take to extreme measures to pressure the government to increase aid. Since the beginning of 2008 skyrocketing food prices and the worldwide financial crunch has been front page news in Israel. It’s not like nobody knows that many Israelis are struggling to get by.
But somehow, we do ignore it. Poverty is not as in-your-face in Israel as it is in other Western countries. While things are far from perfect in Israel, our inner cities are a far cry from the crime-ridden neighborhoods in the South Bronx, south-central Los Angeles or some underprivileged suburbs of Paris. Thankfully, street crime is very low and there are few homeless people to disturb the illusion that “hakol beseder” (everything is fine and dandy).
Dry numbers
I think the issue is that while sanitized reports about poverty do make the news, squeezed in between reports about the weekend road toll and the latest accusations about the prime minister, they do little to bring the reality of poverty to life for most listeners. It’s not that people don’t care, but for most families fortunate enough to enjoy the fruits of Israel’s economic boom, it is hard to relate to a dry list of numbers.
But the numbers are there, and they are horrible – nearly 1.7 million Israelis currently live under the poverty line (NIS 5,191 per month, or $1,500) for a family of four, according to the National Insurance Institute), including 804,000 children. Enough Holocaust survivors live in below the poverty line that a group of them hit the streets last summer to protest the meager government stipend they receive.
Still, how many people come away from the afternoon news with more than a “tsk tsk”?
Tough reality
Hitting the streets with Serge brought the reality home hard. The physical work wasn’t bad – we managed to pull up close to most of the venues we were serving, so we usually had only a few steps to lug crates of strawberries and frozen goods a few steps from the truck to the kitchen.
But sitting with a group of disadvantaged senior citizens forces you to think about the issues at hand, and to appreciate the good fortune that so many people are lucky enough to enjoy. With barely any encouragement, an old lady will tap you on the shoulder with a cane to strike up a conversation, or a frail gentleman will ask a question, almost begging you to sit down for a chat. Both are thankful for the berries, but may be even more thankful that that at least for the moment, they are no longer invisible. One group even welcomed us with a round of applause.
In addition to the obvious fulfillment these people receive from a simple “shalom, how are you feeling today?”, making time to chat with needy seniors is a fulfillment of the Torah’s command to “honor the face of an old man (Leviticus 19:32).
So that’s a day in the life of T2T: Frustrating and exhilarating and tiring and boring and trafficky and a thousand other things as well, all at the same time. But I guess the most accurate description of a day on the trucks is: fulfilling.
Tags: Poverty
