There Shall Be No Needy, Part 6: What makes a home?

As a former tenant and a longtime landlord, as someone who worked at an agency that prevented eviction and as a member of a city commission against housing discrimination, I have been acutely aware of issues around housing and homelessness. In There Shall Be No Needy, Rabbi Jill Jacobs shows that you don't have to have had my life experience to see those issues as Jewish issues. They are deeply rooted in Jewish experience and Jewish text.

I don't altogether buy her argument that "the lack of a secure home" because of exile has created a Jewish sensitivity to homelessness. The two situations are not comparable. At most, when we reflect on how distraught our ancestors were on being expelled from the land and how much it disrupted their whole society, we can understand that losing one's apartment or house, today, is not just a personal tragedy. That is important to realize, I agree.

Here are some other, stronger points that Jacobs makes about the search for housing justice being rooted in Jewish values:

• Rabbinic texts assume that even poor people who have no food have homes. (Again, how deeply this is a criticism of contemporary American life, where that assumption is invalid!)
• Poor people cannot be required to give up their homes to receive assistance (tzedakah). Instead, the rest of us are under an obligation to make sure they can live in those homes in dignity.
  
• There is a model of what permanent housing is NOT: the sukkah. Houses that let the rain in, that have no heat, that are unsafe to live in for extended periods of time, are not homes, and providing such housing is not justice.
• There is a model of what a permanent home IS: the kind of place where we must affix a mezuzah. She summarizes Maimonides' definition; it must be of adequate size, and:
  

A permanent home, in Rambam's description, must have doors and a roof so that the residents be protected from the elements and from other potential dangers, such as robbers. Finally, just as a sukkah should be constructed with the intention that it be temporary, a home must be constructed with the intention that it be a permanent dwelling place. According to these requirements, it may be that transitional housing, FEMA trailers, shelters, and other nonpermanent or unsafe residences would not qualify as homes... (144)

•  The commandment to build a guardrail around a flat roof shows "a house should protect people, to the greatest degree possible, from all potential danger. Concern for human life must, literally, be built into the fabric of the house." (145)
• Landlords have a deep and broad responsibility to ensure the place they rent out is safe and secure. We also have an obligation to prevent homelessness. This is not like renting out an animal (or a car). We have a commanded role to play in creating housing stability.
• The federal government has had a long, evil history of creating racial segregation in housing and evicting poor communities en masse from their neighborhoods. (For a much more detailed discussion of this history, I recommend The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein.) Therefore, we as a country must do teshuvah, repentance, for the sin of creating a racially biased housing crisis, creating homelessness and not preventing it.