Towards A Theory Of Doing A Good Thing

– I went to a religious day school for the first few years of my education. I’m not religious; it didn’t stick. But there was one thing we learned that I think about often — weekly, if not daily — and that was the concept of a hierarchy of mitzvahs. If I’m remembering correctly (and let’s be real, I’m probably not, but whatever), the idea was that mitzvahs are good deeds by definition, but the greatest mitzvah you can do is the one that no one sees. In my memory, my teacher explains this by suggesting an anonymous donation, or giving a great reference, or helping a person without being asked first. I don’t know why this affected me so much as a child but it did and I think about it when I do the things I can’t tell you about for obvious reasons.

– But doing a good thing and wanting credit for it is still considered a mitzvah. Just a lesser one. And, my teacher went on to explain, doing a good deed is sometimes dependent on having your name attached to it: when you sign a petition, for example. Times when your name might motivate another person to do the same good deed. So you can see how it’s a two-way street. Mostly the lesson can be distilled to: “quit bragging.” That seems fair.

– Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about generosity and attention. I saw this quotation from Simone Weil here and liked it a lot:

– So, maybe a good deed is to just pay attention; to make silence an active part of a conversation, like it’s a contribution instead of a lack. To just let another person talk and tell you what they think or feel or share what they need to share and give them your undivided attention as an act of generosity or a kind of good deed.

– I can’t remember where I read this, but I saw a story of a young broke woman who couldn’t afford to buy lunch, and a man bought it for her, and she was trying to figure out how to repay him when she got the money. He told her that she didn’t understand, that it wasn’t about being repaid; he said that generosity is linear. She could only repay him by doing the same in a forward direction. When she had the money and came across someone hungry, she had to buy them lunch. I think this was in a book I bought recently but I can’t check because I gave my copy to a friend.

– In the last few months I’ve done some Good Things professionally. They were all privately dedicated to important people in my life. “If [Person] tells me they saw that thing I did, and that they thought it was good, I’ll be happy,” I thought each time. They never did. Sometimes — and I recognize the humor in this — the Person who I wanted to notice one thing noticed another, and then another Person would recognize another, but even when I thought the dedication was clear it kept flying right over their heads. So I was never happy.

– Maybe a good thing that goes unnoticed or unannounced is only more valuable because it’s so impossible to achieve.

– No, that’s too cynical. It’s more valuable because it’s linear.

– In any case, a Person has exactly one day to get in touch with me before I send them off to the island of disappointments.

– My sister works a very challenging, very demanding job. She has often pointed out that being called a saint or angel for her work is not really the compliment people seem to think it is; it’s often accompanied by a shake of their head and a sincere “I could never do what you do.” Her job is really hard, it’s true, and it does require a very particular personality, and sometimes she tells me stories and I can’t say anything, I can only put my tiny hand on her even tinier hand and wait for her to continue, but she is right that a saint is not a compliment so much as a judgement. She thinks they’re saying that she’s ascended to some higher plane of humanity, that her goodness transcends a normal level of decency, that she’s removed from the rest of the population by virtue of her virtue. But for her this is just the only job she ever wanted to do and the job that she excels at. The idea that her job — working with people who have special needs — is suited only for an angel, she says, takes the responsibility away from the other humans.

– I’m not religious but last month someone did something so kind for me I considered believing in God again.

– Now that I’m back to being hard and cynical, I find that moment in my life particularly confusing; why didn’t the act of kindness make me believe in people again?