Judaism Insists on a Human Right to Housing
For as long as he can remember, Alex Slabosky has felt an obligation to work for justice. His mother Molly chaired the social action committee at Congregation Ohabai Sholom, known as The Temple, the Reform Judaism congregation in Nashville, Tennessee where Slabosky grew up. While Molly coordinated projects like the purchase and renovation of homes for low-income families and advocacy for juvenile justice reform, Slabosky’s father David reached out to ailing veterans along with fellow members of the B’nai B’rith service organization.
Molly Slabosky was also active in the National Council of Jewish Women, which cites as the guide for its long legacy of civil rights activism the straightforward admonition of Deuteronomy 16:18: “Justice, justice, shall you pursue.” The Temple was so actively involved in the historic movement to desegregate Nashville restaurants and stores that its rabbi was physically attacked by white separatists, the Temple received bomb threats, and dynamite destroyed the front of the Jewish Community Center. The Temple still has a social action fund in the elder Slaboskys’ names
Such were the topics of discussion at both the Slabosky family dinner table and at temple. “Reform Judaism talks about justice, justice, justice—and going out and taking action,” Slabosky says. He quotes Isaiah’s admonition: “Is not this the fast that I have chosen? To loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?”
“These are the messages we would hear constantly at religious school and services,” Slabosky says. So it was natural for him to close out his career as the leader of Indiana non-profit health organizations by co-chairing a statewide push to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. After that campaign succeeded, making Indiana one of the first Republican-led states to expand Medicaid, Slabosky turned his attention to the affordable housing crisis.
More than ten million people in the U.S. report they are behind on their rent because they simply cannot afford it. Rent prices on average rose more than 16% during 2021. Widespread rent hikes are an ominous sign, given that a recent study by the U.S. General Accounting Office found that every $100 in average monthly rent increases is associated with a 9% increase in homelessness. Evictions are rising and homeless shelters are reporting growing waitlists in response to a surge in people asking for help.
In response, Slabosky and his wife Marcella have helped lead the Indianapolis Hebrew Congregation’s involvement with Family Promise of Greater Indianapolis, a partnership of congregations and community groups providing housing and other services to homeless families. Slabosky served as Family Promise’s board president, and also is on the steering committee of the statewide housing needs coalition. He helped persuade the Greater Indianapolis Multifaith Alliance to dedicate itself to housing, which resulted in the Alliance participating in an eviction court watch program. Diving deep into advocacy comes naturally, Slabosky says. He is just following the charge he has heard all of his life: “The message I’ve been given is very clear: we as a community have an obligation to support these people who are struggling.”
Bringing Heaven Down to Earth
Abraham’s radical act of hospitality in Genesis 18:1-15, where he rushed to welcome three strangers and in so doing welcomed God, has a special and enduring impact for Jews. Along with the Jewish experience of spending extended periods in collective exile, writes Rabbi Stephen Lewis Fuchs, formerly president of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, Abraham’s founding example inspired the Torah to include the commandment to welcome the stranger no less than 36 times. It is the most-repeated mitzvah in the scripture.
“With this interpretation of the narrative structure of Genesis 18, Jewish tradition expressed one of its own majestic ideas,” writes Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. “Greater is the person who sees God in the face of the stranger than one who sees God as God in a vision of transcendence, for the Jewish task since the days of Abraham is not to ascend to heaven but to bring heaven down to earth in simple deeds of kindness and hospitality.”
An annual reminder of the heaven-to-earth task is provided in the Passover celebration, where Jews reflect on their history as a people who have been in need of some kindness and hospitality themselves. Starting with Adam and Eve’s eviction from the Garden of Eden through the 40 years of Israelites wandering after the Exodus to extended periods of being without a homeland after each destruction of the Temple, the Jewish people have too often struggled to find a home. It is a collective experience that triggers an obligation stated in Leviticus 19: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
To that broad obligation the Law of Moses affixed tangible tasks. Jews are instructed to leave for the poor a portion of their harvests from fields, olive trees, and grapevines. Interest-free loans must be provided to those in need, and the Sabbath (shmita) and Jubilee (yovel) years require debt forgiveness and free access to harvests for the poor. Tithes shall go to widows, orphans, and the homeless.
The Human Right to Housing
Multiple passages in the Torah make it clear that these practices redistributing wealth are not just acts of charity by those with excess. Isaiah affirmed that the poor have human rights that must be enshrined in the law, condemning leaders who “make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right.” More explicitly related to housing, Isaiah calls Jews to “bring the homeless poor into your homes.”
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, a Conservative rabbi writing on “Judaism and the Homeless,” says that Jewish law, halakah, includes the rights of the poor to housing. “(Jewish sources) specifically define housing as one of the obligatory types of tzedakah. The Bible commands that a poor person be granted ‘sufficient for what lacks, according to what is lacking to him,’” she writes. “One talmudic text understands each phrase in that command as referring to a specific type of assistance one might grant a poor person: ‘Sufficient for what he lacks’–this is a house. ‘What is lacking’–this is a bed and table.”
As Jacobs mentions, these mandates trigger obligations for Jews today under the concept of tzedakah, a term whose root word tzedek literally means justice. “Tzedakah is sometimes translated today as charity, but it’s not charity,” Rabbi Michael Knopf of Temple Beth-El in Richmond, Virginia says. “The analogy is to our current tax system. People had obligations to give to tzedakah in a graduated way—people who had more had to give more, people who had less were required to give less. And there were priorities for how it should be used, chief among them providing for the physical well-being of persons in the community who were in need.”
“The term ‘human rights’ does not appear in the Bible or in rabbinic literature,” Rabbi Knopf says. “But when you distill down to the essence what a community has an obligation to provide people, and the claim people can make on the community, it boils down to rights by another name.”
This not to say there is no personal Jewish obligation to those who struggle for housing. For example, medieval rabbinic scholars Moses Maimonides and Jacob ben Asher both outlined landlords’ obligations to treat their tenants well. But, as Rabbi Knopf points out, there is a collective responsibility as well. The Mishnah—the first major work of rabbinical literature—makes it clear that the obligations to assist the poor can and should be discharged by the collective. “This is the rabbinic moment: the move from a personal obligation for each and every person, to an obligation upon each and every person, which is mediated by the city,” says Professor and Rabbi Aryeh Cohen, writing on “Justice, Wealth, Taxes: A View from the Perspective of Rabbinical Judaism.” “Formerly, each person had an individual obligation which was fulfilled by transferring resources to a specific poor person. Now, each person’s obligation is fulfilled by transferring resources to the city, which distributes them to the poor in an equitable manner . . . This is a move from the personal to the political.”
Advocacy for Government Action
Advocacy for that kind of government-provided, society-wide assistance has long been a path for Jews to fulfill their obligations to pursue justice. The early-20th century Jewish Labor Bund in Russia and Poland, and their heirs in the U.S., made improvements in housing a central demand of their movement. The 20th-century tenant rights movement in New York City, the most consistent and insistent such movement in U.S. history, was led at multiple stages by Jewish communities. Today, the Union for Reform Judaism has affirmed that housing for all should be a societal goal.
“Starting with Genesis and all the way through rabbinical literature and more recent response literature, Jewish text and traditions tell such a clear story of commitment to centering the widow, the stranger, the most oppressed, and building a society of norms, laws and values to protect the most vulnerable”, says Rabbi Jonah Dov Pesner, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, which advocates for the right to housing. “The physical house, along with things like healthcare and food security, are the tangible, concrete ways we actualize this vision God had for us.”
The challenge for realizing this vision in the U.S. is that our nation’s default approach to housing is to treat it as a commodity. Many are able to afford it, sometimes in opulence and abundance. Others go without. To mitigate these tragic outcomes, people from religious communities often choose charitable responses. Jewish congregations and organizations provide direct charitable housing support all across the country, as do Christian, Muslim and other religious groups. Many religious individuals and communities in the U.S. are most comfortable with personal, voluntary, small-scale responses to poverty.
For the U.S. unhoused and poorly housed, the problem is that the charitable approach has come up woefully short. The shortcomings were demonstrated most disastrously in the 1980’s, when President Ronald Reagan invoked the U.S. soft spot for charity, “The truth is that we’ve let Government take away many things we once considered were really ours to do voluntarily out of the goodness of our hearts and a sense of community pride,” Reagan said,. “I believe many of you want to do those things again.” Reagan even claimed the housing crisis could be solved if only “every church and synagogue would take in ten welfare families.”
Reagan and the U.S. Congress used the cover of charity to justify slashing the U.S. funding for subsidized housing by over 80%, throwing thousands of families and individuals into homelessness and chaos. The U.S. charity system Reagan praised never even came close to compensating for this devastation. Today, more than a half million are homeless across the country.
By contrast, Jews are directed to push for a systemic response to this crisis, says Rabbi Pesner. “I would argue that the whole framework of biblical literature is an attempt to set up a system of justice in which the marginalized are centered,” says Pesner, who has written on the Jewish history dating back to the Talmudic period of creating social welfare systems. “People sometimes get confused by individualistic language in Deuteronomy about opening your hand to the needy, but there are all these regulations behind that such as the gleaning of the fields and not delaying payment to workers. There are systems and legal frameworks that don’t hinge on the individual grace of one who has choosing to share with one who doesn’t.”
Rabbi Jacobs agrees that early rabbis recognized that full provision of basic needs like housing can only be accomplished by government institutions acting for the collective. “What is the most effective way for us to create the society envisioned by Jewish law? Charitable donations to organizations that help house the homeless are one obvious way,” she writes. “But with a problem this large and complex, a more effective means of working to end homelessness might be political action, advocating for governmental policies and programs that provide housing to those in need and/or give people the means to afford housing on their own.”
Rabbi Jacobs’ call, and the scriptures she cites, continue to resonate with Alex Slabosky. In addition to the emergency services and eviction interventions that religious groups in Indiana already perform, he is challenging them to do more. “We are not going to solve the homelessness and eviction problems until we create more affordable housing, and that means pushing for more government investment, at not just the federal level but at the local level,” he says.
“The community together has an obligation to see that justice is done.”
