With constant talk of bailouts, and the bitter arguments generated by them, it seems like a reasonable question to ask. I suppose it’s also on my mind as Purim is only 36 hours away and one of it’s central practices is giving gifts to those in need. So are we? Are we our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers?
It’s the first human question in the Bible. Cain responds to God’s inquiry about the whereabouts of his brother Abel by asking rhetorically, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” And in many ways, the rest of the entire Bible teaches us to do what Cain could not, or would not do: Answer “yes”.
We are responsible for each other. The real test of our commitment to that principle is not when we are up and our siblings are down — most of us find it relatively easy to be generous under those circumstances.

The real test of our responsibility for each other is when we are all feeling down, all feeling vulnerable, and all feeling poorer than we were until a short time ago. That’s when we discover if our willingness to care for others is simply a matter of allowing them to sop up the overflow of our own good fortune, or a reflection of our commitment to care for those with less than ourselves because it’s our responsibility to help.
It’s why in Jewish tradition Tzedakah/Justice is among the terms used to describe acts of caring and philanthropy. Justice is about what must be done, even when we have to push past our initial desire not to or when we think that we lack the resources to do it. It even extends to those who may not “deserve” our help, to those whose actions got them into the situation which now demands our rescue. Kind of like all those people who spent beyond their means and all those banks who lent beyond theirs.
While we must all learn from those past bad acts, now is not the time to focus on punishing them, especially in light of our inter-connected economy. To paraphrase my own mother, we would only be cutting off their noses to spite our own shared face. But the fact that we are obligated to bail each other out, for both moral and economic reasons, does not mean that we must restore all those who have lost out, to their former glory and meet their every expectation.
Perhaps in a world of infinite resources, we would be obligated to provide for the desires of all who turned to us with a request. We could dissolve the line between wants and needs and give everybody whatever they asked for. After all, one person’s want is another person’s need. But we do not have infinite resources, and that is not the meaning of taking responsibility for each other. We have no obligation to guarantee that what everybody once had, they will have again.
But we are obligated to do as much as we can for as many as we can, not because it’s a nice thing to do, but because it’s the right thing to do. It’s one of the greatest affirmations of both our own dignity and that of those who need us. In the end, that is what answering yes to the oldest human question in the Bible is all about.