I just moved to New York City from Cote St. Luc, a suburban village that’s the closest thing to a shtetl anywhere in Canada. So everyone’s been asking me the same question: what’s life like in the big city?
It’s a good question. When I grew up in Monsey, N.Y., it was a small town, a place where everyone looked out for each other. And like any small-town boy, I still crave that unique sense of camaraderie.
There’s no community like a small-town community
Rod Dreher features this small town spirit in his memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. Dreher left his small town in Louisiana as a teenager. After years of city life, he returns when his younger sister is diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Dreher was so impressed by the communal support given to his sister that he decided to move back to Louisiana. There’s simply no community like a small-town community.
Big cities are very different. Ferdinand Tonnies, in his classic work Community and Society, describes the city as dramatically different than small towns: it is built around advancing individual ambition rather than building communal cohesiveness, and as a consequence, is rather cold and impersonal. And to the minds of many, big cities should be avoided. Thomas Jefferson once remarked: “I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man.”
So what happens when a small-town boy like me moves to the big city?
Actually, this question is relevant to every Jew, wherever we live, because Jews are fundamentally small-town folk. The Book of Genesis offers an extended critique of big cities. The plans of the first city builders are frustrated by God, and there is marked contrast between the hospitable small-town ways of Abraham and the big-town coldness of Sodom and Egypt.
Yet despite the failures of cities and empires, the Torah does not demand that the Jews remain tent-dwelling nomads. In fact, it encourages us to build a cosmopolitan state with well-developed institutions.
So what happens when small-town Jews build a big city? We bring the small town with us. Maimonides teaches that despite the biblical obligation to love one’s neighbour, the rabbis added additional obligations to visit the sick, bury the dead, comfort the bereaved, and marry off brides. The point of these additional obligations is that we must do more than love our neighbour. We are obliged to extend beyond our immediate social circle and build community. It is not enough to treat those we know with kindness. We must create an embracing community that cares for all of the sick, each mourner and every bride. And the magic of the Jewish tradition is that even when we build large cosmopolitan societies, we ensure that within them beats the heart of a small-town community.
READ: Small town, strong Jewish community
Israel is an excellent example of this unique small-town ethos. In 2014, Sean Carmeli, a lone soldier from Texas, fell in battle. There was virtually no one to attend the funeral. But after a worried friend posted a Facebook message about it, news spread like wildfire, and in the end, more than 20,000 people attended. This outpouring of kindness could only happen in Israel, where a large country still carries the warmth of a small town.
Now that I’ve arrived in New York City, I’m learning that in this bustling metropolis, there’s a small town hiding underneath. In my first Shabbat at my new synagogue, we honoured the outgoing chair of its bikur cholim committee. This dedicated group visits patients at Sloan Kettering every Shabbat. Here in the middle of Manhattan is a team of volunteers visiting the sick, making this community, like every Jewish community, feel like one big small town.
So what’s it like living in the big city? To tell you the truth, as a small-town boy, I feel right at home.
