The ‘moral stoplight’ that Trump and Vance blow through

Michael Davis, a former Evening Sun and Sun colleague, wrote in response to my Substack post on J.D. Vance’s demonization of the homeless of Washington, D.C.

A Baltimore rabbi and friend once told me that the homeless present a “moral stoplight.” When you are in their presence, he said, you need to stop and acknowledge them. You don’t have to offer money if that’s not the way you address the commandment to be charitable, but you must summon your humanity, as it costs nothing to do so.

Judaism teaches us that the prophet Elijah often appears on Earth, in different guises. It would be a reasonable assumption that he appears as a panhandler. 

When we lived in Cockeysville, there was a presumably mentally-ill wanderer who walked about every day, smelly, angry and disheveled. People were frightened by him. Maybe I was, too, but I tried to engage him.

I tried my best to imagine him as Elijah, and I regularly left a $20 bill with the owner of a deli to buy a meal for that disturbed and tragic human being, whenever he would pass by. He would accept it wordlessly, eating as he walked away. In providing the anonymous aid, I followed the precepts of the Rambam (Maimonides), the Middle Ages scholar, astronomer and physician who gave Judaism the “ladder of giving.”

I wish I had 1 percent of Trump’s wealth to feed more of our fellow travelers. I don’t need a damn thing.

For the hell of it one day, I did a word search for “Trump” and “the poor,” just to see if that Bible-toting phony ever used that descriptive term in a public remark. You can imagine the result.

I try not to be an angry person, but I hold those evangelicals who laid hands on Trump in contempt. They give Jesus a bad name. Although I’m no New Testament scholar, I know he was a righteous dude.

Michael Davis is the author of “Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street.” Its sequel, “Street Fight: Sesame Street’s Audacious, Persistent, Slyly Subversive Counterassault to Mean America,” is scheduled to be published late next year or early 2027 by Rutgers University Press.