By Gavi Tropper, Features Editor
“Hey! Hey!” the people at a nearby table yelled. “What about us?”
The air erupted with the roar of angry complaints. I smiled sheepishly as one of the full-time workers swallowed a laugh and ran out of the kitchen. Even before the door swung closed behind her, I already understood my mistake.
“If you’re pushing the cart, and you see people coming later sitting in the first tables,” she said, “you can’t stop for them, you understand? Because there are people who have been waiting for a long time.”
She returned to the kitchen and I lifted another two plates from the cart and placed them at a new table. Though some murmuring persisted behind me, I was unfazed by the incident. Small mistakes were commonplace for me at the soup kitchen; I always seemed to find new ways to break the cafeteria’s unwritten code of rules.
As I weaved the cart between the chair legs in the narrow aisle, I kept an eye out for the plastic yellow poker chips strewn across the tables. The chips were a surprisingly sensitive issue. We were supposed to take the chip when we gave a plate. But when I was starting out, sometimes I forgot to take these chips when handing out food, or I’d accidentally give to people who didn’t have one.
One time, a staff member looked down at the cart and counted less chips than there should have been. He reprimanded me loudly, and though I didn’t understand a word of his Spanish, his tone and gestures got the message across loud and clear.
I was startled to be yelled at– it had never happened, since I first found out about the opportunity to volunteer at the food kitchen by word of mouth a few months back. My embarrassment dissipated, though, when I saw how quickly the worker moved past the issue. He didn’t give me a different job; soon after he finished yelling, he left me entirely, trusting me to give out the plates on my own. When I saw him five minutes later, I don’t think he remembered the incident at all. We just went back into the routine.
The chips, I later learned, are given out by the soup kitchen before someone enters as a sign that they are eligible for government food assistance. By regulation, the soup kitchen could only provide for people in the government’s program. If found noncompliant, they could potentially lose funding.
Even after coming for a long time, we volunteers were frequently reminded to account carefully for the chips.
“If someone asks for a milk or a soup and they don’t have a ticket, don’t give them,” we were told in a grave tone by the same full-time worker who had told me not to serve the latecomers first. “Not that you did anything, but some people from the government came by yesterday and saw volunteers giving to people who didn’t have chips, and they told us we had to stop it.”
Ironically, since the rules about the chips were more obviously serious and important, they were easier to grow accustomed to. Most of the soup kitchen’s other rules, though followed meticulously, are arbitrary conventions. Whether we first distribute the food along the left or the right aisle makes no difference. But, after only a few times working at the soup kitchen, I wouldn’t dream of starting on the right.
I spent my first few times at the soup kitchen walking on eggshells, glancing at the other workers and volunteers, mimicking their every move. Besides the literal language barrier, all the conventions and routines of serving the food felt like its own language, to which I was totally ignorant.
But over the coming months, as I volunteered on a consistent basis, I began to feel less like an intruder, and more at home in the cafeteria. I enjoy the lively Spanish music that drifts through the air, wafting above relaxed conversations. And though the language barrier and the rush of lunch hour prevents any serious conversations, there is something nice about seeing the same faces every time I go. I started to recognize the regulars, and they began to recognize me.
All the little steps that had once seemed so foreign slowly turned into muscle memory: a first round of milk, juice and plastic silverware; a second round of soup; then a plate with the main meal, along with little cups of fruit. And those little cups of fruit had to first be organized on the cart in the right pattern: a row of six on each of the cart’s two layers, lined up in a neat row in the center, ready for six plates to be loaded up around them.
After a few months, the feeling of eggshells beneath my feet disappeared. I knew where to find a latecomer an extra chair or set of fork and knife. Even some of the basic Spanish words of the cafeteria– “jugo,” “leche,” “cuchillo” and the ever applicable “más tarde” – became natural parts of my vocabulary. The work started to become automatic.
As I grew more comfortable with the soup kitchen’s unchanging routine, the contrast between the rest of my day at school, which requires constant thinking and complexity, started to become more pronounced. Every suggestion while learning Talmud requires a degree of creativity; speaking up in class requires active thinking about the material. But to serve lunch at the soup kitchen, all these skills could be left at the door. All that is needed is strict adherence to the formula.
Though this rigidity was difficult to grow accustomed to, I gradually discovered that there can be something comforting in the soup kitchen’s predictable rhythm. In a school day that continually demands creativity and active effort, there is something dangerously refreshing about shutting off my brain to follow a defined set of rules once in a while.
Going to the soup kitchen provides a degree of fulfillment I hadn’t even realized I was lacking. While much of the rest of the day is spent working toward larger life goals or building more abstract skills, in the soup kitchen all of the results are tangible and immediate. It isn’t difficult to fall into bouts of cynicism in a boring class, wondering what the point of learning some arcane detail is. But placing a plate before someone wearing a bright smile, adding a cheerful “hello” or “hola,” and receiving a smile and a “thank you” or “gracias” in return – in that moment, there can be no doubting the purpose of what you’re doing.
But more importantly, as “menial” and “thoughtless” as working in the soup kitchen is, volunteering there provides something that can unfortunately be easily lost in the college experience – doing something for others. Especially in an institution like Yeshiva University, which places “Chesed,” “kindness,” as one of its five pillaring values, it rings a touch hypocritical to lie in bed after a long day running between Seder, classes and different meetings, realizing I’ve done nothing that wasn’t centered around myself all day.
So when 12:00 p.m. arrives, and I have to (oftentimes literally) run out of Seder and sprint the few blocks down Audubon, I don’t think of it as a chore. Carving out some moment for active, physical giving serves as a validation of everything else I do at YU. And when I hand out the little cartons of milk and single-serve cups of orange juice, I’m sometimes surprised to find that the smile across my face is unforced.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Gavi Tropper