there's a jewish story about a rich man who goes to his rabbi to ask him about building an orphanage, and the rabbi is like "yeah duh go for it!!" and then later the rich guy comes back and is like "actually I've decided not to... I was just doing it for my own image and not coz I cared about orphans" and the rabbi was like "bitch the orphans don't care why you're building the orphanage!!!" and sometimes I wish I could say that to lefties who haven't unpacked their christian upbringing. sometimes motives don't matter!! who give a fuck why a politician wants to do a good thing? bitch the orphans don't!!
This bumps up directly against the deep-seated christian beliefs that a) actually yes the reasons do matter and if you do good deeds for sinful reasons it's just as bad as doing bad deeds, and b) charity should only be the domain of the church. eg it's all well and good for the church to run a soup kitchen, but if some wealthy pensioner who's bored after retirement does it instead? That's suspicious, he's trying to turn the needy away from god, or he's trying to inflate his own ego, or he could even be acting from the pure unalloyed goodness of his heart and love for his fellow human beings, but the devil is still working through him.
And keeping all this in mind I look at the current state of disk horse online and I'm like. huh. A lot of these folks grew up christian probably
It also shows a fundamental distinction between Christian and Jewish ethics.
A key example of this is a scene from the movie Ghost (1990), starring the late Patrick Swayze (z"l) and Whoopi Goldberg. It's a fun scene. You can find it on YouTube. Long story short, Oda Mae Brown (Goldberg) defrauds a bank of $4 million as a favor to the ghost Sam Wheat (Swayze). As soon as she gets the check in her hand, she's already imagining how she'll spend it on herself. But she can't hold on to the check because that money is why the bad guys killed Sam in the first place. On their way out of the bank, Sam sees a couple of nuns collecting alms for the poor. Sam suggests giving the money to the nuns so the bad guys can't get their hands on it or trace it to Oda Mae. Hilarity ensues, but in the end, Oda Mae hands a $4 million check to some random nuns.
I will remind you that Oda Mae:
Took money that someone was murdered for
Came by that money through fraud
Planned to use it completely selfishly
Gave it away mostly to save her own hide
And got mad at the person who suggested giving the money away
It would've been perfectly in character for Oda Mae to say, "Fuck them broke bitches," but the movie was rated PG.
Yet, despite the greed, betrayal, and corruption attached to that money, at the end of the day, Oda Mae Brown gave $4 million, no strings attached, to some random nuns on the street. Despite the evil that the pursuit of that money led to, Oda Mae unwittingly did the one thing that made it possible for any good to come of it.
And this is, I think, a major difference in Christian and Jewish morality. In my experience, Christian morality strives for a personal state of innocence or purity, the absence of messiness. By contrast, in my experience, Judaism acknowledges that human beings are hopelessly messy yet still demands that we do our part to make this world better.
From that lens, Oda Mae Brown is a terrible Christian, but she's a mensch. When it matters most, she fights her selfish inclinations and does the right thing. That is such a *chef's kiss* Jewish response to a test of character.
BTW, I left out a key detail: them nuns ain't ask no questions.
Well, no, of course the nuns wouldn't. Catholic morality is perfectly comfortable with good works being motivated by bad feelings. That's the whole point of bad feelings: you cultivate them as motivation for doing good things.
This is actually one of those examples of the Protestantization of American Christianity: not all Christian sects place so much emphasis on Correct Thoughts And Feelings over Good Works, and the Protestant emphasis on these things is explicitly a reaction to Catholic emphasis on Good Works More Important Than Bad Thoughts And Feelings.
So of course them nuns ain't ask no fucking questions. They got the money, so it's time to go do some work with it!
(This is one of those times when I'm a little prone to side-eyeing the Disk Horse around Americans being culturally Christian by default: it's true, but look, as someone who has spent twenty years politely identifying as culturally Catholic, there are some doctrinal differences that play a major role in shaping your relationship to morality and charity. And yes, that is even true given that American Catholicism is infamously Protestant-flavored on an international scale.
A lot of y'all mean "Protestant Evangelical" when you say Christian, and look, it's not that I want to defend the Catholic Church--it's a life cult that believes that suffering drives good works rather than impeding them, with all that this entails--but look, you don't have to fucking help Protestant Evangelicals act like they're the only theological opinion on the ground under the term "Christian." Especially in an example fucking bracketed by nuns.)
