At 8568 West Pico Boulevard the door opens on a smell of old wool, cardboard, and furniture oil. Coats hang in rows by size. A shelf of holy books leans against one wall, prayer books with cracked spines, a set of the Talmud some father studied and some son did not want. Sheitels sit on foam heads, the wigs married women wear, washed and reset, waiting for a head that fits. Toasters. A bin of women’s undergarments, which the volunteers will tell you they need more than anything else. A cashmere coat with a Beverly Hills label hangs three hangers down from a parka with a broken zipper, and neither one knows the difference now.
In the back alley a woman lifts bags from the trunk of a German car parked with its hazards on. Her mother died in the spring. The closet had to come empty before the lease ran out. She does not want money for the clothes and she will not put them in a dumpster, so she drives them to Pico, where someone takes the bags, says thank you, and means it. The coats begin a second life.
This traffic, the dead handing down to the living through a storefront, runs six days and stops on the seventh. Friday afternoon the gate comes down. Saturday the store sleeps. Global Kindness keeps the Sabbath because the order the store serves outranks the store. Since 2005 the operation has run on volunteers and moved food, clothing, and cash to families across Los Angeles. The sign says kindness. What happens at the register is older and stranger than that word lets on.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave us the tool for seeing it. Man is the animal that knows he will die, and the knowledge would crush him if he looked at it long. So he does not look. In The Denial of Death (1973) Becker argued that culture is the great apparatus of not-looking, a set of hero systems that promise a man his life counts beyond his body. Self-esteem is the feeling that one is a hero inside such a system, a contributor to something that does not rot. Every people builds its own version. The pyramid, the cathedral, the revolution, the corpus of published work, the line of sons who carry the name. Each is a way of buying a portion in what death cannot reach. In Escape from Evil (1975) Becker took the argument one turn further. Evil enters the world when one immortality project meets another, because the second man’s different denial of death exposes the first man’s as a choice rather than a law, and no man can bear to see his eternity reduced to a preference.
Hold that and walk back into the store.
Nouriel and Yaelle Cohen work inside a system that does not call this charity. The word in the building is tzedakah, and tzedakah comes from tzedek, which means justice, not pity. The poor man has a claim. The deed is owed. Maimonides (1138-1204) ranked the giving in eight degrees, and set at the top the gift that ends the need, the loan or the work that lifts a man so he never has to ask again. Below that sits the deed of kindness, gemilut chasadim, which the tradition names as one of the three things the world stands on. In this house the needy family is not a problem the store solves. The needy family is the occasion of the deed that counts before Him. The receiver hands the giver something the giver cannot make alone, a chance to do what the commandment asks. The poor man does more for the rich man than the rich man does for the poor man.
So the store is an engine that runs in two directions at once. It takes the residue of the dead, the coats and the prayer books and the dead woman’s good winter wool, and converts it into the survival of the living. Then it converts that survival into deeds, and the deeds into a portion in the world to come. Nouriel and Yaelle Cohen stand at the hinge. Every coat forwarded is a small refusal of death, theirs and the dead donor’s and the cold man’s who now has a coat. The volunteer who sorts undergarments on a Tuesday morning is building, one item at a time, a thing that outlasts the building.
This makes complete sense, and it makes sense only here. Carry the single word out the door and watch it break apart.
Bring it to the man with the spreadsheet. He runs the numbers on suffering, dollars against lives, the marginal cost of a malaria net, the deworming pill that buys a child a year of school. To him the volunteer hours spent moving a used blender across a counter are waste laid on waste. The dead woman’s coat carries sentiment, and sentiment is the tax the inefficient pay to feel good. Sell the building, he says, wire the cash to the highest-yield intervention on earth, and stop dressing arithmetic as grief. His eternity is the running total of well-being, the sum that survives every particular donor. Kindness to him means the cold sum, and the store fails the sum.
Bring it to Geneva and the heirs of John Calvin (1509-1564). Works save no one. The elect were chosen before the foundation of the world, and no coat handed across a counter moves that ledger by a hair. Yet the saved do good, and the good is a sign, evidence read backward toward a verdict already entered. The Calvinist gives and watches his own giving the way a man watches his pulse, for proof he is among the chosen. The receiver is a mirror held up to the giver’s soul. Kindness here means assurance, and the needy family serves the donor’s anxiety more than its own cold.
Bring it to the Bolshevik organizer in the winter of 1919. He has read his Lenin (1870-1924) and he knows what the thrift store does. It is the bandage on the wound the order needs kept open. Every family fed by private hands is a strike not called, a riot postponed, a year bought for the propertied to sleep behind their gates. Charity launders the guilt of ownership and sells the owner one more night of peace. He looks at the coats moving across the counter and sees the revolution delayed. Kindness to him means delay, and delay is the enemy. His eternity is history’s verdict, the new world his grandchildren will stand in.
Bring it to the Theravada monk with the bowl. The gift thins the self. Dana, the act of giving, loosens the grip of the wanting mind and moves the giver one notch toward release. The monk’s bowl is a field where the layman plants merit, and the merit ripens in the layman, not the monk. The receiver almost disappears in this account. What the gift does, it does inside the man who gives. Kindness here means the subtraction of self, and the dead woman’s coat is an occasion for a stranger to want less.
Bring it to the Roman patrician. He pays for the grain dole, the games, the aqueduct that carries water to a town he will visit twice, and his name goes on the stone in letters a foot high. Anonymous giving would strike him as money thrown into a dark room. The whole purpose is the inscription, the clients who owe him, the dignitas that swells with each public gift and the memory cut in marble that outlives the flesh. Kindness to him means the name that survives the body. Becker might say the patrician understands the game better than the rest, since the patrician admits out loud what the others hide, that the gift buys the giver a piece of forever.
Bring it to the Swedish social democrat. Private charity shames him. A coat handed across a counter by a benefactor marks two failures at once, the failure of the commonwealth that should have clothed the man, and the wound to a man forced to stand before a stranger and accept warmth as a gift. In his world the coat comes as a right, paid by all, owed to all, begged from no one. The thrift store is a monument to what the state left undone, and the gratitude on the receiver’s face is the proof of the injury. Kindness to him means the right, and the right kills the need for kindness.
Bring it, finally, to the reader of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Here the word turns all the way over. Pity drags the strong down to the level of the weak. Charity is the slave’s long revenge, weakness rebranded as virtue, the herd closing around the botched and the failed and calling the closure holy. The thrift store, in this reading, is a temple raised to the morality of the defeated, and the warm feeling in the volunteer’s chest is the feeling of a man helping the species sink. Kindness here names a sickness that has learned to call itself health.
Seven cosmologies, one word, and no shared floor beneath them. The man with the spreadsheet and the woman sorting wigs on Pico do not disagree about a single fact in the world. They count the same coats. They live inside different denials of death, and the coat means a different thing in each because the coat does a different job in each man’s bid for forever. This is Becker’s hard teaching. The arguments people have about charity look like arguments over policy and feel like arguments over morals, and underneath they are arguments over which immortality is the true one. That is why they will not resolve. A man cannot grant the other system its kindness without granting that his own eternity was one option among several, and almost no one can pay that price.
Watch what happens when the systems touch. The effective altruist finds the thrift store sentimental and wasteful. The social democrat finds it degrading. The Bolshevik finds it counterrevolutionary. The Nietzschean finds it morbid. Each reaches for the same verdict, that the kindness on Pico is a kind of error, and each reaches for it because the Cohens’ eternity, working quietly six days a week behind a roll-down gate, makes a silent claim against his own.
At 4:55 on a Thursday the volunteers begin to straighten the racks. The holy books go back on the shelf in their cracked spines. Tomorrow the gate stays up only until the afternoon, and then the store stops, because the Sabbath is the one thing the store will not sell past. The coats wait in their rows through Friday night and all of Saturday, the dead woman’s wool among them, holding the shape of an arm that is gone. On Sunday morning the door opens again on the smell of old wool and oil, and the traffic between the dead and the cold resumes, and somewhere in the back a deed gets done that, in this house, the doer believes God counts.
