It is that time of year. Cold and gray in the parts of the world I inhabit. Time to dismantle the Chrisnukkah decorations, the menorah and the hot pink artificial tree, the lights, the pretty, glittery balls full of possibility and take stock of another year gone by and another year begun. I will admit to hating the holidays, particularly the Shopocalypse in which people pepper spray one another to get more cheap stuff and shoppers die during stampedes at large box stores.
But this year the holidays seemed to so effectively take the Christ out of Christmas (and the sun out of Solstice and the miracle out of Hanukkah and so on), that it left me even more Grinch-y than usual. And then, a woman around the corner from my apartment in Brooklyn was set ablaze, apparently because she owed someone a couple of thousand dollars, and in that horrendous act I found something I didn’t expect: my soul.
Max Weber would disagree. He argued that as Americans moved from a Protestant Ethic to the Spirit of Capitalism, we lost all sense of the divine, that there was a “disenchantment of the world” as we became “hedonists without a heart.” According to Weber, as consumption replaced redemption as the driving force of modernity, we lost our ability to believe in something bigger and more important than our own desires. I realize this Weberian understanding of modernity is undermined by the persistent habit of Americans to be very religious, but let us assume that religiosity does not necessarily lead to behavior indicative of someone who believes in something bigger and better than herself.
But here’s where things get weird. I live part of my life in Prospect Heights, around the corner from where Deloris Gillespie lived until she was brutally murdered. On December 17th, Ms. Gillespie came home from the same supermarket that I shop at, carrying bags of groceries, and stepped into the elevator, Jerome Isaac, apparently upset by money she owed him for various odd jobs,
was dressed as an exterminator, doused her from head to toe with an accelerant as she cowered in the corner clutching her groceries. He set her on fire, then lobbed the Molotov cocktail inside the elevator. The whole scene was captured on two surveillance tape cameras in the elevator. Gillespie was pronounced dead at the scene, while five other tenants suffered minor injuries.
Immediately afterward, total strangers stepped forward and offered to pay for the costs of the funeral (estimated to be about $10,000). Outside her building, candles and flowers appeared, heartfelt notes to her and her family, even some coins. Walking by Ms. Gillespie’s building, it is impossible not to stop and look. But for some reason, I felt compelled to do something for her. I walked down the block to the grocery store, found a blue candle, bought it and brought it back. I am an atheist Jew. This act, so incomprehensible, was so completely out of character that I never even told anyone I did it. I am not even sure why I did it. I was thinking about a friend who is near death. I was thinking about Ms. Gillespie’s life and death. I stood there, crying and feeling some sense of the divine in Prospect Heights.
Of course her death is a sign that money is so sacred, so much our God, that some are willing to brutally murder for it. But how different is this than religious zealotry, where some are willing to kill- especially women and girls- for any sign that a religious law has been broken. Stoning a woman for not covering her body and burning her alive for not paying money owed are related acts.
But if money is the religion of Modernity, as Weber did in fact predict, then it also comes with its own acts of charity and even grace. Crowds may stampede in the temples that are Walmart, and zealots may kill those they deem financially polluted, but believers will also reach out with money for funerals and notes and flowers and the other rituals of grief and grace that enchant even a world as brutal and gray as this one.
