Help Poor Me

You know how sometimes you have a song in your iTunes library, and you know you like it, but somehow it falls off your radar at some point, and you find it (via the shuffle function, or an old playlist or something) and you’re like, “Hey, this song is amazing! How did I ever forget it?”

I did that this morning with this song, a nice collaboration between BB King and Eric Clapton.

Recently I’ve been feeling a lot of connection between the music I listen to and the weekly parshah, and it was so nice to have this song come on during the week that we study Parashat Mishpatim, which contains a bunch of laws about helping the poor, and otherwise defenseless among us.

Over and over again in the Torah we hear that we have to be good to other people, especially the downtrodden and oppressed, because we were downtrodden and oppressed ourselves. In the King/Claptop collaboration, the conceit is that you should, “Help the poor…help poor me.” Ultimately, this is a similar idea. You have an obligation to help the poor, and I’m poor, so help me.

It’s also a really nice bluesy way to jam on a gray Monday afternoon.