Hospitality is the Antidote to Tribalism

“…Hospitality is both invisible and formidable — it surrounds you.” Tejal Rao, NYT, 4-13-21

In her New York Times article “What is Hospitality?” Tejal Rao makes the case that the commercial guest/server relationship has become dysfunctional in a post-Pandemic time. She is only observing the tip of the issue. https://nyti.ms/3tmq1Mr

I would suggest that rediscovering Hospitality, in its broad traditional context, is the answer to the social crises and the challenges of the time. It is the true antidote to the emotional and spiritual pandemic we are also suffering from in our daily lives.

Over generations, Hospitality has evolved to appear in three branches from the same tap root:

A) the branch Rao writes about, is the Business of Hospitality: what may now be called the “caring industry” built on the exchange of goods and services between a host and a paying guest. Today this includes not only restaurants, hotels and travel, but the entire healthcare, medical and social welfare industries, too. Much of it is built on emotional labor;

B) the branch that encourages tribalism is the Hospitality of Home: the slowly diminishing duty we owe to family and friends, examples include the invitation list for a wedding or Passover Seder, and compulsory attendance at graduations, funerals, holiday dinners, or visiting hours. We have learned to outsource much of this emotional labor to the first branch;

C) but the branch that should be prominent is the Hospitality to the Stranger: which for thousands of years was a core foundational virtue for all of the world’s moral, ethical and religious teachings. This branch is the shared road to fulfillment, a universal understanding that the openness to the “other” with no expectation of return is what defines our common humanity.

What does it mean to be hospitable? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as the generous and welcome reception of strangers and guests. Can you teach someone to be generous, can you teach them to be welcoming to strangers? I have spent almost four decades trying to do just that as a Professor of Hospitality. In fact, the very Western Universities where I have worked over the years are in a direct line from St. Benedict's Sixth Century Rules of Monastic life and his codified requirement to offer Hospitality by welcoming strangers and new ideas.

One question I have tried very hard to answer: is Hospitality a business, a custom, or a way of life? I firmly believe it is the latter, though it seems harder and harder to make that point.

The ancient Greeks had a term for the generous love of strangers —Philoxenia. Not something easily taught, yet an idea that transcends, being associated with various cultures at certain times in their development. Here the questions are "What distinguishes an open culture from a closed one?" Or, "Why do sub-cultures within dominant ones seem to respond so differently to outsiders, the stranger, when their external environment is similar?"

Certainly, at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Centuries, the acceptance of strangers was publicly part of the American shared credo, if not always privately practiced. Collectively we know that at the base of the Statue of Liberty (called the “Mother of Exiles” by poet Emma Lazarus) is engraved: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.” We were then, and still remain, a nation of strangers created, nurtured and built by metaphorically open arms. We are inescapably a community of immigrants and diverse cultures, the world’s “Melting Pot” with traditions and rituals and even a language that are all a blend of the strange and new. As a child I memorized the phrase minted on every coin "E Pluribus Unum" - Out of Many, One. Clearly that was not meaningfully applied to all members of the entire society, but it was aspirational.

Of course, there are many examples of Americans acting in just the opposite way, of being afraid of strangers. The term for this is Xenophobia, and at many times in the history of the United States, from George Washington on, we have been driven to be isolationists. This seems to be just such a time. Fences, both literal and figurative, are everywhere. In a world so easily linked by technology, we have clearly forgotten to embrace our commonalities.

But under the hazy veneer of cultural history why do so many of the world’s ethical and moral systems contain some form of service to others (the practice of Hospitality) to be the means to salvation or redemption? For the Ancient Greeks it is the story of Baucis and Philemon welcoming Zeus. For Jews, Christians and Muslims it is the common story of Abraham/Ibrahim running to welcome three sojourning strangers to his tent. For the Buddhist the connection to the other is spiritual, making one whole. For the nomadic Bedouin it is life sustaining. Throughout time, offering Hospitality to strangers has been universal.

Each of these beliefs have a word or phrase for this concept: Xenia (guest-friendship), Sakkara (welcome for guests), Atithi Devo Bhava (the guest of God), hachnasat ochim (welcoming guests), Melmastia (profound respect for visitors), Ibn Al-Sabil (the wayfarer). Whatever the word we all recognize the Stranger…Sojourner…Traveler…Alien…

This is where I take exception with Rao, the concept of Hospitality is too important to be just about one segment of society, to make one group shoulder the burden. Rather than being left to servers and care providers, isn’t hospitality an integrated part of a moral life, one well led?

Unfortunately, like so many things over the past two centuries, we have “outsourced” the care for our families, ourselves, and the stranger to others for profit or gain. We pay for meals eaten in restaurants or delivered to our homes, we pay to stay in hotels and even in other family’s homes (VRBO and AirBnB), we place our elderly in assisted living or nursing “homes” and we provide limited places for the dispossessed, indigent and homeless in “shelters.”

In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the protagonist really acts as a “first responder” tending to the immediacy of the sojourner’s wounds, but it is the Innkeeper who welcomes the stranger in and offers a place of rest and care. This is, in fact, the root of the modern hospital. The first in the nation, Bellevue Hospital, was founded in 1736 as an “almshouse” or laying in hospice for indigent women and children. Sharing common roots, there are very subtle differences between a nurse and a server, a pharmacist and a bartender, or a surgeon and a butcher. The Inn has evolved into the Hospice, Hospital, or Hotel, but they all share a common heritage, a universal mission, the caring for the Other.

Certainly, Hospitality happens inside a small space, within a person's arms reach. It is the interaction and shared human moment that occurs between a care provider and a guest within a single square meter. Hospitality is intimate, personal, human, whether in a restaurant, a hospital, a classroom, or a subway car. It is as trivial as being the first one to the door but waiting to be the last one through. It isn’t asking where the party will be, it is asking “what should I bring to help?” More to the point, Hospitality is as important as asking oneself, "What can I do today to make other's lives easier?"

The business of Hospitality is, in fact, a convenient but simplistic substitute for the timeless moral responsibility we have to each other, of the duty to care we share because each of us is the stranger ourselves. It doesn’t matter who prepares the meal or who makes the bed, it matters who takes care of the sojourner. For we are all, in the end, truly strangers in a strange land, seeking the shelter of someone’s open arms.