A compassionate picture of a man riding the subway in New York, letting another man sleep on his shoulder, has gone viral.
The photograph was captured by
Reddit user
Braffination, who uploaded it to the sharing site, which in turn was then picked up by Facebook group,
Charidy.
The picture has garnered over one million 'likes' and several hundred thousand shares on Facebook.
The image was accompanied by this message: "Heading home on the Q train yesterday when this young black guy nods off on the shoulder of a Jewish man. The man doesn't move a muscle, just lets him stay there. After a minute, I asked the man if he wanted me to wake the kid up, but he shook his head and responded, 'He must have had a long day, let him sleep. We've all been there, right?'"[sic]
The Jewish man, Isaac Theil, managed to be tracked down and contacted by
Tablet Magazine.
Isaac speculated why the image had proven so popular on the web.
“Maybe the photo wouldn’t have become so popular if people weren’t seeing a Jewish man with a yarmulke and a black man in a hood, and because they might not necessarily correlate the two,” he suggested.
"But there is only one reason that I didn’t move, and let him continue sleeping, and that has nothing to do with race. He was simply a human being who was exhausted, and I knew it and happened to be there and have a big shoulder to offer him.”
Garvey Dutes, the sleeping man in the photograph, later saw the picture appear online and expressed his appreciation with this
comment on Facebook:
Proof that a small act of kindness can have a huge impact.
