The Challenge of Repairing the World:

A JEWISH PERSPECTIVE ON VOLUNTEERING

By Leonard Fein

The dictionary offers two definitions of "voluntary"‑- one that is familiar, and wrong, and a second that is obscure, and entirely correct.

The first: "Voluntary" means "to act, serve, or do willingly and without constraint or expectation of reward." Now that is plainly wrong. We in fact experience both constraints and rewards. The most obvious of the constraints is time, which can only be carved up into so many pieces, and we suffer from no other modern malady so much as we suffer from over-commitment. But as against the difficulty of squeezing our voluntarism into an already over‑burdened schedule, there are the rewards we expect of volunteering, the first of which is that we feel good when we do; the second of which is that we thereby help resolve the crisis of meaning that afflicts so many of us these days; the third is that, quite literally, those who volunteer will live not only fuller lives but also longer lives, so says the research on the subject; the last of which, the most important, is that those who volunteer will, whether literally or metaphorically, inherit the world to come.

So the first definition fails. I am drawn to the second definition‑" voluntary" as in "trumpet voluntary," "a short piece of music, often improvised on a solo instrument, played as an introduction to a larger work." That is, it seems to me, how we must come to see our work in soup kitchens and in advocacy, in tutoring programs and in shelters, in all those ways in which we fulfill the injunction to clothe the naked and feed the hungry, to care for the widow and the orphan, to be gracious to the stranger. All of that is an introduction to a larger work, to the work of justice, the work of mending this fractured planet.

Which brings me to the heart of the matter. We are American Jews. As thoughtful citizens of this great nation, there is surely no need for us to review yet again the endless list of cruelties and miseries, of human pains and human sorrows, from land mines in Afghanistan to oppression in Tibet, from terrorism in the Middle East to poverty in these United States, and so on ad very nearly infinitum that stand as indicting evidence of how far from justice we remain. No matter how insulated we ourselves may have become, we are altogether too sophisticated and it is too late in the day for us to require yet another rendition of the heartbreaking details of cruelty and indifference, and of the pain that is their consequence. Let us instead simply stipulate to the assertion that too many of God's children remain left out and locked out. And if its detail is required, let us rest the argument with one entirely unsentimental statistic: In the United States of America, nearing the dawn of a new millennium, 24 percent of all children under the age of six live in poverty. One out of every four.

We may not always know the precisely relevant statistics, but as every generation of Jews, including our own, has known, this world, our world, is badly fractured, and every generation of Jews, including our own, has understood that the heart of the Jewish enterprise is the repair of its fractures. That is what Jewish voluntarism is about.

Yet in every generation, there have also been those who have questioned the propriety of that historic commitment, who have insisted that as Jews," we have other priorities, other interests, that if it is Justice we feel disposed to pursue, there is nothing distinctively Jewish about that pursuit and it ought, therefore, be conducted under other banners.

And it follows that in every generation, including our own, it is necessary once again, and more than once, to make the case for a specifically Jewish devotion to the mending of our fractured planet.

So: Why the Jews? My preferred way of responding is by telling Jewish stories, stories of where we have been and what we have done, stories that reach back to our earliest beginnings and stretch all the way to our own time. All those stories from Abraham's dazzling challenge to God to our own more modest interventions on behalf of social justice, are part of the torah we need to be studying. What they show is that the thread of social justice is intricately woven into the fabric of Jewish history's multi‑colored cloak that it extends from the most ancient "then" to the ever‑urgent "now," and that none can plausibly challenge its rich authenticity. It is not the only thread‑but seek to pull it out and cast it aside, and the fabric our history unravels.

There is inadequate space here to retell the stories that prove my point. Instead, I turn to the question of Jewish interests, to the question of why a community so justifiably preoccupied as is our community with pressing internal problems with recurrent threats to its body and constant threats to its soul should raise its eyes from the urgent work of defending its own interests to the larger challenge of repairing the world.

And the answer to that question directly and explicitly, is this: The Jewish community has no more urgent interest than the energetic pursuit of its values. Our values are not merely grace‑notes to our lives; they are our purpose, they are our announcement of who we are and what we are about. And that is exactly why their energetic pursuit is in our urgent interest, now more than ever. For the central American Jewish problem of our time is not anti‑Semitism, nor is it intermarriage specifically or assimilation more generally; it is the problem of boredom, the fact that for very many American Jews, the experience of being Jewish does not seem to be about anything ‑- not, at any rate, about anything that matters very much. Very many Jews are simply unable to fill in the blank in the sentence that begins with the words, "It is important that the Jews survive in order to…” In order to what? In order to survive? Lots of luck: send out an invitation to the young that reads, "Please come survive with us," and see how many rsvp.

We need no focus groups or questionnaires, much less gimmicks and slogans, to fill in the blank. We need only turn to the chronicles of our people, to which of life's many roads it has most often chosen to walk, which grand visions have most consistently inspired it. I can think of no single statement to which more Jews through the centuries and even today would subscribe, no sentence that more accurately and comprehensively captures the most fundamental Jewish insight, than that this, our world, God's world, is not working the way it was meant to -‑ and that to be a Jew is to know that somehow, you are implicated in its repair.

Accordingly, the completed sentence reads, "it is important that the Jews survive in order to help repair this oh so fractured world." And voluntarism is plainly one essential ingredient in the work of repair, an ingredient available to us all. Now.

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LEONARD FEIN, Director of the Commission on Social Action of the Reform Jewish movement, is the founder of Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger, and of the National Jewish Coalition for Literacy