Volunteerism

by Michael Pelz-Sherman

As the summer winds to a close, the High Holidays draw near and parents and teachers prepare for another school year. I would like to help renew the call to fulfill the mitzvah of participation in our wonderful Jewish community and school. In his graduation address of 2002, Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, wrote:

“[T]he mission of the synagogue is to make Jews. Its ritual, educational programming and social action imbue Jews with a sense of peoplehood and communal responsibility. The need for a minyan bespeaks the centrality of community. We offer our prayers in the plural. At Yizkor, we honor the memory of our loved ones through the giving of charity. And our synagogues face east to affirm our ties to Israel. Judaism turns on acts of loving-kindness the cumulative goal of which is to mend the world, תִּקּוּן עוֹלָם tikkun olam. Citizenship in the Jewish polity springs from belonging to a synagogue… Our collective survival in the open society rests upon turning Hillel's ancient plea of ‘אַל תִּפְרוֹשׁ מִן הַצִּבּוּר ’al tifrosh min ha-tzibbur, do not withdraw from the community’ into the supreme commandment of contemporary Jewish life.

Last year, the Gan HaLev board of directors decided to add a requirement of 20 volunteer hours and attendance of at least 6 congregation services and events to our Sunday school enrollment package. At our last meeting, the board decided to renew these requirements. Yet, we found ourselves struggling to find the right words to use in our Sunday school enrollment materials. Obviously, we all recognize how hard it is to make time for these things, and we know all too well how hard it is to pry kids away from their TVs, computers, game consoles, and cell phones long enough to have real shared community experiences of almost any kind. We are aware that most families fell well short of meeting these requirements last year. Yet we felt it was important not to lower our standards, but rather to try and clarify the reason for their existence.

Our intent in establishing these requirements is to indicate the critical importance of participation in our school and congregation activities, without which a Jewish education can have little meaning. We wanted to help foster the culture of participation that has been one of the hallmarks of Gan HaLev since its inception. Gan HaLev is unique among the Jewish congregations of Marin County in terms of the level of openness and participation we expect and encourage in our members. While the professional teachers and religious leaders of our community are of course exceptional, it is the contributions of individual members that give our community its signature spirit (רוּח ruach) that makes it so colorful and special. In a relatively small community like ours, every single person who makes the effort to come to an event, spends an hour helping out in a Sunday school classroom, makes a few phone calls to let folks know about an upcoming event, or helps set up chairs or clean up after a service, makes a huge difference to the quality of the Gan HaLev experience. Serving on the board and/or committees (education, finance, spiritual) is a unique and immensely rewarding opportunity to help define that experience, and to help our synagogue fulfill its mission of “making Jews.” Our congregation's—indeed, our people's survival literally depends on the participation—in ways both large and small, of all its members.

—from our July-August 2005 Newsletter

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