Personal Reflection
Hannah Gelder
Yom Kippur, 5769
Good Yom Tov.
Several months ago, as we sat in a bus, bouncing along a road in rural Rwanda, Brant asked me if I would deliver a personal reflection at the high holidays. I was honored. And scared. Later he told me the theme was “making a difference.” Suddenly my task seemed much more daunting. After all, who am I, at 22-years of age, to stand before a congregation full of people who have dedicated their lives to making a difference? But, alas, here we are.
Making a difference. It’s a timely topic in my life as I graduated from Macalester College in May and am now taking my first steps into the “real world.” I no longer have the excuse of student status to explain what I’m doing with my life, and I constantly question how am I going to make a difference in this world? I’ve always been inspired by the quote by Horace Mann, “Be ashamed to die before you have won some battle for humanity.” But what battle will I fight? Not to mention, how will I win it?
I’ve always dreamed of changing the world, even if that means making a difference in just one person’s life, because to that one person, that will be changing their world. Sometimes I wonder why this battle is important to me in the first place. The best answer I can come up with is that I, quite frankly, don’t feel good living in a society, a country, a world, that does not honor the dignity of each individual. But also, I grew up in a household with parents who have both spent their lives working for the betterment of our society and impacting individuals’ lives, and with family friends also committed to social justice. I’ve also been blessed to have traveled and lived abroad. So that’s where I come from – a progressive family and the great privilege of travel, which has permitted me to catch a glimpse of how other people in this world live.
As I reflect on Making a Difference, I’ll work backwards through three formative experiences beginning with my participation in a Jewish service corps this year, then the lessons I learned traveling to Rwanda and Uganda with JRC over the summer, and finally the year I spent living in Senegal.
The confluence of Judaism and social justice has become a recent theme in my life. This year I am participating in AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps. 14 of us live in Chicago in an intentional Jewish community and we each work for a different non-profit that is fighting poverty in the city. Twice-a-week we participate in trainings, discussions, and activities that help us explore the connection between Judaism and social justice. My identity as a Jew and my commitment to social justice have recently become two important parts of my life. I LOVE that they are so consistent with one another – especially here at JRC. I feel fortunate to find myself a member of a group of people that have similar values as my own, and to whom I can also turn for spiritual guidance and support. Not to mention the community that forms as we fight together to make a difference.
But again we return to this idea of making a difference. And it is hard to know just how to do that. This is something with which I struggle. There are very many levels of this concept. You can make a difference in an individual’s life, you can work on institutions affecting many people’s lives, or you can also address the structures affecting our society and the world. I’m learning that the various levels of change are not mutually exclusive; you can work on all three at the same time. You can make a difference in a person’s life simply by treating him/her with the dignity each human being deserves. From what I’ve seen, just this act of respect goes a very long way. At the same time, you can still continue protesting, advocating and organizing.
My job placement through AVODAH has me working as a community organizer for the Lakeview Action Coalition. On a daily basis, I see the benefits of empowering community leaders and the power of organizing a community to fight for change in their daily lives. In my position, I am able to work with individuals to change the institutions and structures affecting their community.
Now I’ll turn to my participation in JRC’s delegation to Rwanda and Uganda. I think many of us on the trip this summer, expected that we’d be able to ‘help’ the people with whom we visited and interacted. Many of us were quickly disappointed when we realized that there was really not much we could do. But while focusing on trying to make a measurable difference, we discredited the impact we were having by simply being there. It meant a lot to the people with whom we visited that we took two weeks out of our lives to come and see them. In Rwanda, we bore witness to the genocide that occurred there, an act that not many Americans have performed. And with the HIV/AIDS clinic WE-ACT, we went and listened to their patients’ stories and experiences. Every person wants to be heard, and sadly in our world, the poorest and most marginalized have the hardest time sharing their stories. But from these experiences we really saw the true resilience of humanity.
In Uganda, when we visited Mirembe Kawomera and the Foundation for the Development of Needy Communities, we got to see first-hand, the positive effects these two organizations are having on their communities building from the grassroots up. And now we can bring back that positive message, and model for change, to our own communities.
Reflecting back, I think we were hoping to do something concrete with our time there, and we did do that through various projects and contributions, but I think the real value of our trip lay in the learning process and the exposure we gave ourselves to others’ realities. In our attempt to ‘make a difference,’ I think for many of us, the greater difference was made on us. And for them, we were able to make a difference simply by being there and showing we cared. We interacted with people on a human level, and just by entering their lives in that brief amount of time; their battle became our battle. Now we have the responsibility of bringing their stories and the experiences we had, back to our communities, to educate people here about life outside of the US. We have the responsibility of using these experiences and what we learned to engage others and ourselves to fight for a more just global society, one in which people can have the medications they need, and the housing and food they ought to have – where they can live with dignity.
These travels allowed me to see JRC in a new light. Since I went to college, I have always bragged about how progressive our congregation is, but traveling with fellow congregants this summer really blew me away. JRC is a synagogue that puts its money where its mouth is. We don’t just talk about things, we actually do them; we are leaders in our Jewish community. And now that I’m on the Tikkun Olam mailing list, every week I’m even more proud of all that is going on amongst our members. It is exciting for me to return to Chicago and participate with our synagogue in this new way and to reestablish myself in this community, which is actively fighting to make a difference on all levels.
I’ll conclude by drawing on my experiences in Senegal, a country in which 95% of the population identifies as Muslim, on the west coast of Africa. The year I spent there, living with 2 families, one in Dakar, the large urban capitol city and one in Mbam, a small rural village, was very transformative for me. Not only did I have the opportunity to immerse myself in a different culture, but I learned about the goodness and beauty of humanity. I anguished over the disparities between my privileged youth, where I had daily access to luxuries about which my Senegalese friends and families could only dream, and their daily struggles for water, food, cooking oil. Yet, despite our obvious differences, complete strangers took me in and cared for me. Strangers opened their houses and their hearts to me. I learned about interacting with others on a much more human level and opening myself up to the lessons they had to teach.
After all this, I think the biggest difference we can each make can be made on the individual level simply by being compassionate, by opening ourselves to experiences outside of our comfort zone and then letting them change us. This does not mean we can give up the fight on the structural level, for this is key to eliminating the injustice we see in our society and world. But in the mean time, we must interact with each other on a human level and build strong empowered communities. I think we can all make a difference on a daily basis simply by acting out of compassion. And as we embark upon this new year, one of my resolutions is to bring more compassion into every interaction and treat every individual with the dignity each person deserves.
May you have a meaningful fast and may we all be sealed into the Book of Life.