Transitions:
Just Giving
By Hilary Lustick

Growing up a white Jewish girl in a privileged, wealthy suburb, I had always been nagged by the need to make a difference in a community other than my own. I volunteered at a homeless shelter in middle school, tutored in high school, and mentored adolescant girls in college. Each activity left me with a bigger heart but smaller hands; I realized that whatever I had given to the few people I had met with, I had done nothing for countless others like them. More importantly, I had done nothing to assuage the larger problems behind Philadelphia homelessness, poor education, or lack of self-esteem in girls.

I wanted to look to my religion for guidance, but Jewish law often neglects to provide the tools with which to carry out its commandments. Even the values we learned about in Hebrew School seemed segmented from the problems of the world; discussion of social justice was largely limited to the classroom tzedakah box, in which we put coins for charity. It wasn't until my senior year of college, when I attended a social justice conference at the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs in Chicago, that I learned that the word "tzedakah" does not just mean "charity", but comes from the word " tzedek ", or "justice". Jews [cut: don't] have the obligation not merely to help the less fortunate, but also to create an economically and socially just world in which the less fortunate can help themselves.

The Jewish Council on Urban Affairs is not an organization to keep its tzedek in a box. Our conference leaders had key contacts in virtually every major sector of Chicago's urban affairs network. We spent our morning studying with rabbis, and our afternoons learning the tools of organizing that shift the balance of power toward the people most negatively affected by urban policy. We petitioned for affordable housing, participated in the ongoing union strike at the Congress Hotel on Michigan Avenue, and heard blood-curdling personal testimonies from Latino day laborers who worked for very little pay and no protection.

While our actions were nothing grand, that pattern of morning text study and afternoon action showed me the rhythm that pulses between Jewish values and social action. I saw the deep-rooted desire I'd always had to make change in a new light--rather than vaguely wishing I could help communities in need, I developed the more sophisticated and intellectually stimulating impetus to connect with officials in seats of power and strategize about how to work collaboratively with them. The worlds of politics and policy that had always seemed so foreign and abstract to me were, now, familiar and fascinating.

That week, I learned the first rule of organizing: the members of a community must advocate for themselves. The JCUA may have "Jewish" in its name, and it may root its work in Jewish philosophy , but to the Chicago residents, immigrant workers, and politicians who collaborate with JCUA staff on countless urban affairs projects, the organization is merely an ally in achieving a just society. That is how Jews should be, I thought: perceiving what is just because we are Jews, but working for justice because we have resources and are members of a larger community. The ties between my values and those of Judaism had never been so real to me as they were now. My Jewish identity has become the intersection of those ties.

I came away from the conference with skills I felt I could apply to my passion for social justice, and a newfound pride in the Jewish values that supported that passion. More strikingly, however, I gained a new attitude toward the excessive wealth I'd seen in the Jewish community. That wealth was not something for me, a socially conscious Jew, to be ashamed of or run away from. It was a success story: we came to this country as poor immigrants, and worked our way up in a matter of generations. Now, as Jews and as American citizens, it is our obligation to use our resources, connections, and knowledge to help others make those same gains. The JCUA, and organizations like it all over the country, exist because Jews have this attitude toward their wealth that I had learned at my conference. How impressive that Judaism preaches such socially conscious doctrines; how fortunate that we, as American Jews, have the luxury to act on them.

Hilary Lustick, who graduated from Tufts University in May of 2005, is currently the Social Justice Fellow at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston.   She writes the newsletter for the Synagogue Social Justice Team, which supports synagogues in organizing projects.   She is also a poet, a songwriter, and a closet waterskiing fanatic