Recognizing and Valuing Our Own Contributions

Another quick hit from a day when transcribing last week's Torah study session has sparked a few thoughts: "Teruma", the gifts people brought in building the tabernacle in Exodus 25, was translated in the context of our group's session as "free will offering". Each person in the group was asked to ponder their own free will offerings to the world. Several people said they were proud of the time they had contributed to Beyt Tikkun and found that to have been most rewarding for them in different ways.

Students, like the retirees more broadly represented in our synagogue, are generally in a position to better contribute time than money as well. Our brains and enthusiasm cannot be overestimated in their importance to creating and sustaining movements to transform the world. Even lending our mere presence to burgeoning groups an have its own meliorative impact, letting organizers and those tentative about their own participation know that there are more people out there who care enough to spend time in meetings about a cause. So often I have heard the question, explicitly or implicitly, "OK you're going to a meeting for sds, but what are you going to DO?" And I have come to realize that if there were more of an emphasis on incorporating BEING into our DOING we could enhance both.

The Quaker meeting style exemplifies this well, linking the importance of silently being with one another in worship, and practical, logistical and political stuff that gets worked out in the same setting. I witnessed this both at Friends Camp and at the Berkeley Friends Meeting on MLK.

My own contributions to groups that I am proud to have participate in have often been modest, but I feel that even humble contributions are significant in small group organizing and am proud of the little things I have been able to do. Sports coaches often laud the indispensibility of players who "do the little things well", like hitting the cut-off man (less violent than it sounds, Will) or filling the lane on a fast break (on the basketball court, not in the bedroom). Movement organizers should recognize this and promote it as a theme of their groups as well, because such contributions really are integral to activist communities.