American Jewish World Service (AJWS), an international development organization, is hosting a global justice conference for rabbis, rabbinical students and Jewish communal leaders near Baltimore this week. The conference, called the Rabbinical Students’ Delegation Alumni Institute, will focus on leveraging participants’ power to elevate global justice as a core expression of Jewish tradition, both locally and in the larger North American Jewish community. Over the next few days, Rabbi Vered Harris will share her account of the Institute and the issues it raises for 21st century Jews.

Across the globe our narratives are unique but we share universal human qualities that bind us together and make us responsible for each other.  To illustrate this point with a group of rabbis from across the spectrum of Judaism we study Maimonides, Seforno, Talmud and Midrash. We learn sources for a Jewish ethic of obligation and concern. We confront the authenticity of Jewish social justice for all of the people in the world, all created in God’s image.

The true illustration for me, though, presents herself as flesh and blood. In addition to her impressive role as the General Secretary of the World YWCA, Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda is the founding chairperson of the Rozaria Memorial Trust in Zimbabwe. Ms. Gumbonzvanda visited our group to tell us the story of her AJWS supported NGO assisting children and adults living with AIDS in her village and surrounding areas. You can see more at www.rozaria-trust.org.

But if I didn’t know the texts, if I didn’t know about the Rozaria Memorial Trust, if I didn’t know about AJWS, Ms. Gumbonzvanda herself would convince me to support causes of global justice.

The vast majority of public speakers thank their hosts and the audience that came to hear them. After being introduced by Ruth Messinger, Ms. Gumbonzvanda brought the polite “thanks for having me” to a new level of grace. Slowly, with eye contact, in a voice both gentle and strong, she told us, “I want to begin by giving my respect. My respect to the ground here. My respect to you, for who you are. You are here. I begin by giving my respect.”

I am flipping through the file cards of experience in my mind. My training is to say “thank you. If instead I said “I respect you,” what message would that send? To the foreign born busboy in a restaurant? To the bedraggled homeless man washing my windshield? To my adolescent daughter clearing the dinner dishes? “I respect you” instead of “I thank you.”  It is a profound, incomparable statement. When I offer you respect, I recognize your dignity. “Thanks” says you did something for which I am grateful. “Respect” offers a framework for our relationship.  I heard in her opening words that Ms. Gumbonzvanda, a devout Christian, lives the messages of the Jewish texts. She considers us in relationship. This is a universal ethic.

Ms. Gumbonzvanda went on to honor her mother’s memory, reminding me that what Jews value as zachor, remembrance, is a trait we share with other soulful people. Whether they went to school without shoes or sold fruit to assist the family, Ms. Gumbonzvanda’s mother taught all eleven of her children: “The dignity inside you is that space who you are and nobody under the sun can touch. Poverty does not define dignity. It only shifts perceptions of dignity…  You are born in the image of God and you are just as great as the other person who ‘has’ [material goods] even when you ‘have not.’”

Ms. Gumbonzvanda’s NGO assists in neighboring villages where many children are born HIV-positive, where thanks to the Rozaria Memorial Trust families don’t have to choose between food, AIDS medicine and paying for their children’s education. It’s the actualization of the oft referenced book title It Takes a Village. How much more real could it get than this real life example of people in a literal village reaching inward to each other and outward to their neighbors to care for children, many without parents, seeing to their medical care and ensuring their education and health?

She respects us. She recognizes the God in all people. She knows first-hand that happiness and poverty are not opposite words, and the strength to pursue justice and social change stems from a love of life. The people in her village show it can be done.

And then Ms. Gumbonzvanda expands the village. In her closing words to us she affirms: “I think, I know, I believe that we need in our every day life to hold somebody else’s hand. Let’s look at the world together, because the world is bigger than my village. Including here in the U.S. The U.S. is only a village in the world of global dynamics.”

It takes a village joining hands to make a difference. Joining with others in our global neighborhood expands the change we can make. It’s the Jewish thing to do. It’s the right thing to do. It’s the challenging thing to do. It’s the only thing to do.

Rabbi Vered Harris is the Education Rabbi at Congregation Beth Torah in Overland Park, Kansas. She participated in AJWS’s Young Rabbis’ Delegation to Muchucuxcah, Mexico last summer.

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American Jewish World Service (AJWS), an international development organization, is hosting a global justice conference for rabbis, rabbinical students and Jewish communal leaders near Baltimore this week. The conference, called the Rabbinical Students Delegation Alumni Institute, will focus on leveraging participants’ power to elevate global justice as a core expression of Jewish tradition, both locally and in the larger North American Jewish community. Over the next few days, Rabbi Vered Harris will share her account of the Institute and the issues it raises for 21st century Jews.

For all of our diversity, the rabbis at the American Jewish World Service Rabbinical Students’ Delegation Alumni Institute have in common a commitment to pursue justice. We are rabbis from across the spectrum of Judaism, working or preparing for rabbinates on campuses, in congregations and serving organizations. In each of these places there is space for encouraging social action as a sacred duty.

The passion for social justice is, thankfully, not limited to rabbis. The work of tikkun olam requires partnership between professionals and lay people. Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky of Bnai David-Judea in Los Angeles, teaching as a scholar at the Institute, shared four essential predictors for success with any social justice project we might want to develop.

1. The recipient population, that is: those who the project seeks to help, must mean something to the people being rallied to make change. For a project to be sustainable the participants on the “helping” side need to have reason to personally care about the issue.

2. A project needs at least one or two volunteers who take it on as their own. It must not be “the rabbi’s project” led by gracious lay people. Especially in the beginning the volunteers need a high frustration tolerance so they can stay positive when confronted with obstacles.

3. The project itself needs to allow for family participation. Involving children is a key component for transmitting values and we want to transmit our values.

4. Participants need a reinforcing feedback cycle. When the project keeps on giving to the people who participate (“I really made a difference today”) they will want to come back.

or congregational rabbis these four predictors can serve as a check-list to determine whether or not we are ready to launch a project. Rabbi Kanefsky offered these factors based on his experiences at B’nai David-Judea. When I think about the successful social justice projects in the congregation I serve it is clear that these rubrics have been in place. Unsuccessful projects? The rubrics were not in place.

One empowering realization is that these predictors of success are applicable to social justice projects that anyone may want to implement. When you care about the recipient population, dedicate your time as part of a team, bring your children into the experience and see that your actions matter, you are entering into a sustainable cycle of change. These four components are an organizing factor that I anticipate using for developing programs in the future.

Rabbi Vered Harris is the Education Rabbi at Congregation Beth Torah in Overland Park, Kansas. She participated in AJWS’s Young Rabbis’ Delegation to Muchucuxcah, Mexico last summer.

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American Jewish World Service (AJWS), an international development organization, is hosting a global justice conference for rabbis, rabbinical students and Jewish communal leaders near Baltimore this week. The conference, called the Rabbinical Students Delegation Alumni Institute, will focus on leveraging participants’ power to elevate global justice as a core expression of Jewish tradition, both locally and in the larger North American Jewish community. Over the next few days, Rabbi Vered Harris will share her account of the Institute and the issues it raises for 21st century Jews.

There are times before I lead tefillah when I stand behind the ark in our sanctuary and say a quiet prayer to God. “Please, give me the peace I need to help them find the peace they need.” It isn’t a rote prayer, and I can’t guarantee those are the exact words, but it is a ritual of supplication that helps me to quiet myself and prepare to lead others in prayer. It is a source of spiritual power for me.

I don’t think I’ve ever used that phrase before: Spiritual Power. At American Jewish World Service’s RSD Alumni Institute, I expect to think about how we harness power to make change. But typically my definition of power would revolve around notions of community building, politics, charismatic leadership and financial resources.

Spiritual power, it turns out, is the foundation for me of all other positive uses of power.

Tonight Rabbi Shelia Peltz Weinberg, director of outreach and community development at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, asked us to consider this quote from Reb Nachman of Bratslav: “If you believe it can be broken, you must believe it can be repaired.” Internalize that thought: anything in disrepair can be mended. Relationships. The environment. Material goods. Food supplies. Water systems.

Traditional definitions of power can make the repairs. Spiritual power connects the repairs to a greater good, to meaning and purpose and the interconnectedness of humanity. Spiritual power means we make change in partnership with God.

So Rabbi Weinberg asked us to consider where we gain our spiritual power. For me, it is in those quiet conversations when I ask God to be with me when others look to me to lead them.

Then she asked us to think about where we lose our spiritual power. I realized that I lose my spiritual power when I suppress my inner voice, when I compare myself to others and doubt my own strength. When I fear my own power and therefore hide behind a façade of weakness, I allow my spiritual power to drain and my foundation to falter.

Jewish social action requires us to locate our spiritual power. Anyone can set out to make the world a better place, a friendlier place, a more peaceful or equitable place. As a Jewish leader it is my relationship with God and my people that brings deeper meaning and purpose to my quest for justice.

An internal strength of conviction allows me to see the broken world and have faith that it can be fixed. That is my spiritual power. It is essential to recognize where it comes from, and to learn to overcome the obstacles that drain it.

If we each nurtured our spiritual power, we would stand on the most solid of foundations. We would harness the hope and the power to fix the brokenness in our world.

Rabbi Vered Harris is the Education Rabbi at Congregation Beth Torah in Overland Park, Kansas. She participated in AJWS’s Young Rabbis’ Delegation to Muchucuxcah, Mexico last summer.

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