The Antidote to Cynicism

It occurs to me that I haven’t explained what has brought me to Israel on this adventure with the Good People Fund.

The Good People Fund was founded 19 years ago by my friend and teacher Naomi Eisenberger, seeking out and supporting extraordinary people and organizations that are doing the work of Tikkun Olam/world-repair in powerful, creative, and grassroots ways. We currently work with 35 projects across North America, 28 in Israel, and 1 in Ukraine. And they are not necessarily Jewish projects; what makes our work Jewish is the way in which we do our Tzedakah work.

(For more information about the Good People Fund—and for a real jolt of inspiration—check out the new edition of the Journal for Good, available on the GPF website.)

Naomi and I met each other 34 years ago in Jerusalem, where we both were mentored by Danny Siegel, the pioneering teacher, author, and poet who changed the ways in which the Jewish world thinks about Doing Good. For years Naomi was the Managing Director of the Ziv Tzedakah Fund which Danny created. When Ziv closed its operations in 2007, Naomi launched the Good People Fund—taking the whole idea to the next level of seeding new projects and mentoring them in best practices of how to run a truly transformative organization. (It’s been wonderful to see the love that each of our projects’ leaders have shown to Naomi throughout this trip.)

Naomi retired as the Executive Director earlier this year, and the Good People Fund is now under the leadership of the wonderful Julie Fisher, who will take this work to another level in what is effectively chapter 3 of this story.

My connections to Naomi and Danny  have absolutely shaped my outlook on the world and why I do the work I do. So when Julie invited me to join the Board in 2025, of course I said yes. And when I was invited to be the “rabbi-in-residence” for this sojourn to Israel, it felt like coming full circle.

Now, Jewish communities frequently launch “Tzedakah missions” to Israel, often via Jewish Federations or large foundations, but this trip is far from those. The Good People Fund nurtures young Tzedakah startups, providing them with a crucial foundation from which to grow. Every project inevitably is led by a visionary—someone who is creative, passionate, loving, and utterly non-arrogant or self-consumed. They tend to have a ziv – a warm radiance of integrity, honesty, kindness, and hope.

The other common denominators that Good People Fund projects share are absolute trustworthiness, transparency in their finances, and a grassroots commitment to their work.  And, of course, touching lives and transforming them.

They work in different fields and care for different populations of people. But for me, one thing cuts across all their work:

Being with Good People is an antidote cynicism.

It’s a fraught time for the State of Israel, and for Jewish people around in the world in this era of slander, hate, and surging antisemitism. I know I have days when those forces feel overwhelming.

But if you’ve felt that way before, know that we have to push back against those forces. Cynicism is a spiritual toxin, and it brings a terrible coarsening of the soul.

The best antidote I know is to spend time with these people and the countless others like them.

Here are a few examples drawn from the 20+ Good People Fund grantees we’ve encountered in the past few days (in addition to a few I described in my previous post):

Assif (Assi) at Back 2 Life Farm

Back to Life Farm in Sdot Yam: In a nation that is wracked with PTSD, especially in the wake of the massacres of October 7 and the subsequent war, it is inspiring to see how many compassionate people are addressing victims of trauma. We met Assi Nave, who started in this magnificent place in memories of his brother-in-law Ro’i Levy and his best friend Danny, each of whom died tragically in recent years. Assi and his companions created this farm, starting with rescued horses and other animals, and created an oasis of a caring community.

And we met with a current client, also named Ro’i, who spoke about how this place not only saved his life by restoring his self-worth, but how it gave him the opportunity to become a volunteer on the farm, helping other who had been similarly traumatized. “That’s one of the best things they could give me,” Ro’i told us.

Jamal telling us his story

Jamal Alkirnawi/A New Dawn in the Negev:  There are around 40 unrecognized Bedouin villages in Israel’s south, and they lack many crucial services and support systems. We journeyed to the Negev, Israel’s southern desert, to meet grantees who are working with the Bedouin community here, especially the children.

Jamal Alkirnawi has a remarkable and inspirational story about how, as a shy and introverted child in this traditional and insulated community, he discovered Israeli teenagers’ student councils—and made a journey to encounter and learn with his Israeli peers. Then he returned to his home communities here, and now works to empower young people with initiatives based in literacy, leadership development, entrepreneurship, and peace.  

Gadi and me

Gadi Gevaryahu/Tag Meir: I’ve known about and contributed to Tag Meir for years, but was delighted to meet its founder Gadi in person We all know about the shameful surge in racist violence by Jewish extremists against Palestinians in the past few years; they call it tag mahir/”price tag” attacks for Palestinian acts of terror. In 2011 Gadi created an Israeli-Jewish emergency response unit; Tag Meir (a “tag of light”): every time there is an act of Jewish terror, their volunteers mobilize with visits of compassion, sorrow, and empathy—and much more, including Tzedakah. It’s Israeli anti-racism at its most urgent and primal level.

Racheli Tadessa Malkai

Ma’atzimot—Empowering Ethiopian Women/Racheli Tadessa Malkai: In 1992, my life changed volunteering on an Israeli immigrant absorption center in the wake of Operation Solomon, when over 14,000 Ethiopian Jews were airlifted to Israel. Racheli and Ma’atzimot work to promote women’s rights in that tradition community, combatting sexual abuse and teaching leadership development, vocational training, resilience and entrepreneurship—and promoting pride in their distinct heritage in Israel’s cultural mosaic. She is awesome—as is the book of women’s voices that they’ve published (in Hebrew).

That’s the tip of big iceberg and a very intense and inspiration week. Do check out the Journal of Good on the GPF website for more of these wondrous people and project.

Ultimately, this journey is about hope. Hope is not some glassy-eyed view of the world that “everything will work out for the best.” The open wounds of October 7 prove that. But hope is a reminder that there is still a powerful network of good that exists in this world, and if you can plug into it, you can be empowered to defeat the cynicism and fear and solipsism that poisons the spirit.

Am Yisrael Chai!

"You See Me!"

Shalom from Tel Aviv. I’m in Israel for two weeks with the Good People Fund, visiting extraordinary changemakers whom the organization supports. I’ll be blogging about some of them over the next few days.

It’s a powerful moment to be in Israel. Last week Israel held its national elections, the first since the terrorist massacres of October 7 and the subsequent Gaza war. And Tuesday of course was the U.S. midterm elections, in which Israel and Jewish communities were given outsized attention.

These are fraught times for Israel and people who love her. I’ll write a future post about the view from here about these things. But for now I’m here for other reasons.

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וַתִּקְרָ֤א שֵׁם־ה׳ הַדֹּבֵ֣ר אֵלֶ֔יהָ אַתָּ֖ה אֵ֣ל רֳאִ֑י
כִּ֣י אָֽמְרָ֗ה הֲגַ֥ם הֲלֹ֛ם רָאִ֖יתִי אַחֲרֵ֥י רֹאִֽי׃

And Hagar called YHVH who spoke to her, “You Are El-roi,”
by which she meant, “Have I not gone on seeing after He saw me!” (Genesis 16:13)

On the first day of our site visits, this text from Bereishit was ringing in my ears. In Genesis 16, Hagar the slave flees from the household of Abraham and Sarah. That idea alone is sobering for Torah readers and should give us a sense of what the Torah thinks about any delusion of “Jewish supremacy.”  The text states directly that Sarah was oppressive and Abraham was indifferent to Hagar’s suffering. She flees for her life.

In the wilderness, we can imagine how afraid and alone Hagar must be. Then G-d appears to her. (In Genesis, the distinction between “G-d” and “an angel of G-d” can be fluid; recall the angel who appears to Abraham at the climax of the Akedah in Genesis 22.) When Hannah is asked, “Where are you coming from and where are you going?” she can only muster an answer to the first question: אָנֹכִ֖י בֹּרַֽחַת she says, “I am fleeing.”

But then G-d speaks to her directly, and she responds by calling G-d by a unique name: “You are El-Ro’i!” El Ro’i:  “G-d who sees me!”

Imagine what it means to Hagar, abused and alone, to know that she is seen. If not by people, then by G-d. An affirmation of her humanity, her human dignity, and perhaps a dose empowerment to begin to answer the second question, “Where are you going?”

That’s the text that I was thinking of on our first day with the Good People Fund, a golden thread running through our visits: letting hurting people know that they are seen.

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Our first stop was Yotzrot: Turning the Tables, an extraordinary community that runs a series of workshops in Tel Aviv, protecting and saving women who have been sex workers.

The parallels to Hagar’s flight were unsettling. Virtually every one of the women there was fleeing an abusive situation. And sex workers are certainly “invisible”; their desperation and humanity is rarely spoken of, and much of society would prefer not to acknowledge their existence.

But the Yotzrot team doesn’t do judgment. “First, we listen,” we were told by the director, Lilach Tzur Ben-Moshe. And so begins a process—sometimes a very long one—of a comprehensive program of restoring dignity, ending cycles of abuse, helping where it is needed (such as eliminating a woman’s financial debts), and mentoring that can move their clients away from sex work and open new horizons (one of their clients is now in law school!).

Art and creativity are part of the process of reinvention. We went to a workshop were the women were making denim handbags for sale. The workshop is called “Hotam,” which means “sign” or “seal.” Among other things, each artisan puts her distinct hotam on the bag she creates, such as this one created by a woman who uses the eye-symbol as her distinctive brand. (“You see me!”)

And there is this painting on the wall of the studio, below, by one of the women, which haunts me:

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Later we spent time in South Tel Aviv with the indefatigable Gideon Ben Ammi, the founder of Pesia’s Kitchen. In the early 2000s, South Tel Aviv was the limbo where asylum seekers fleeing devastation from Eritrea and Sudan were placed by an indifferent Israeli government. It quickly became a place of squalor—prostitution, drugs, and general devastation.

It was here that Gideon and his cousin began serving meals in 2012. In other words: they saw them—and they saw their opportunity to change things.

They began feeding the hungry residents of the neighborhood. They named the program “Pesia’s Kitchen,” after their grandmother, who had her own refugee story, coming to Israel before World War 2 and had already established a reputation for feeding people who were hungry. Gideon’s project grew far beyond South Tel Aviv; today they are preeminent rescuers of food and they partner with 40 schools in Israel to feed children and families who are hungry—Jews, Arabs, Bedouin, Druze, immigrants; anyone in need. Tons of kilos of food are have been saved and delivered to schools for distribution.

Gideon’s son Yoni has taken over as the Director of Pesia’s Kitchen, but, in his eighties, Gideon is as busy as ever. He told us the people are always asking him, “When are you going to retire, take a break?” His reply: “I take a break every day: I do what I love to do.”

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Much more in the realm of empowering women: We meet Racheli Tadessa Malkai, the founder of Ma’atzimot, empowering Ethiopian Israeli women. We hear from Esty Shushan, the founder of Nivcharot, which advocates for women in the Haredi world, where the very idea of empowerment is new and controversial. And Shana Aaronson of Magen, supporting survivors of sexual abuse and advocating for safer Jewish communities, who tells us some heartbreaking stories and an astonishing one about bringing a particular abuser to justice.

This trip is emotionally exhausting. And there is wonder and human grandeur around every bend in the road.

One more stop: The LGBTQ Center in Tel Aviv, which also knows a thing or two about saying “You are seen” to people who are running from dangerous situations. We met with Merav Livni Keish, the co-founder of Brit Ha’Leviot (“The Pride of Lionesses”), supporting families of transgender and gender diverse children.

And we met with Linor Abergal and Jannette Tayeb of the Israeli Transgender Association, providing a supportive and safe community for transgender Israelis, Jewish and Arab alike.

Each of them have powerful and wrenching stories of being lost and then being found by a community of gentle and caring people, restoring dignity and self-worth. Each is an inspiration.

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This is an unbelievably powerful way to encounter Israel in 2026. Each day we are meeting extraordinary heroes who fight back against indifference, apathy, or outright cruelty. Each of these heroes we saw today is telling people who might otherwise be rendered invisible, “We see you.” And thus restoring human dignity and value.

Much more to come.

Transcending Trauma in Israel

Trauma is a brutal word. It’s not only the damage that occurs from physical or psychological wound; it’s also the wound that festers, long after the initial damage has been inflicted.

Israel is a traumatized nation this summer. On the surface, the cafés are occupied, the beaches are full, the tourists are touring, and so on. But the trauma is everywhere, barely beneath the surface. Even if every hostage were to return home tonight (amen!), and if Hamas were to surrender, and if Hezbollah were to cease raining missiles on the North—still it will take a generation to heal the trauma.

My friend—truly one of my heroes—Dr. Anita Shkedi is an authority on trauma, and earlier this week I went to observe the power of the therapeutic work she is doing.

I’ve known Anita for 30 years; she’s one of many Mitzvah-heroes I first met through Danny Siegel. She is a world-renowned expert on equine therapy (“therapeutic horseback riding”), which uses the holistic power of horses to heal broken bodies and broken spirits. In recent years, her attention has moved to healing trauma; her book Horses Heal PTSD: Walking New Paths is full of staggering stories of love and hope that should be read even by people who have never given horses more than a moment’s thought.

And then, October 7 and its aftermath: the massacres, the hostages, the horrors of war; the 125,000 Israelis from the Gaza envelope and the northern border who have been forced from their homes. The nation is grieving and writhing. In response, Anita and her team pivoted and created a new program: TRANSCENDING TRAUMA, “supporting individuals in the early, mid, and post stages of trauma, and then later if chronic PTSD has developed. It provides immediate intervention and treatment, builds resilience and encourages post traumatic growth. Transcending Trauma is an excellent way to regain a sense of trust and learn to manage this ongoing crisis.”

They’ve created groups from survivors of the Nova Festival. They’ve had groups of survivors from the kibbutzim that were devastated by the terrorists. Today, it’s a group of traumatized soldiers.

Anita Shkedi (left)

Nikki Kagan

I visited Anita and the team at “Piloni’s Place” on Moshav Hibbat Tzion, at the backyard horse farm of Nikki Kagan, a noted leadership consultant and horse expert. I met the group of eight participants who had gathered there for the day’s program:

·      A soldier who is the lone survivor of his unit of thirteen fighters. Can you imagine the trauma that he carries with him?

·      Another soldier whose job in Gaza is to recover the dead; to piece together pieces of bodies, give positive IDs, and get the bodies out of the combat zone to central command. Can you imagine…?

·      A young soldier from Westchester County, New York, who came to be in the army of the Jewish people…

·      And so on; five more people each of whom has seen death and destruction among friends and comrades-in-arms.

None of them, as far as I know, was a “horse person” before discovering this place.

The day unfolds this way:

First, the group gathers to say good morning and greet each other in the mercifully air-conditioned patio. They’ve become an intimate group in a short amount of time. Prior to finding Piloni’s Place, they had never met each other; each comes from a different army unit and lives in a different part of the country. As they arrive, we discover that each has brought a snack to share with the group: a watermelon, pastries, cookies, and so on—far more than we could eat that morning. As each person comes in and places onto the table the snack they’ve brought for the others, the whole groups bursts into laughter. No one asked anyone to bring anything! Anita tells me this instinct to take care of each other is a sign of their growing camaraderie and friendship.

Next, Nikki leads us in a short meditation and spiritual intention. And Anita gives gentle instructions for the day: “Talk to your horse as you’re riding,” she tells each participant. Not superficially, but she encourages each one to share how they’re feeling—what terrifies them, what keeps them awake at night, what they’re feeling deep inside. The bond between horse and rider is remarkably deep and holistic.

Then we adjourn to the stable, where the participants began to dress and groom the horses. But I also observe a process of getting in sync. The grooming is so physical and tactile: human hands caress the horses’ bodies as manes are combed, saddles are assembled, hooves are cleaned of debris, and so on. I can see the horses grow calm and comfortable, and the riders, too, are becoming attuned to their animals.

Then it’s time for riding and exercises. Each student mounts their horse and rides, occasionally raising their hands, or moving through obstacles, and following some basic exercises as instructed by Anita and her daughter-in-law Shani. There are smiles, serenity, a growing sense of security and self-awareness. The horses are steady and calm. Even though the day is brutally hot, I could stand in this spot and watch these riders for hours.

When the exercises end, the riders hose down their horses, return the equipment, and reassemble in the room where we began. There is some discussion and processing of emotions, as in any sort of therapeutic support group. There is laughter. Everyone seems looser, relaxed, and enjoying each other’s company.  A beautiful sort of camaraderie has taken place among them; over the weeks that they’ve become part of this group, they’ve shared some intense therapeutic time together. They’re on the long, slow march to a place of confidence and self-worth, and fewer night terrors and isolation and doubt.

Tomorrow, a different group will be meeting here: Anita will be training trainers, who can spread out around the country and offer similar therapeutic groups on horseback for a traumatized nation.

I’m glad to be an emissary for the Kavod Tzedakah Fund, and I deliver a check for a few thousand dollars (each day’s session costs about $1000 to run; of course none of the participants pay anything). I’m also eager to give Anita some of the cash that friends entrusted me to give away in Israel: This, I tell her, is for ice cream and snacks for future groups, to make everything that much gentler.

This is an awesome place, and Anita and Nikki and their team are doing life-saving work. But the need is huge, for a damaged nation coming to grips with its trauma.

If you’d like to support the work of Transcending Trauma (the non-profit is officially registered as “Friends of Jonathan”) from America, there are three ways to do so: 

1.     A wire transfer directly to their bank in Israel; more information here: https://www.anitashkedi.com/transcending-trauma/

2.     The Good People Fund, run by my friend Naomi Eisenberger in Millburn, NJ: www.goodpeoplefund.org;

3.     The Kavod Tzedakah Fund, for which I am a volunteer allocations director, founded by Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback: www.kavod.org. (If you give through Kavod, please send me an email saying that you’ve directed a donation for Transcending Trauma.)

The Mitzvah of Forgetting

My D’var Torah on this week’s parasha, Ki Teitzei, is up on the Hebrew College site “70 Faces of Torah.” It’s about a unique commandment in the Torah, the Mitzvah called shikhecha.

You can check it out here: https://hebrewcollege.edu/blog/the-mitzvah-of-forgetting/.

An Antidote to Cynicism

Book Review: Dreams Never Dreamed, by Kalman Samuels (Toby Press, 2020)

We live in strange and cynical times. It’s an era of discord and polarization, on the precipice of what will be the nastiest, most divisive political season in American history, exacerbated by the centrifuge that is social media. It’s difficult to escape, but we should do our best to protect ourselves: Cynicism, after all, is spiritual poison.

The antidote to cynicism arrived in my mailbox in the form of Dreams Never Dreamed, a memoir by Kalman Samuels, the founder of Shalva, the Israel Association for the Care and Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities. It looks like a generic feel-good memoir, and to be honest, I was unprepared for how deeply and profoundly I was moved by the story of the Samuels family.

The book works on a variety of levels. It is an Erin Brockovich-style saga of perseverance against entrenched and moneyed bureaucracies. It is also the story of a husband and wife, and a father and son. And it is the diary of one man’s spiritual journey and faith.

Kalman Samuels was born Kerry Samuels, raised in Vancouver in a normative suburban Jewish lifestyle. He was a jock, an inquisitive pupil, and a student leader. In young adulthood, he traveled to Israel, where his intellectual curiosity and openness brought him into the orbit of baal teshuvah-Jewish outreach. Incrementally he left the promise of university life behind for the life of a full-time Talmud student. No doubt that some members of his former circles were dismayed. But part of the sweetness of this book is that, unlike other memoirs of people who embrace haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Judaism, Kalman’s writing is open and affectionate about his youth. He doesn’t seem to have any regret or resentment about his upbringing; in fact, his teenage skills as a golfer, for instance, will help build important bridges much later in his life. Like I said, there is no cynicism to be found here.

Given the remarkable experiences that befall Kalman throughout the years, it’s hard not to be drawn into his faith, and to sense that something behind the scenes is pointing the way for him. Time and time again, as he becomes one of Israel’s leading advocates for disabled children and their families, an angel seems to lift him over yet another insurmountable obstacle. I kept thinking of the biblical Joseph, who constantly reminds others that his successes are not his own, but attributable to G-d whose hand is hidden behind the scenes.

It is also to Kalman’s great credit as a writer that he never sermonizes and these religious details are never heavy-handed. Nothing about the book is conversionary. He simply shares the elements of his deep faith that are germane to the astounding story he has to tell. That is refreshing, too.

Kalman and his wife Malki began to build their family in Israel in the mid-1970s. In autumn 1977, their one year-old son Yossi received a routine DPT (diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus) vaccination that all babies receive. And that is the moment the family’s life changed. Later they would discover that the pertussis element of that batch of vaccinations was corrupted. Soon their sweet and alert boy would begin having seizures, and he was becoming blind. By the time he was three years old, they realized he had become deaf as well.

Yossi Samuels eventually would become known as the “Helen Keller of Israel.”

For Kalman and Malki, Yossi’s disabilities  launched a years-long battle in the courts against those who negligently—and ruthlessly—permitted the faulty vaccines to be distributed to Israeli families. Entrenched corporate forces and the Kafkaesque Israeli health system denied culpability at every turn. Kalman tells the story of his family’s pursuit of accountability in direct and compelling terms. The setbacks are excruciating. The denouement, when it comes, is exhilarating. 

Yossi Samuels and Shoshana Weinstock, in an image from the book.

The emotional center of the book is Yossi’s emergence into the world. Just as Helen Keller had a teacher, Annie Sullivan, whose painstaking efforts finally broke into her world, Yossi had a teacher named Shoshana Weinstock. Shoshana does the work of teaching Yossi by fingerspelling letters into the palm of his hand. Here is the moment of breakthrough:

In the course of one such lesson, Shoshana suddenly appeared at our house with Yossi, knocking loudly at our door, breathless with excitement. “He got it! He got it!” she cried. “His life has changed forever!”

Malki and I had no idea what she was talking about. We looked at his hands to see what he had “got.” “No! No!” Shoshana shouted. “He got it! He understands that I’m signing letters in his palm. His entire world has just opened.”
…
“We were sitting at the table in my house and I was fingerspelling the five symbols that spell the word ‘table’ [shulchan in Hebrew] into the palm of his hand, while his other hand rested on the table.” She continued excitedly, “I have done this for the past few lessons but Yossi didn’t respond. Today,” she said, “a smile suddenly lit up his face and he began to touch the table deliberately, and we both knew that he’d understood I was spelling shulchan. We did it over and over and he smiled again and again, touching the table every time. He has a new life. I can teach him all twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and give him language.”

We were all sobbing as Shoshana began to demonstrate on the palms of Yossi’s sister and brothers how to spell shulchan and how to sign the other letters. She told them: “You, too, are going to learn the letters, and you’ll at last be able to speak to your brother.” (p.94-95)

Excuse me for a moment, I have something in my eye.

Yossi’s widening horizons and development into a passionate, active young man is thrilling, to say the least. Just as inspiring, however, is Malki Samuels’s relentless vision. She is the catalyst behind Shalva. She knows firsthand how caring for a disabled child can be physically and spiritually exhausting for an entire family. The original vision was to create a center for children with disabilities that would provide love, care, and growth—and which would give parents a much needed respite, to focus attention on the rest of their families, or to reenergize themselves. These are lessons that could only come from parents who have experienced the challenges of raising disabled children themselves.

Shalva opens in the apartment building next door to the Samuels’ home. But this book is really about Shalva’s exponential growth, thanks to two factors: (1) Malki’s crystal-clear vision for what disabled children and their families need—which is not always in sync with what “the experts” believe; and (2) Kalman’s indefatigable, serendipitous, and often comic ability to make things happen or to raise the necessary funds. You root for them, even as you are certain that their efforts will be successful. (As Joseph would remind us, “Not me! But G-d…”)

The final battle is to find Shalva’s permanent home in central Jerusalem, on a vast campus with an amphitheater, public café, and an enormous array of amenities for the development or simple of joy of the children and their families. Shalva is even more than that: It’s a portal that welcomes visitors to Jerusalem as they enter the city from the west. For Jerusalem is not meant to (merely) be a place of politics and business. It is also supposed to be a gateway to more supernal dimensions, and that gateway is channeled through chesed / compassion and love. Do go visit the Shalva campus, it’s an essential part of understanding what Jerusalem is about.

And if you’re still not convinced, spend a little time with the astonishing Shalva Band. You’ll come around.

I got to know Kalman back in the 1990s, during my summers in Israel with Danny Siegel. Indeed, a chapter about Yossi and Shoshana is included in Radiance, the new anthology of Danny’s writing that I edited. Kalman’s book fills in lots of the gaps that I didn’t know and brings his story to a remarkable and heady fulfillment.

If you’re looking for a little inspiration—never maudlin nor cliched, but honest, touching and often very funny—read Kalman’s joyful, uplifting book. 

Quite simply, it’s the antidote to cynicism.

Some RADIANCE for Dark Times - New Book!

Dear Friends,

I hope you and your family are safe and sound during these trying times. I hope that with this note I can share a little bit of light.

I’m pleased to announce that the book I edited—after more than 3 years of work—is now available:  RADIANCE: Creative Mitzvah Living—The Selected Prose and Poetry of Danny Siegel, just published from the Jewish Publication Society. It’s available now from jps.org, and—even though the sites say May 1—I understand it is now available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere. Perhaps someday soon you’ll see it in your local bookstore (here’s a prayer that bookstores will still exist when this is all over).

 It’s an anthology of the most important writings by Danny Siegel, the noted Jewish educator, essayist, Torah teacher, and poet. Rabbi David Ellenson, President Emeritus of HUC-JIR, calls Radiance “A spiritual masterpiece!” and Professor Deborah Lipstadt calls it “a welcome volume that continues to challenge and teach us today.”

Danny Siegel’s teachings have shaped modern Jewish education with his urgency about how to do acts of Tzedakah, Tikkun Olam, and deeds of compassion and generosity. My experiences with Danny have very much shaped the person, professionally and personally, that I’m trying to become, and that’s a big reason why I wanted to create this book.

His prose essays are filled with translations and interpretations of texts from Jewish tradition—including many off-the-beaten track and unusual selections. Ideas for personal Mitzvah Projects fly off the page, and inspire readers to think creatively about how each of us is poised to personally make a difference in the world. And it’s not meant to be a period piece; there are five new essays where Danny takes his insights into the 2020s.

The poetry is saturated with Jewish spirituality—its history, pain, exhilaration, and hope. Many of these poems have been incorporated into Jewish liturgies over the years.  Some are ripe for rediscovery; I think he should be recognized as one of the most sublime Jewish poets of our generation.

I realize that there are other, greater concerns at this time. But it also strikes me that much of this book is about how to hold together as a community (especially at a time like this), and how to carry compassionate responsibility for the most vulnerable among us (now more than ever)—and in that way, it may be especially poignant today. 

For Jewish community leaders:  I’d like to suggest that this book may be especially useful to you as a gift for faculty and staff, for executive boards and volunteers, and for anyone involved in the work of building communities based upon Jewish values.

I hope you’ll check it out. Danny and I are available to speak to you or your community about  the ideas both in and beyond the pages of this new anthology.

With Gratitude,

Neal

On the Death of an Indigent Jew

At first, burying the dead was more difficult for families than the death itself—because of the enormous expense. Family members even abandoned the bodies and ran away.
That changed when Rabban Gamliel adopted a simple style, and the people carried him to his grave in plain linen garments. Subsequently, everyone followed his example.
—Talmud, Ketubot 8b

Today I stood by an open grave as we lay to rest a certain Mr. Cohen, with the honor of Jewish rite and ritual to which every Jew is entitled.

With me at the graveside were the gentile funeral director and four members of the staff of the Jewish Cemetery Association of Massachusetts (JCAM). And that’s it. There were no mourners; no family to say the Kaddish, no friends or acquaintances to pay their respects.

I was invited to be there, because for the past few months I’ve been part of a quiet but important conversation here in Greater Boston: How our community can create a policy for burying indigent Jews—for people who have nothing; no assets, no money to pay for funeral costs or burial plots, and often no family.

You may think that it’s rather astounding that a Jewish community like this one does not have a strategy in place to bury extremely poor Jews. And you’d be right.

For decades, the burden of burying Jews without money here has fallen on the shoulders of whoever happened to be there. Sometimes that’s the funeral homes; other times, it’s the fine people at Jewish Family Services, or Yad Chessed, the important Boston-area Tzedakah collective.

More often than not, the burden of providing a dignified burial falls upon JCAM, a non-profit organization which owns and manages 124 Jewish cemeteries throughout Massachusetts. My friend and colleague Jamie Cotel, the Executive Director of JCAM, estimates that they are called upon to provide approximately thirty to forty burials a year for people who have little or no funds. JCAM’s already thin budget is stretched to provide a free grave, to pay the facilities crew to open and administer the burial plot, to arrange for the ritual, to provide a gravestone, and more. 

That’s thirty-to-forty times a year. And that’s just the cases that come into JCAM’s domain. It doesn’t include those desperate poor who simply disappear beneath the communal radar screen. Our Mr. Cohen’s body, for instance, was alone in a local hospital for a distressingly long time before being turned over to a local Christian funeral home. They were prepared to bury his body in a pauper’s field in a Christian cemetery—until JCAM became aware of the situation, and advocated to bury him in one of their Jewish cemeteries, with full Jewish ritual and honor.

But JCAM has limited funds and staff. This crisis—and it is a crisis, if you believe that Jewish burials aren’t just for the rich—demands a systematic, community-wide effort to share the responsibility and the cost. I’m glad we’re working on it, even while I’m ashamed that it hasn’t happened until now.

We buried Mr. Cohen, but we knew almost nothing about him. The only family Jamie could identify was a distant and estranged cousin in another state, who could provide her with no further family information and certainly wasn’t offering to share the cost of a funeral.

Here’s a part of the eulogy I gave:

Our tradition says that the day of death is like the Day of Atonement, and optimally we go to our Final Reward in the spirit of humility, purity, and atonement for all the sins we committed in our lifetime. I pray today that his passing does indeed bring atonement for his sins, and peace to his soul, and comfort to those whose lives he touched during his years on earth.

….There’s another dimension of atonement that I’m thinking of today as well. We, too, need atonement. We, too, must ask for forgiveness—of Mr. Cohen, for our sins. We have sinned by living in a self-absorbed society where he found himself so alone at the end of his life; where he lingered so long in the hospital morgue.

Chattanu – we have sinned. Please forgive us, sir. You, and all of G-d’s children, deserve better.

I believe that the measure of a community’s integrity is the degree to which it cares for the most desperate, hurting, and defenseless members in it. The enormity of its bank accounts, the hugeness of its homes and synagogue buildings, and the grotesque assemblage of automobiles in its parking lots are not signs of moral grandeur—and they just may indicate the exact opposite.

May Mr. Cohen rest in peace. And may his memory, such as it is, give us no peace, until we are able to do far better for those like him, the living and the dead.

Book Announcement - Radiance: Creative Mitzvah Living/The Selected Prose & Poetry of Danny Siegel

I'm excited to share the pre-publication information about the book I've edited, Radiance: Creative Mitzvah Living--The Selected Prose & Poetry of Danny Siegel, to be published by the Jewish Publication Society in April 2020. Rabbi David Ellenson, past President of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, calls it "a spiritual masterpiece"!

Here’s a link to the JPS site for forthcoming titles: https://jps.org/books/radiance/

Danny, as many of my friends and colleagues know, is a scholar of Jewish texts and values, and the preeminent expert on creative and grassroots ways in which people transform the world. He's also one of the unheralded shapers of Jewish education in America. He's the author of over 30 books, many of which are long out of print -- thus my desire to gather an anthology of his "greatest hits." His prose essays are filled with offbeat Jewish texts and striking ideas and projects, and we've written five new essays to bring his thinking about Tzedakah and Tikkun Olam (world-repair) up to date.

Furthermore, ⅓ of the book is devoted to his remarkable, profoundly spiritual poetry. Many of these poems have been included in various Jewish liturgies for Shabbat, holidays, and life cycle events over the years.

Danny and/or I would love to come to your community for a book launch or event. Please feel free to contact me directly if you or a community leader is interested.Danny, as many of my friends and colleagues know, is a scholar of Jewish texts and values, and the preeminent expert on creative and grassroots ways in which people transform the world. He's also one of the unheralded shapers of Jewish education in America. He's the author of over 30 books, many of which are long out of print -- thus my desire to gather an anthology of his "greatest hits." His prose essays are filled with offbeat Jewish texts and striking ideas and projects, and we've written five new essays to bring his thinking about Tzedakah and Tikkun Olam (world-repair) up to date.

Furthermore, ⅓ of the book is devoted to his remarkable, profoundly spiritual poetry. Many of these poems have been included in various Jewish liturgies for Shabbat, holidays, and life cycle events over the years.

Danny and/or I would love to come to your community for a book launch or event. Please feel free to contact me directly if you or a community leader is interested.

Elegy for… a Character: A Tzedakah Story

Even a poor person—one who is sustained by Tzedakah funds—
is required to give Tzedakah to another person.
Maimonides, Mishneh Torah
Laws of Giving to Poor People 10:5
 

My friend Renee was a character. She was well known in our town; you couldn’t miss her. Her frizzy salt-and-pepper hair was often bound in a pigtail like a schoolgirl’s. She drove an SUV that was constantly breaking down, packed to the roof with the telltale possessions of an inveterate hoarder. She had weary eyes that conveyed years of adventures.

She lived on the precipice of homelessness. For a while she stayed in emergency shelters—scary places that she would recount with stark tales. In recent years, she found more stable housing, finding cheap rooms to rent in residential homes around Natick. And she knew how to work the system, making her rounds to get the food, gas money, and, especially, the money for medications that she needed.

I suppose that’s where I came in. She started dropping in on me years ago at the synagogue where I worked. At first she came for Tzedakah money, knowing that people gave me funds to distribute in emergency situations. But she would linger, telling me stories, asking about my family, and, I think, looking for some human contact that can be the harshest thing people who are very poor lack.

Like many such characters, she tested the nerves of those who didn’t “get” her. When she began to show up at the synagogue—ensconced in one of the wealthiest Zip Codes in America—some people whispered behind her back. Being Jewish herself, she accepted my invitation to come to Friday night services. Sometimes the bar/bat mitzvah families with out-of-town guests would murmur about the woman who looked funny and took too much of the food that was offered before the service began. The staff grumbled when she would sit on the couch outside my office, waiting without an appointment to grab a few minutes of my time. Hebrew school parents and kids kept their distance.

She was funky. She looked funky, she talked funky, and sometimes she smelled funky. Initially our relationship was based on shnorring—she needed money, and she knew that I was usually reliable to help her pay her heating bill during the cold winter, or fill a prescription for her urgently-needed heart medicine.

Sometimes she exasperated me. I know, of course, about the social service agencies in our area that are there to provide a safety net. I begged her—I insisted—that she connect with them. She would reply that her nonconformist hippie soul wouldn’t be part of their “system.” That made me crazy; I threatened to cut her off if she didn’t take their assistance. But she would inevitably show up with a bill for heart medication, and of course I would help pay for it.

After a while, the dynamic of our relationship changed. She knew I was going through some rough times personally, so one day she invited me to lunch. I demurred—where in the world would she get the money from?—but she insisted. So a few days later, she took me out to a local diner. I’m sure we got a few stares. But the gesture meant so much to me: she considered me a friend; she knew I was down, and she treated. She didn’t even let me cover the tip.       

Yes, she was a character. She wasn’t invisible, but she became one of those offbeat folk who populate a suburban town who are tolerated as long as they don’t become too much of a nuisance.

But because she was my friend, I knew things that others didn’t.

I knew that she had a Master’s degree in counseling from the University of Wisconsin. I knew about her daughter at American University, of whom she was very proud. I knew that she had spent time in Israel, and spoke a limited but comprehensible Hebrew. And I knew she still saw herself as a “Sixties Person”—committed to volunteerism and social activism. She once told me stories about working on the Clearwater Project on the Hudson River with Pete and Toshi Seeger.

But now I’ll share something with you that very few people knew (including her daughter, until I told her). She couldn’t stand just being on the receiving end of the cycle of caring. “This isn’t me,” she’d say, insisting that her younger self was alive and well inside her rather emaciated and graying body.

So one day she handed me a large folder. “I know you see a lot of hurting folks throughout the course of the day,” she said. “So when you feel it’s appropriate, please give people one of these.”

Inside the folder were ten envelopes labeled “For You.” In each one was a handwritten personalized note. Each was a gentle message of compassion and tenderness. For instance:

To remind you
How unique and
Wonderful You
Are—
every day,
every hour
—And to wish you
extra energy for the things you’re
currently tackling…

Or:

Please accept this
as a symbol
of some
great things
comin’ your way—
for example
Brightness
Fairness
HAPPINESS…
Enjoy your
wonderful
future.

And enclosed in each card was a $2 bill. (A $2 bill!) The instructions were not to keep this money for yourself, but to take it and use it to brighten someone else’s day.

Look at what an extraordinary Mitzvah that is. She did it completely anonymously; she left it to me to identify the adults, teens, or kids who needed cheering-up. I was not to tell the recipients where it came from; it was just from “a friend, someone who cares.” And the cards were designed to trigger a chain reaction of compassion and human kindness. This is Tzedakah—but Tzedakah with the personal touch, rooted in compassion and a desire to make a connection with people who may be desperately lonely.

Renee died last week; her heart finally gave out, surely not helped by the on-the-edge lifestyle she was living. There weren’t obituaries in the paper or online; few people noticed. Many who encountered her over the years may have forgotten her, or figured that she just skipped town. But she deserves a better memorial.

I know many more juicy stories that she shared with me, but I won’t tell them here. Suffice to say that she was a character, and she lived out the Rambam’s principle that everyone’s (everyone’s) task is to bring kindness and caring into the world, not indifference and lies. I just wanted to say that she was my friend, I’ll miss her, and she made a difference.

Writing Roundup: A Few Recent Books with Writings of Mine

November was a prolific month. I have articles in three recent books which you may be interested in:

First, THE FRAGILE DIALOGUE: NEW VOICES OF LIBERAL ZIONISM, edited by Stanley Davids and Larry Englander, is a collection of essays about Reform Zionism in America, Israel, and elsewhere. I contributed a transatlantic dialogue with Rabbi Charley Baginsky comparing the history and nature of Zionism in the liberal Jewish movements of America and the U.K.

A LIFE OF MEANING, edited by Dana Evan Kaplan, discusses Jewish spiritual practices. I wrote an essay on “Creating a Life of Meaning by Caring for Others,” which includes some reflections on the inspiration of my teacher, the Rabbanit Kapach.

Finally, NAVIGATING THE JOURNEY: THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO THE JEWISH LIFE CYCLE, edited by Peter Knobel, includes an article of mine about integrating Tzedakah into the practice of daily living.

Check ‘em out!