So It Goes

Jews With Hammers

A WEEK AGO, I SPENT A DAY IN THE HOT SUN lifting countless 80-pound bags of Sakrete, mixing them with water and pouring out the mix to make a sidewalk. I also hung a new door to a bedroom (which needs to be adjusted, though), and poured concrete footings for a back deck.

If this had been at my own house, first of all, I probably wouldn't have done it. At my own house, I lack the ambition and confidence to take on such complex tasks -- or so they seemed to me before some professional contractors guided me and others through the necessary steps.

But, along with 25 or 30 other volunteers -- most of whom, like me, had never done anything close to building a sidewalk or a back deck or, as others were, hanging new kitchen cabinets -- I somehow plunged right in at a small shotgun-style house in Southeast Washington, D.C., as part of an annual program called Sukkot in April.

Sukkot in April is the brainchild of, well, my wife, Audrey Lyon, who runs Yachad, the Jewish  housing and community development group based in D.C. About a dozen or so years ago, she approached what was then called Christmas in April (now Rebuilding Together), which organized churches, businesses, and other groups to spend a day in April renovating homes of people who had serious needs for repairs but little or no money to get them done. Because of Christmas in April's name and the fact that most of their work took place on Saturdays, there were few, if any, synagogues and other Jewish groups taking part. So Yachad organized these Jewish groups under the banner of Sukkot (a Jewish harvest festival in the fall) in April, and they scheduled all the work to done on Sundays, which wouldn't interfere with the biblical instruction not to work on the sabbath. Consistently, there are a couple of dozen or more synagogues and Jewish groups -- and a few of hundred individual volunteers -- participating every year.

My own synagogue, Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation, is one of the more active ones in the Sukkot in April program. In fact, many years we get almost too many volunteers -- a good problem -- and, because of that we usually take on some of the more challenging houses.

This year's was no exception. I'm not entirely sure of the circumstances of the family that owns the house, but they probably fit the typical profile. Often times we see an elderly woman there, with health problems and a fixed income (probably just Social Security). She may have owned and lived in the home for a couple of decades or more. It may even be paid off or close to paid off. But she doesn't have the ready cash to keep up with maintenance.

You'll see situations where the roof has needed to be replaced for years, and, in that time, water damage has destroyed walls, allowed mold to flourish and so forth. Or some have barely or not-functioning basic amenities, such as toilets and showers, stoves or refrigerators. Paint (some of it still lead-based) might be pealing all over. Floorboards could be eroded, enabling one to see through to the floor below. If conditions aren't altogether unsafe or unhealthy, they are surely not comfortable.

Sukkot in April (and other home repair programs Yachad runs) offers a rescue. It bundles the energy and resources (sweat equity and a modest cash outlay for materials) from Jews who are looking for a way to help someone in need. Not that Jews have the monopoly on that impulse to help; there are plenty of other denominational groups and others who are doing what they can.

But what's interesting (I was going to say 'remarkable,' but that's overstating it) is that with Sukkot in April we're engaging in something more than checkbook charity. We're getting our hands dirty in was that most of us -- well, me at least -- would rarely do in our own homes. Mostly that's because (in my case) of a lack of confidence to try to do something (like build a new concrete sidewalk) that might make matters worse. In my case, too, there's a dose of laziness at play.

So take my partners on the sidewalk project, all of whom, like me, spend most their days far from work like this:  David Kupfer, a clinical psychologist, and I, a p.r. guy with a desk job, hoisted the 80-pound bags into the mixer (in fairness, I have to admit that David probably hoisted more than I did) and poured the concrete; David Dolinsky, who runs a video production company, and Blair Levin, a leading telecom industry analyst, both spent several hours on their hands and knees leveling out and finishing the fresh concrete surface.The result: a solid and attractive sidewalk to replace a long strip of weathered plywood. Mark Gunther,a journalist, helped me pour footings for the deck. Ralph Nitkin, a cellular neurobiologist at the National Institutes of Health who seemed to really know what he was doing, worked with me to drill and hang the bedroom door.   

I kept joking that all this should come easily to Jews; after all, it was Jews who built the pyramids. Of course, some smart guy there told me that there's some archaeological evidence to suggest that's largely not true. Okay, whatever. But it is true that most American Jews of my generation are rather like me; not so experienced or skilled with the building trades or with fixing cars and such.

For most of us though, we are only a generation or two away from Jews who knew which end of a hammer was up. My grandfather, for example, was a blacksmith growing up in Lithuania, and made a career in the U.S. wrecking cars and reselling their parts. My uncles were, likewise, pretty handy with building and fixing things. I kick myself that I did not spend more time learning this sort of thing as a kid.

The closest many of us Jewish guys come to building is perhaps during the actual Sukkot holiday in the fall, when we are instructed by the Torah to build a sukkah, a temporary booth in which we are also instructed to eat and sleep. Along with many of my peers, I built my first sukkah (and seem to have to rebuild or repair it every year) only about a dozen years ago or so, and many of us take great pride in this fairly simply accomplishment, knowing how unusual it is for us to build things.

There are plenty of other Jews of our generation around us, though, who do know how to make and repair things. Yachad has, in fact, recruited a fair number of Jewish building contractors to help out on various projects throughout the year. And then there are the two guys who basically kept all the rest of us from screwing up last week: Alan Kanner, who runs a construction company called Added Dimensions, drives a pick-up truck, owns a bunch of cool tools and has jokingly referred to himself as "a Jewish carpenter" (he is, naturally, trained as a lawyer); and Louis Tenenbaum, who modifies homes for people with disabilities and also has a pick-up and cool tools. These guys worked harder than the rest of us, of course, as they answered frequently calls for help from the rest of us who needed guidance on the most basic of tasks.

The point of this exercise, of course, is to help someone who needs the help. The house, when I left it last week (they are doing a second phase today), had been transformed in many ways and will hopefully transform the lives of its residents in important ways, too.

But along the way, some of us who are doing the transforming are transformed ourselves: learning a new skill and building our confidence to do what previously seemed undoable. In addition to using our hands, we do something else that we need to do more of: bridge an all-too-wide gap between ourselves and others with whom we rarely interact, even as they live but a short distance away.

Jeff

Celebs and the Public Interest

I HAVE TO CONFESS TO A CERTAIN SMUGNESS about the use of celebrities in public interest campaigns. Whenever I hear the suggestion that comes up in strategy meetings that we enlist this box-office femme fatale or that glam lead rock singer to get people to pay attention to a serious policy issue, I wince. It's yet another reminder that our society (I'm speaking only of the U.S., but I realize we're not the only ones) suffers from a sorry syndrome: we think our beautiful people are more credible than our Nobel laureates.

But even I have to admit that celebrity does have its place in bringing attention to important public affairs issues. Bono and Angelina are not the only ones, of course, and I have to give them their due.

Comes now a story from a recent New York Times of the dynamic duo of Mia Farrow and Steven Spielberg, who seem to have done something that few others have accomplished before. They have gotten the Chinese government finally to press the Sudanese government to take some first steps to do what the international community has asked for a long time regarding the genocide against Darfurians.

Because of their actions, the article reports, "A senior Chinese official, Zhai Jun, traveled to Sudan to push the Sudanese government to accept a United Nations peacekeeping force. Mr. Zhai even went all the way to Darfur and toured three refugee camps, a rare event for a high-ranking official from China, which has extensive business and oil ties to Sudan and generally avoids telling other countries how to conduct their internal affairs."

All of this had to do with Spielberg's involvement as an artistic advisor to the Chinese Olympic Games. Farrow, who has been an outspoken advocate about the plight of the people in Darfur, via her role as a good-will ambassador for the United Nations Children’s Fund, started, according to the Times, "a campaign last month to label the Games in Beijing the 'Genocide Olympics' and calling on corporate sponsors and even Mr. Spielberg, who is an artistic adviser to China for the Games, to publicly exhort China to do something about Darfur. In a March 28 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, she warned Mr. Spielberg that he could 'go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games,' a reference to a German filmmaker who made Nazi propaganda films."

The Chinese, as you may know, have been under enormous pressure regarding Darfur because China has a large stake in the Sudanese oil industry, and many presume that this gives China one of the most powerful positions to intervene and rein in the killing. (Also, if you look at the history of the conflict in Sudan, much of it, going back to the early 1980s, began over the discovery and fight over the spoils of large oil reserves there.) China has consistently and vociferously refused to push Sudan to stop sponsoring the terror against Darfurians.

Farrow and Spielberg aren't the only celebs involved in this issue. There are many. Indeed, just to pick out one, George Clooney and Olympic speedskater Joey Cheek made news a few months ago when they personally met with Egyptian and Chinese government officials asking them to put pressure on President Bashar of Sudan. (They did not.)

So maybe there's something to this celeb thing. Maybe I just need to get over it.

Jeff

Small, But Essential, Steps Across Borders -- Just Beyond Our Doorsteps

"YES, THERE'S IRAQ AND IRAN and Hamas and Fatah," Leonard Fein wrote on May 26 in his regular column in the Forward Newspaper. "There's gas prices and NSA and CIA and the stock market. There are typhoons and volcanic eruptions and soon, again, hurricanes. There's Darfur and taxes, the morning-after pill and the essay by Mearsheimer and Walt, and that's quite enough for the moment, thank you very much.

"But there's also O'Day Playground, on West Newton Street in Boston's South End neighborhood, less than two miles from where I live and from where I write this report. And there's a moral to the O'Day story, if you'll bear with me."

Fein goes on to tell the story of of myriad problems facing this neighborhood and of seven shootings in two months in or around O'Day Playground, an otherwise tidy and inviting city park. It's a park that should work, but, Fein concludes "draconian budget cuts of the past several years have reduced the city [of Boston's} capacity for constructive intervention to heal the city, to save young lives. In your city, too."

His moral is that, yes, there is so much to repair across the world, and we should not avert our eyes from those needs. But let's not do so at the expense of those problems not far from our own doorsteps. There is plenty of need right in front of us.

The good news is that many understand this. And one wonderful case in point is the Ramp It Up! program, operated by Yachad, a Jewish community development organization in the Washington, D.C. area.

Yachad, which means "together" in Hebrew (and my wife happens to be the group's executive director), has been at this sort of activity for more than a decade and half (though Ramp It Up!, now in its third summer, is a relatively new initiative). The group organizes in-kind resources -- real estate lawyers, builders, architects, finance experts and many others who provide simple sweat equity -- to help people who can't afford to renovate their own homes but need to. And it also partners with organizations -- primarily African American churches -- to transform boarded-up buildings or long-unused property into foundations of economic improvement in struggling Washington, D.C. neighborhoods.

Ramp It Up! recruits Jewish high school kids to spend a week of their summer vacations building accessibility ramps at the homes of people with disabilities. It sounds like a small matter, but it has impact on many levels.

First, for the residents themselves, the impact is earth shattering. Before Ramp It Up! arrives,  residents with disabilities are effectively prisoners in their own homes. Confined to wheelchairs, they have no way of getting out of their homes on their own. In nearly every case, someone would have to carry them get them out of the house. So the simple tasks -- like touring the neighborhood for fresh air or going to the grocery -- are just about out of the question, and they don't always get out enough for important trips such as visits to the doctor.

The isolation has to be stifling, especially since they are typically not living in homes with all the pleasant amenities many of us enjoy; to qualify for Ramp It Up!, the residents must be low income, and in a lot of cases, the absence of accessibility is just one of many problems that make the structures nearly unlivable.

When some of this year's Ramp It Up! teenage participants, led by a professional contractor, finished their work at a home a couple of weeks ago in Wheaton, Md., just outside, D.C., the young man living inside and wheelchair-bound as a result of a traffic accident, appeared at his front door. In the five years since his accident, he has spent little time outside the house. But this day, he rolled out on a new landing, down the ramp and into his front year. It was a simple act that was inconceivable even a day before.

‘‘You don’t know what this means to me,” he told a local newspaper reporter. ‘‘These people are the answers to my prayers.”

The second level of impact is on the students themselves, all of whom were, to say the least, touched when the young man rolled out of his house by himself for first time. There was, right there in front of them, a vivid and concrete example of what they could do with their own hands.

The students also got something that a lot of comfortable, bookish suburban kids don't normally get: hands-on experience with construction work. [That's something that our friend Alan Kanner, a residential construction contractor, who oversaw one of the teams of students and who is one of the few Jewish carpenters (with a law degree, of course) since Jesus, often laments. There are too few people these days who know which end of a nail to hammer (myself included) and, despite the short supply of essential workers in the building trades, there doesn't seem to be enough appreciation for what they do -- even though people are always asking Alan for his advice on their own home repair projects. But I digress, don't I?] On some of the hottest days of the year, these kids were hammering and sawing, and measuring (twice) and building a ramp -- and a little character.

Also, with the guidance of a counselor, they learned from Jewish scriptural and historical texts about the moral imperative of this sort work, which in Jewish tradition is called tikkun olam, or repair of the world. Jewish mystics conceived the world as a ceramic vessel that could not hold the light of God at creation and shattered. It is our job, according to this narrative, to put the pieces back together, shard by shard, eventually bringing about the messianic age, when the real fun begins.

Programs like Ramp It Up! enable something else to happen: crossing boundries. As our metro areas have expanded geographically and the gap between people of different socio-economic communities has grown, we have all become more insular. As I think about my own day-to-day existence, and I'm typical, I seldom step outside my own boundries, and it's not often that others step into mine (though my wife offers me an outlet). When I do, I am often amazed at how different, and often pretty interesting, these other "worlds" are or how they defy my preconceived expectations.

We could use a little more border crossing, and we don't have to go clear across the country or around the world for it, though it's good that someone does. Neighbhoods like the one Fein described in Boston and the ones that Yachad works in all the time in Washington almost never improve on their own. They need a spark from outside, an injection of capital and caring and a morale-boosting sign that they are not just lost at sea but, worst of all, forgotten.   

But the benefits go both ways. Metropolitan areas are like single organisms, and if any of their internal organs or systems are weak, the entire organism cannot reach its full potential and could even get sick. So everyone has a stake.

The problem is that not everyone, especially those living comfortably, realizes this -- at least not until they step across their own borders, see the weaknesses with their own eyes and try to make them stronger.

Jeff