Tikkun Olam – Employment Opportunity

(Published in The Outreach, March 2005)
The Outreach is the newsletter of Valley Outreach Synagogue, Reseda, California
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Have you ever considered joining the diplomatic corps? Yes, even at this point in your life you could be a diplomat while maintaining your current commitments to other employment or even to an enjoyable retirement. Wouldn't it be exciting to interact with foreign dignitaries, representing your culture, its contributions to the world and its values? You could personally change the view that others have of your people. You could make them rethink their prejudices and reevaluate their conceptions.

Consider that as a Jew you signed up for this job when you accepted the honor of calling yourself by that ancient name. You represent your family and your people in every interaction with the world. Even in the momentary, seemingly insignificant interactions – the ones that do not really seem to matter, you state, "I am a member of this family and a member of this people. I represent them along with myself."

We who have traveled outside the United States know that our identity as Americans only becomes apparent to us when we see it through the eyes of foreigners. In those moments, we either solidify the old or create the new impressions of our national character.

As ambassadors, what should be our code of conduct? Surely, it should be the written code of our Torah. Often though, we read the Torah in terms of grand concepts – miracles and major commandments or conversely we see only the minutiae of the Torah and fail to see its grand messages. In either case, we struggle with the challenge of bringing it to bear on our daily acts.

The essence of the entire body of Torah, as Rabbi Akiva taught, is that we should be a people who loves our neighbors as ourselves; individuals who afford dignity to the bus boy who serves us our drinks and the gardener who mows our lawn; people who are content forgo the need to be right or to demand our rights if in doing so we diminish another's dignity. Of course, we have the right to excellent service and to the best that life has to offer, but, if it is less than excellent, rights aside, must we berate and belittle another human being with equal right to respect and happiness?

The Torah teaches us to be generous in our transactions. In the wisdom of our sages we learn of the holiness of truly selfless moments; those moments in which we are able to present more than our needs; to listen without our needs deafening us to another's words.

If we take our roles as Jewish ambassadors seriously, we define our lives by making choices that act by act, interaction by interaction, diminish anti-Semitism in our generation and foster respect for the values of Moses and the people Israel. Then we can rightly say that we have added light to the darkened corners of the world and orthodox or Reform, we can take pride in the achievement of tikkun olam, repairing our world.