This year as in the past few years, the national Volunteers’ Week coincided directly with the Jewish Festival of Shavuot. This gave us at JVN an opportunity to link the valuable contribution volunteers make to our community with the festival of chessed (kindness).
But this year, we had an added significance – it was the 30th anniversary of Volunteers’ Week. Jewishly, 30 is not the most significant of numbers. 40, yes. For example, we have 40 days and 40 nights of the flood,;40 years of wandering in the wilderness; the 40 days and nights that Moses spent on Mount Sinai; the 40 days Jonah spent inside the belly of the great fish that swallowed him; and many more mentions of 40... but 30 doesn’t appear so frequently.
However, if we look at the letter that correlates to the number 30 (in Hebrew all letters also have a numerical value) – Lamed, corresponding in English to the letter L – we see a direct connection to our theme. The letter Lamed is the tallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet when written, and the word ‘lamed’ also means learn. But the letter is usually used as a prefix, signifying action. In fact, when the letter is placed before a verb it means to.
This suggests it’s not enough to just learn. We must also to act on the learning. It’s the action that makes the difference. This is personified in the Book of Ruth which we read at Shavuot. The beautiful story demonstrates Ruth’s kindness, embodied through action: not just following her bereft mother-in-law Naomi back to the land of Israel, but taking on gruelling work in the fields in order to keep them both from falling into abject poverty. The story shows how Jewish morality is embedded in Jewish law. We see in the Book of Ruth laws about looking after the poor, and taking care of the widow and the orphan. Ruth is thus an extraordinary story, not only because of the interpersonal loving kindness among the main characters, but also because of the Jewish legal structure that provides a healthy system for taking care of the needy in the community.
Volunteers’ Week provided a way to also remind ourselves of the wonderful contribution so many people make through active engagement with society, through volunteering and living by the values highlighted in the Book of Ruth. Congratulations on 30 years of acts of kindness and volunteering, and thank you to all who volunteer!
Wishing you a wonderful summer of kindness,
Leonie.
