I recently came across an article in which some experts on global poverty answered readers’ questions. One of the questions was particularly relevant to college students who attend service trips like those done with JDC. I thought that people who read and contribute to this blog might be interested.

The answer is from Dean Karlan, a development economist at Yale; and Jacob Appel, a researcher at Innovations for Poverty Action

Here it is:

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Q. I am currently a college student interested in global poverty and will be traveling this summer to India to work on trying to decrease diarrheal disease in urban slums. Though our student-run organization has debated this at length, I would like to know what you think of student orgs that volunteer overseas. We travel every summer to India and are committed to long term solutions for communities in Hubli and Mumbai (so not just a one week medical brigade of sorts). But even with more of an investment than such one week programs what is the true function of these volunteer programs, and are they the best way for young people to start helping? –Vaibhav Birda

A. We are all for volunteering, especially for college students and other young people. It’s true: in a couple weeks in India, your student group probably will not find a groundbreaking new solution to diarrheal disease in the slums. But that’s not the point.  The biggest impact from getting involved, especially at the ground level in the field, will likely be on you, and then hopefully your later impact on the world. Spending time face-to-face in developing countries is a great way to become engaged in the fight against poverty, and so a few weeks of summer volunteering can lead to a lifetime of work in development—and that really has the power to change lives.”

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The full article can be found here:

http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/04/25/how-to-attack-global-poverty-more-than-good-intentions-authors-answer-your-questions/

THIS PAST Spring Break, I participated in a service trip to Israel through the Hillel Jewish Center and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. I, along with seventeen other University students, spent the week volunteering in the northern city of Nahariyya, a beautiful coastal city that is a mere six miles from Israel’s border with Lebanon. Because I already had spent a year volunteering in Israel, I did not expect to gain much from this experience besides pure enjoyment, but in light of the events that occurred there this trip had a significant impact on my life.

Nahariyya faces many economic difficulties, in part because of a large immigrant population. Alongside members of this immigrant community, we worked to refurbish apartment complexes in one of Nahariyya’s poorest neighborhoods, doing everything from plastering to painting.

What made this job unique was that each group of four students was assigned one Arab contractor to oversee the project and two elderly Russian immigrants to assist us. These Russian immigrants only recently had come to Israel following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and many had struggled to learn Hebrew, creating an extreme language barrier. But from this frustrating situation came something amazing.

Despite the perceived communication problems, I noticed that our contractor, Abbed, and the two Russian men seemed to understand each other perfectly. One would yell in Russian, the other in Arabic, and somehow an agreement would be made. I watched, stunned, as these men from completely different backgrounds were able to work together to better their shared community.

Before I saw this communication, I had been struggling to interact with both parties individually. I was able to speak freely with Abbed in Hebrew, and exhausted my knowledge of Yiddish when conversing with the Russians, but shied away from speaking to both parties simultaneously. However, this one moment reminded me that human interaction is so much more than a shared language — it thrives on mutual respect for one another.

On Friday night, we were invited into the homes of community members for a Sabbath dinner with warmth and hospitality. As I returned to the hotel that night, I remember reflecting on the trip and feeling comforted. Though we were in Israel during a time of unease — felt especially in Nahariyya, which was bombed heavily during the Second Lebanon War in 2006 — there was so much hope for a better future. Even among grown men, who have had decades to harden their opinions, there was still the ability to live together and work peacefully.

The next morning, our last in Israel, we were informed of the tragedy that had occurred the previous night. Just as we returned to the hotel after a night of enjoyment, so too did the Fogel family return from Sabbath festivities to its home in the West Bank. That night, as the family members slept, two terrorists broke into their home and brutally murdered them. Udi Fogel, his wife Ruth, and their children Yoav, 11, Elad, 4, and three-month-old Hadas were stabbed to death simply because they lived in the West Bank. After their 12-year-old daughter Tamar found them and reported the crime, news of the incident spread throughout Israel.

People’s reactions ranged from disbelief to anger, and yet when Ruth Fogel’s father Rabbi Yehuda Ben-Yishai was interviewed he stressed that he would not seek vengeance or harbor hatred. “I have worked in education many years, and as an educator, I try to strengthen and teach people faith,” he explained. “I understand that I cannot be satisfied with words and that I also must implement the same principles on which I have educated others. This is a test of my faith.”

The rabbi’s words seem to have fallen on deaf ears. Because the Western world has failed to cover this story adequately, its citizens have lost the opportunity to learn from it. Situations like this make my hope falter. How can I maintain faith for a better future when the murder of five innocent people does not warrant the same outcry of condemnation that the construction of a housing unit receives? Has the world truly chosen to deprive these people of the respect they deserve?

As University students, we must understand that “faith” is not defined by religious beliefs but rather a unified hope for a better future. It is the same faith that connected the Arabs and the Russians who failed to communicate verbally but were truly able to understand each other. It is this faith that we must encourage in the hope of achieving a future compassionate coexistence.
We can all learn a valuable lesson from the interactions of some gentlemen in Nahariyya and the words of a mourning father. Every life is precious, and between every person there is some common ground. Search it out and cherish it.

As our last day was Shabbat, it is only appropriate to relate our service to this week’s parshah, Vayikra. Vayikra is the first portion in the Book of Leviticus, which is traditionally known as a book of laws for Jewish living. The portion gets its name from the first word in the book, Vayikra, which means “And he called (to Moses).” What has occupied the attention of  many rabbis is the unusual appearance of the word, which ends with an aleph that is smaller than other Alephs within the Torah. Why this deviation from the norm? What significance does this small aleph have for our understanding of the portion, Leviticus, or Judaism at large? And what can we as students on a service trip expect to take away from a detail as seemingly irrelevant as the size of a letter?

At first glance, there seems to be little take-away. Maybe Moses got distracted — after all, there was much to occupy his attention at Sinai as he helped provide our people with their first taste of freedom. Maybe the letter got shortened in an old scroll, and subsequent scribes simply copied it out of a reluctance to alter their base text. Even if the lesser letter had some greater significance, certainly its relevance has diminished in the thousands of years since our Law was delivered to us, through Moses, at Sinai.

And yet, on further reflection, there is much that happened at Sinai that continues to affect our daily lives. We continue to observe the ten commandments, to rest on Shabbat, and to give blessings over bread and wine. There is a tradition that in the Torah every detail down to the last letter is important and there for a reason.  Why, then, would this word, this letter, be any different? While it is not obvious prima facie, it is important to delve into the text to understand why this was written the way it was written, and what it means for our post-Sinai world. While having Shabbat dinner with an Israeli family, I was offered two explanations that shed light on the meaning of this letter and its importance to our understanding of our week serving our Jewish brothers and sisters in Nahariyya.

The first explanation — the one which I most prefer — argues that when God commanded Moses to write the Torah, Moses wanted to write “Vayikar,” the meaning of which roughly translates to “And He (God) happened upon.” In so saying, the text would imply not that Moses was explicitly chosen from all of the people of Israel but rather that he happened to be in the right place at the right time. This is entirely consistent with our understanding of Moses’s Jewish leadership; after all, when called by God in Exodus, he protests, arguing that he does not possess the spiritual or physical capacity to meet God’s demands. Humility is a central tenet of Mosaic leadership, and understanding him as wanting to write “Vayikar” only heightens our understanding of this.

As the story goes, God refused to allow this. He had chosen Moses for a reason, and he intended for the text to reflect that. Forbidden from writing Vayikar, Moses then decided to obey God but retain his sense of humility through the tiny aleph.

While this is a beautiful example of humble leadership on its own, it also sheds light on our service journey in Nahariyya. In our group reflections, we discussed Maimonides’s ladder of Tzedakah, which explains the different levels of giving and which are, in his opinion, considered higher than others. During our discussion, Conor mentioned that with each subsequent rung on the ladder, one was moving closer and closer toward removing the ego. While the first rung is giving reluctantly, which implies a strong egoistic presence, the second rung includes giving, though less than one should, which involves slightly less. Subsequent rungs include giving without knowing to whom one is giving or from whom one receives, which is a complete negation of the ego. The highest rung — helping another become self-sufficient– is not only a removal of all ego and personal sense of fulfillment but also ensures an eventual cessation in the differentiation between the self — the ego — and the other by putting both on equal grounds. During our service, we and the JDC have tried to provide the tools to make others self-sufficient by improving their homes and inculcating positive values in teens and children to help them make good choices for their future.

Poignantly, Aleph is intimately connected to ego, as it forms the beginning of the word “I,” ani. Just as Maimonides asks us to no longer differentiate ourselves from those we are helping, so too, does Moses try to avoid differentiating between himself and anyone else in the Jewish community. By emphasizing “Vayikar,” Moses tries to assert that he is no different from those who were not spoken to by God; instead, he was simply there at the right place and the right time. It’s a valuable lesson; instead of thinking of our service as us, or “I,” helping them, or “you,” we should strive to meet Moses’s example of humble service. While those whose homes we improved and whose company we kept felt a personal sense of fulfillment from our service, so, too, did we feel a personal sense of fulfillment from their company, and their assistance. This was not us giving to them. It was we giving to we — a perfect embodiment of Moses’s humble example.

That is the first interpretation of the small aleph; however, another exists that provides a different perspective on our service. As previously mentioned, Vayikra opens the Book of Leviticus, which is a book of laws. According to this second interpretation, the tiny aleph represents children and students who are just at the beginning of their learning of the Law. Representative of how much they need to grow, the aleph begins small; it is only by completing the book that one can grow to understand the true meaning of the Law.

For many of us, this trip has constituted our first major service project. In that sense, we are all starting as small alephs in our service to the Jewish community; but all that means is that we have a lot of room to grow, and an entire book of future service to write. While we may not be able to solve all issues in the world, we should not be frustrated by this; instead, we should take refuge in the fact that we all must start small, and we all must work as hard as we can to improve the world, even if we can not fix it entirely. As Pirkei Avot tells us, “It is not our responsibility to finish the work, but we are not free to desist from it either.“ It is up to us to live up to that standard, and, through our experiences this trip, it is safe to say we all will try.

Over the course of our trip, many people questioned the impact of our service. To them, it seemed as though our work was trivial, unproductive, or even meaningless. There were times during the trip, they argued, when there wasn’t enough work for us to do or the work we did caused more harm than good. Many of us also struggled to relate to the people we were helping because of communication barriers.

I understand these concerns, and I felt them myself during the trip. Nevertheless, I still believe that the trip was important and that our work was meaningful. I think that the problem is that the people in our group who criticized the work we did only looked at the tangible things that we provided for members of the community in Nahariya. We should have pushed ourselves to the edge with physical labor, they argued, so that we could have offered something tangible, large, and obviously important, like a refurbished bomb shelter or a repaired home.

However, if the goal of the trip was to provide the most tangible benefits, then the solution would have been simple. All we needed to do was donate all of the money that we spent on the trip, including what we spent on gifts and food, directly to the JDC so that we could provide the most possible food, toys, and other goods for the community. There was no need for any of us to actually go to Israel. This argument makes sense from a material cost-benefit analysis, but I believe that there was a reason why we went to Israel and that our trip brought greater benefits beyond just the tangible items that our work produced.

Our service provided hope and fulfillment to the community of Nahariya. During our many discussions, people shared countless anecdotes about members of the community expressing their gratitude and happiness with our work. For example, on the first day of service, I was working with a group painting the entrance and stairs to an apartment building. While we were painting, a woman came out of her apartment and started talking to me in Russian. I had no idea what she was saying, but luckily one of the people working in my group knew Russian. As it turned out, the woman was ardently thanking us. She said, with an emphatic tone, that no one had repaired those apartments in thirteen years. This was just one experience I had, but I had many more encounters like this, and other people in our group seemed to as well. Events like this led me to realize that the real benefit of our trip was that we brought hope to the people in the community that we helped. Even if we provided very few tangible benefits, the mere fact that we, Americans, took time out of our lives to visit a lesser known community and to help those in need signaled a message to that whole community that there are people out there who care for them. It’s easy to underestimate this non-material emotion, but just a little dose of hope can go a long way towards making the lives of these people much better.

Our time in Israel also provided connection for the people of Nahariya as well as for all of us. During the course of the trip, many people, especially those who could speak Hebrew or Russian, experienced a strong connection with the people in Nahariya. One person, who worked with children in a Mishol center, bonded with several of the kids. In fact, on the last day of service, one of the kids shyly came up to him and softly asked “you’re coming back right?” Another person on the trip, who was born in Russia, developed an instant relationship with the Russian immigrants that we worked with. Towards the end of the trip, one of the Russians gave her a book written by an important Russian author. This book had been passed down throughout his family for generations, and he wanted this girl to have it because he considered her to be his “grand-daughter for the week.” These connections were real and they were greater than any material item that we could measure. A large part of our trip was the relationships that we were able to establish and the things that these relationships taught us about other people, other cultures, and ourselves.

Finally, our trip to Israel was also, what one member of our group called, an “investment”. During our last reflection of the trip, we spent time discussing ways that we could take what we learned and what we experienced in our trip and apply those things to our regular lives. This discussion sparked an enthusiasm in the group that blew me away. During the lunch after this talk, everyone in the group was yelling and arguing and discussing (in that order) all the ways that we could improve the Jewish community at UVA. At the table I was sitting at, it seemed like there were five people speaking rapidly at once all sharing their ideas, and many of these ideas were great. A couple of people on the trip also felt driven to do something more personal and life changing as a result of the trip. One person started to seriously consider studying abroad at Hebrew University. Another student decided that she wanted to pursue a career in the Jewish non-profit sector after having been on this trip. One other student is also planning on applying for a year long program working with the JDC. So, the third and final benefit of the trip is that it inspired us to continue to do more work to help the Jewish people. This “investment” may turn out to bring more tangible benefits than we ever could have realized. Only time will tell.

Even though I knew there would be elderly Russian immigrants in Nahariyya before we arrived, I am still shocked at how connected to them I have felt for the past couple days. From the moment they realized I spoke Russian, a language my grandma persistently  urged me to  preserve throughout my childhood, I noticed that their faces lit up. It was incredible to witness that even years after their immigration to the drastically different society of Nahariyya, these men were instantly exuberant about a seemingly small thing like speaking a common language. In fact, they were so excited to speak their mother tongue with an American that they were quick to call me their “adopted granddaughter” for the week. One of the elderly men, Boris, even gave me his hat to “protect my beautiful hair,” a really friendly and adorable act of affection towards a person he just met and knew almost nothing about. Tomorrow is our last day spending time with them and though our visit is brief, I will always remember them and I hope that they will smile when walk by the stairwells we painted side by side.

I also had a similar experience when we went to work with the children at the Mishol center. On the first day I was under the impression that everyone there only spoke Hebrew and there was an obvious language barrier. While I was trying to find someone to connect with, there was a Russian man that came up to me and said “you speak English?” I was excited to find a friend and we proceeded to have a conversation so that he could practice speaking English. It was an incredible experience for me because this man told me that he “doesn’t have anyone to work on the language with because people are too shy to speak in broken English” and so I felt really honored to help him out. Moments like these are what truly make this trip special to me

During our time in Israel, we’re working at one of the 22 JDC-supported Mishols throughout the country. The Mishol program operates in low-income neighborhoods with large immigrant populations. The program helps residents channel their cultural differences constructively, working on consensus issues such as improving municipal services and their neighborhood surroundings.

Our group is working with the Mishol in Nahariya. We are painting and refurbishing bomb shelters, painting a mural in the Mishol Center, and create a community garden. Check out our pictures from our work!

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We began this work day a little wary and unsure of what the task would entail. We had heard that these girls were “at-risk” but we had no briefing before arriving at the location. To make matters worse, we were dropped off a block away and spent ten minutes knocking on a different building! Thankfully, we got everything sorted out and soon found ourselves in front of the “Beit Cham” Nahariyya, which translates to the “warm house.” As we walked through the gate, we were greeted by a garden and beautiful mosaics on the benches and tables that emanated the warmth we hoped to experience when we walked into the little house. As we entered, we were immediately welcomed by a few girls wandering around, but they looked at us with intrigue and reservation. The head of the programming for the girls gave us a quick tour and a brief explanation of the purpose of the house; it is a refuge for young girls who have experienced different forms of trauma. While she did not go into much detail, she explained that the goal of the program is to provide counseling, art therapy, and other recreational activities after the school day.

After the introduction, we were anxious to join the girls working on a mosaic bench in the main room. They were definitely excited, but very shy at first. Luckily, they quickly opened up, informing us of their love for Justin Bieber, hopes to perfect their English, and dreams of growing up to sell candy… (seriously). Between the mix of English and Hebrew in air, everyone was excited and participating. Girls were circling around the room to meet all five of the volunteers and were obviously appreciative of our visit. Many times they asked why we were going home so soon and told us that we were cute and should move to Israel! We left after two hours reluctantly and looking forward to our return tomorrow.

To be honest, today was eye-opening. In two hours, we went from being nervous and unsure about if we could connect to these “at-risk” teens to realizing that these girls are not defined by their suffering and past experiences. These girls are truly remarkable for the progress they have made and the incredible warmth with which they welcomed complete strangers. They were absolutely hilarious, full of energy, and interested in the world around them. We feel that the work done at this “Beit Cham” is truly invaluable because it is preventative. By helping these girls cope and providing them with a support system, it helps guide them through the rough times and keeps them on the right path. To be a part of this process is humbling and fulfilling, and we are left wishing that we had more time to dedicate to the girls. We cannot wait to see how the volunteering goes tomorrow!

As we pass the green, fertile fields of the Sharon Plain in our shockingly pink bus, I cannot help but reflect on the journey our group has already completed. After more than seven hours of delayed flights, innumerable minutes sleeping in uncomfortable airport seats, and no less than two near-death airplane experiences, Hillel at UVa is finally in Israel, on our way to the coastal city of Nahariya. Suffice it to say that coming to Israel has not been the easy, air-conditioned escape we expected; we are sweaty, tired, and anxious to meet the city we will call home for the next week.

It is strange then that I have a strong feeling that our pre-Israel adventures will be an indelible memory of the entire trip. The time we spent complaining about Delta Skyteam, or playing cards on the airport floor, or hoping that we would even get to Israel at all, has only strengthened our excitement to make an impact in Israel with the limited time allotted. For me, this excitement can only be described as a bubbling in my chest, a raw energy that is hard to contain. It is a feeling reminiscent of that which I felt three years ago, when I was last in Israel, but deeper, stronger, and more impassioned.

Something special is in this country. In much the same way our delayed flight aroused excitement in me for this trip, this bus ride fills me with a happiness I cannot quantify. Like the dark, ominous storm clouds above us, I feel like I am standing at the precipice of some unexpressed purpose, my toes hanging off the edge.

Unfortunately, right now, I do not have the time or focus to ponder this thought anymore; our bus driver is pumping “Material Girl” on the radio, we are approaching Nahariya, and our Israel trip is officially underway. Until next time, Shalom!

- Ben Bissell