It’s not every day you see a toddler volunteering. Bethesda Jewish Congregation’s Mitzvah Day allowed kids as young as one year old to color and decorate bookmarks for local children.
The Jan. 25 morning of service united people of all ages, Jewish and non-Jewish, in doing good for the community. The 80 participants packed 200 snack bags for Bethesda Help, made 50 chew toys for rescue dogs, wrote birthday cards, designed bookmarks to accompany donated books and learned about facets of environmental justice.
Mitzvah Day concluded with a half-hour Shabbat service to talk about the many different ways to display Jewish values.
“Because we did this on a Saturday, we had this whole idea of praying with our hands and feet and making a different definition of Shabbat,” Geryl Baer, the director at BJC, said. “We were action-minded first, and then we concluded the program with our spiritual aspect; we had a service.”
This notion of “praying with one’s feet” originates from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who participated in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches alongside Martin Luther King Jr., said Amy Kertesz, BJC’s program and communications director.
Intended to honor King’s legacy, this event marked BJC’s first Mitzvah Day; the congregation has “piggybacked” off of the Jewish Community Relations Council and Jewish Federation of Greater Washington’s Good Deeds days in the past.
Leading up to Mitzvah Day, community members collected 50 to 60 new and gently used books to donate to the National Center for Children and Families, The Children’s Inn at NIH and some Montgomery County public schools.
They also donated towels, sheets and pet food to the Montgomery County Humane Society.
Lay leaders and volunteers at BJC chose to benefit these organizations and causes, Baer said: “We really opened it up to our community.”
Mitzvah Day began as a family program out of BJC’s religious school, and Baer wanted to expand the initiative into a congregation-wide effort.
“It was a really terrific way of getting the different cohorts of our congregation involved and really making this an intergenerational program,” Baer said.
Kertesz, who publicized the event, said, “In our marketing and communications, we made it clear that the Mitzvah Day was not just the religious school participating but it also was open to the community as a whole.”
Kertesz posted the event listing on Montgomery County Volunteer Center’s website, which drew teenagers from outside the Bethesda Jewish community to join in and lend a hand.
“It was a wonderful way to expose them to the values of Judaism,” Kertesz said of the teens. “And, of course, they got their [Student Service Learning] hours.”
Baer said the collaborative aspect also helped connect young families who may have recently joined BJC with its more veteran congregants, allowing them to spend time doing common tasks.
“People worked together, they made new friends, they built connections,” Baer said.
She said participants walked away with smiles on their faces after the morning of volunteering. The staff at BJC hope to make Mitzvah Day into an annual tradition.
“There were many congregants that came up to me afterwards to say that, especially when at times our world feels tumultuous, to be grounded in work, to do good and to be able to teach their children that they can ground themselves in doing tikkun olam and doing tzedakah was really powerful to them,” Baer said.
Kertesz and Baer spoke to the importance of strengthening community bonds both inside and outside BJC.
“Tikkun olam — doing community service [and] social action — is a strong Jewish value, but these are values that are shared by many people,” Baer said. “Although we want to be proud Jews doing tikkun olam because Judaism teaches us to do good work for the community, we’re exclusively working for our community. All of the organizations that we did projects for are for the greater community, not specifically Jewish.”
One of BJC’s values is its openness to interfaith and multifaith relations, Baer said. The BJC community works closely with the neighboring Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church community to coordinate interfaith programs and services; BJC even has permanent rental space in the church building.
BJC also shares space with a mosque that uses BJC’s sanctuary on Fridays, Kertesz said.
“We know that we are living within the larger community as well,” Baer added.
“It’s an interesting space,” Kertesz said. “A lot of our programs we generally open to the wider community to take advantage of the community that we have here in the building.”
She added that hands-on projects allow for more meaningful connection compared to monetary donations.
“It’s one thing to donate to … a dog shelter, and it’s another thing to be able to make those dog toys and know that they’re going to be used, [which] you don’t get from handing over your checkbook,” Kertesz said.
That is why Kertesz and Baer set out to organize a community event dedicated to doing good, whether a volunteer is one or 80 years old.
“We wanted to have a variety of projects that fit each person’s interest and stage of life,” Baer said. “We really wanted to have a project for everybody.”
