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Why and how we hope: Rabbi Debra Orenstein’s research in social science and Jewish work leads to online course

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Rabbi Debra Orenstein

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all

If there’s any time of year for hope, it should be now — it’s springtime, and every bud pushing itself open, every new leaf on every old tree, every extra minute of sunlight, and yes, every loudly chirping bird is all about the renewal of life.

But it doesn’t feel that way.

“Probably starting in the pandemic, I started to feel that hope was especially needed,” Rabbi Debra Orenstein, who leads Congregation B’nai Israel in Emerson, said.

She’ll lead a series of webinars on hope, starting on Wednesday, March 27. (See below.)

It’s often hard for many people to remember the emotions of that first covid spring, in 2020; the world was just a frightening, oddly timeless place, stalked by the novel coronavirus that was locking us in at home in tiny pods.

“During those first few weeks, I got six people from my community together,” Rabbi Orenstein said. “A social worker, a psychologist, a health coach — people with different orientation who all spoke about positivity during the pandemic. There was such a need for hope then. We were in such a bad state, feeling such uncertainty and negativity. We particularly need hope when things are bad or the future is unclear.” In other words, we most need hope during the times when it’s hardest to find.

So Rabbi Orenstein “went deep into both Jewish sources and the social sciences,” she said. “Since then, I’ve been delving deeply into hope as a topic.

Since then, arguably, things have gotten worse: the country seems to have fractured more than it’s healed since the pandemic ended; our divisive politics have widened and sharpened those divides; and then October 7 unleashed hatred, fear, and death.

Hope is in sharp demand but short supply right now.

That’s why Rabbi Orenstein is offering the webinar, based on the reading, consulting, workshops, and talks she’s been giving for the last few years.

“Even before October 7, I felt that times are so difficult, the threats are so big, that we have to cultivate hope or we will fall into denial and despair.”

How do we cultivate hope? “There are times when hope just comes to us — we’ve all had those experiences, when somebody reaches out to you at just the right time, or you get good news, or there are communal experiences that lift us up,” she said. “But hope also is a habit of mind and behavior that you can choose. It doesn’t require good times or bad times.”

Hope is both an emotion and action, Rabbi Orenstein continued. “I have worked to bring together my training in positive psychology and my training as a rabbi.” Positive psychology tells her that “when you have a feeling of hope, your heart lifts, your future is more optimistic and happier. When you are hopeful, you see opportunities and possibilities that you would have missed if you weren’t hopeful. That’s the emotional component.”

But it’s not all unicorns and fairy dust. “Positive psychology emphasizes action, goals, and pathways for hope,” she said.

From the Jewish side, “we know from the tragedies of Jewish history that there are times that there isn’t an action you can take that necessarily will change the current reality, or at best that it will change any time soon. Yet you can still hope for redemption. You can still hope for next year in Jerusalem. That hope comes from investing in a power greater than yourself.

“For many people, that power is God, but it can also be the power of community or of Jewish peoplehood. I think that religion gets this one more right than psychology does. Religion gives us the power of being able to wait with positive expectations, even when there is nothing that you can do. It is the power of gaining hope, or of borrowing hope, from that power greater than ourselves.

“I think that most religions offer that to the world, and Judaism does it in particular. I don’t know who said this, but someone has said that Judaism is an optimistic religion with a pessimistic history. We have in a sense the benefits of both.”

Rabbi Orenstein is doing that.

She was asked to give a talk on hope last November at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan on the Upper West Side. “Six months before, in the spring of 2023, they asked me to pick a topic. I said I’d speak about hope. The talk was scheduled for Election Day. ‘We don’t think you want to talk about hope then,’” she reported being told. “Yes, I do,” she answered.

“And then October 7 happened, and they called and asked if I wanted to change the topic. And I said, ‘No. We need hope more than ever now.’

“That’s how I started to talk about hope after October 7.”

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

The word “hope” is unappealing to some people, she acknowledged. “It sounds pie-in-the-sky, or like wishful thinking; people don’t like it because they want to guard themselves against disappointment,” she said. “It can sound passive.

“But it is necessary to separate false hope from genuine hope. Because the antipathy people have is to false hope, the version that says that I can crawl into bed, pull the covers over my head, and hope that someone else will do something. Because nobody likes to live in self-delusion.”

Rabbi Orenstein will “look at the way modern social science measures hope, and I will look at what positive psychology has missed but the Jewish tradition has understood.”

“Social science focuses on agency, which is a very important part of hope, which must be more than a good feeling about the future. It is the fuel that gives you the energy to make a better future.

“There is a lot of emphasis on goal setting and finding pathways. But there comes a point when you don’t see a way forward, when neither you nor your community can do anything more. Then you might feel that everything is hopeless. That you’re lost. But the Jewish tradition knows so much about continuing to hope in seemingly hopeless situations.

“In hospice, one of the questions that sometimes is asked of dying patients is ‘What are your goals?’ ‘What do you still hope for?’ People have lists, even if they have only weeks or days left. Still, often people feel that they have come to the end of their agency — and that’s where Jewish traditional, historical resilience comes in.”

The course is experiential, Rabbi Orenstein said. “So part of it is me teaching, but some is putting it into practice in real time. We do it together live on Zoom, and there also will be a recording available afterward. There will be a forum where people will see each other’s comments.

“There will be a lot of ways to connect. If they want, people can have a hope buddy, but that’s not required — not everyone is a buddy type. There are options and ways to connect, to give and get support.”

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

— Emily Dickinson

This course will be about real hope; “it’s not pabulum or Pollyanna,” Rabbi Orenstein said. “People need a sense of the possibility of a better future, and some ways to build toward it. They need a sense of allyship and partnership, to develop more inner resources and outer support. People can be reminded that even the worst day has a best moment; even the most difficult times have hope shot through them. Finding these pieces and savoring them is not denying the pain that you’re in. We will talk about ways to do that every week.

“We’ll have what I call a hope twist. There’s poetry, art, music, novels, photographs, different ways of feeling hope, and of developing your own personal toolkit, filled with what works for you.”

One of those resources is humor, Rabbi Orenstein said. “The theologian Harvey Cox called laughter hope’s last weapon.”

She’ll provide an armory of those and other weapons in the study and practice of hope.

Who: Rabbi Debra Orenstein

What: Teaches a six-session course on “Real Hope”

Where: Online, both on Zoom and in other forums

When: Wednesday, March 27, April 3 and 17, May 1, 8, and 15, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EST

How much: Suggested donation $180

To learn more and register: Go to
www.goodpeoplefund.org/good-people-learn or call (973) 761-0580.

An Israeli Charity for Palestinians Grapples With Oct. 7 Attacks

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Yael Noy, left, chief executive of Road to Recovery, walking with Adam Abu al-Rob, a 6-year-old Palestinian eye-cancer patient, and his father Mamoun at a checkpoint between Israel and the West Bank, on their way to an Israeli hospital last year.Credit…Jack Guez/Agence France-Presse

Nearly every week for a decade, Iri Kassel picked up sick Palestinian children at Israel’s Erez border crossing with Gaza and drove them with their guardians to Israeli hospitals for treatment.

But on Oct. 7, the crossing was raided by Palestinian militants who blasted the passport control booths and magnetic scanners as they stormed into southern Israel.

The deadly attacks plunged Israel into all-out war in Gaza and disrupted the work of Road to Recovery, the Israeli nonprofit organization that Mr. Kassel volunteers for, which has ferried more than 1,500 Palestinian patients a year to Israeli hospitals.

Several of the group’s volunteers died in the Hamas-led attack, including Vivian Silver, a prominent peace activist who was killed in her home at Kibbutz Be’eri in southern Israel. Others were taken hostage, like Oded and Yocheved Lifshitz, a couple in their eighties from Nir Oz, a kibbutz near the Gaza border. Dozens more lost loved ones or were evacuated from their homes near Gaza.

The organization’s staff and volunteer drivers were devastated. “It was a blow to the stomach,” Mr. Kassel said. Even for those who survived the attacks, he said, there was “an almost physical pain.”

Road to Recovery was founded in 2010 by Yuval Roth, a peace activist whose brother had been kidnapped and killed nearly 20 years earlier by Hamas militants. The group helps Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank access medical treatment in Israel, where health services are among the most advanced in the region.

In order to be treated in Israel, Palestinian families have to navigate several obstacles. The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Health must agree to absorb the cost of the treatment. Then, families have had to obtain permission from Hamas to exit Gaza, and from Israel to cross the border.

Once they are inside Israel, the cost of traveling to a hospital can be prohibitive for many Palestinian families. That is where Road to Recovery comes in.

Yael Noy, the organization’s chief executive, said its work is as much about humanitarian aid as it is about fostering personal connections between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Palestinians see Israelis as soldiers at checkpoints, and many Israelis don’t see Palestinians at all,” she said in an interview. “These rides are an opportunity for a clean, direct human encounter.”

The Erez border crossing this month. The crossing was raided by Palestinian militants on Oct. 7.Credit…Maja Hitij/Getty Images

Mr. Kassel, 77, a retired educator, said he rarely discussed politics directly with Palestinians he picked up, although the conflict surfaced in numerous ways. Once, he drove a family to a hospital during a flare-up in hostilities between Israel and Hamas. “I found myself explaining what they should do in case sirens go off, signaling Hamas rocket fire,” he said. Later, after he had driven them back to Gaza, he heard from the family that their house had been damaged by an Israeli attack.

Some of the drives pass in silence. Conversations are often stilted because of the language barrier. Still, volunteers say they have formed relationships with Palestinian families.

The morning after the Oct. 7 attacks, as gunfights still raged in towns near Gaza, volunteers showed up at the crossing with the West Bank to pick up sick Palestinian children. The group’s work has continued in the West Bank, even as Israel has all but banned crossings from Gaza.

Some volunteer drivers say that, since the attacks, friends have called them naïve or radical for continuing to help Palestinians. The group says donations have slowed, as even Israelis who support its work prioritize giving to other initiatives.

Mr. Kassel said that while he admired friends who continued to volunteer, it was now too hard for him to do so. “I know that people in Gaza are enduring huge suffering: their houses and economy are ruined, they’ve become refugees again, medical care is almost nonexistent,” he said. “But emotionally,” he added, “I feel angry and hurt — even betrayed.”

Still, Ms. Noy said, the group has signed up some new volunteers. In the West Bank, it is back to running its usual number of daily rides. Several volunteers who were evacuated from their homes near Gaza have changed their routes, and now drive from their temporary hotel accommodations to pick up Palestinian patients at a crossing near Bethlehem.

“It’s a way of holding on to hope,” Ms. Noy said. “When we help Palestinians heal, we also heal ourselves.”

‘We can’t stop’ – the Israeli woman still helping sick Palestinians

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Yael Noy (left) drives sick Palestinians, mostly children, across checkpoints to hospital appointments in Israel

Yael Noy doesn’t wear military fatigues, but she describes herself as being in battle right now, after the Hamas assault on 7 October.

“I’m fighting to be good,” she tells me. “I’m fighting to stay moral when both sides are in such terrible pain. I’m fighting to be the same person I was before.”

Yael heads a charity called Road to Recovery, a group of Israeli volunteers who drive sick Palestinians – mostly children – from checkpoints in the occupied West Bank and Gaza to hospital appointments in Israel.

Or did.

The 1,000 or so volunteers can no longer take patients from Gaza, which is governed by Hamas. And four of them are dead – murdered as Palestinian gunmen stormed through their kibbutzim in southern Israel.

They include Vivian Silver, a renowned peace activist; Adi Dagan, who Yael describes as “funny” and always ready to step in and ferry patients at short notice in his big car; Tammy Suchman, a much-loved grandmother; and Eli Or-Gad, who loved talking about poetry.

Four other volunteers lost close family members on 7 October.

About 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas attack on Israel. Since then, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry says more than 17,177 people have been killed in the Israeli offensive which followed.

Yael lives in northern Israel, but her parents are from kibbutz Alumim, one of the southern communities which was attacked – and they cowered as the assault unfolded, hour after terrifying hour.

Two of her nephews have been fighting in Gaza, in Israel’s military response.

Yael Noy’s parents were in one of the kibbutzim attacked by Hamas on October 7 and are now displaced

In the immediate aftermath of 7 October, Yael says she was so shaken that she could barely breathe.

“Something was broken in my heart and I said that I would never talk to people in Gaza again,” she tells me.

But after a few days, she decided that she couldn’t allow the atrocities to change her.

She and most of the Road to Recovery volunteers have continued to drive Palestinians from the West Bank to hospitals in Israel for cancer treatment, organ transplants and kidney dialysis. As soon as she can, she says she’ll go and collect patients from Gaza again.

Yael refuses to dehumanise them, or equate them with Hamas, which is classed as a terrorist organisation in the UK and other countries.

“Like us they are victims of Hamas, so I think we should keep on helping them, because it’s not their fault,” she tells me over the phone.

“We can’t refuse to help a child with cancer. Our neighbours need help, so we need to help them.”

She worries for the families she knows in Gaza, with winter approaching and so many bombed houses now uninhabitable.

The parent of a 6-year-old child, who’d had an organ transplant, texted one of the Road to Recovery volunteers saying simply: “We are okay. We are going to die here.”

After one week of truce, bombing over Gaza resumed on Friday

Yael is also desperately concerned for two Road to Recovery volunteers, Oded Lifschitz and Chaim Peri, who are still being held hostage by Hamas.

Emotionally, she feels like she’s being torn apart. She has uncles and cousins who are adamantly opposed to what she’s doing and accuse her of helping Hamas.

And it’s not just family members who disapprove.

“When I’m driving with Palestinians through checkpoints in the West Bank, soldiers have asked me how I can do what I’m doing,” she tells me. “Other people ask the same question.”

“It’s dangerous now to even talk about the suffering of the kids in Gaza – people look at me like I’m the enemy,” she says, through sobs. “But I’m not doing it for the Palestinians, I’m doing it because I want to be proud to be Israeli. I believe that whether you’re an Israeli or a Palestinian, a Jew or an Arab, people are people.”

Some Palestinian families have reached out to find out how she is. But it’s harder than ever now for those few people swimming against the tide by trying to bridge the divide between Israelis and Palestinians.

“Even people on the left say that we should flatten Gaza. Both sides have become more and more radicalised,” Yael says.

“I really don’t know what will happen in the future. But I know that both of us will still live here, so we must find a solution.”

Since 7 October, some Road to Recovery volunteers have dropped out of driving altogether or decided to focus on taking medicines to displaced Israelis instead, while the war lasts.

But other volunteers have stepped in, to make sure that sick Palestinians from the West Bank still get to appointments that are saving their lives.

Yael says the charity will need support from the outside world to keep going because donations from within Israel have virtually stopped.

But she is sure that, when it becomes possible, Road to Recovery will be collecting child patients from Gaza again – hoping that they will all have survived.

“It may be hard. But we can’t stop,” she says. “It’s my mission and I have to do it.”

At 19, I Was Forced To Marry A Stranger And Was Sexually Assaulted Every Month For 12 Years

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The author on her wedding day. “I was a 19-year-old bride, in the world’s ugliest turtleneck gown and the world’s ugliest wig,” she writes.Courtesy of Fraidy Reiss

Note: The following essay contains descriptions of sexual assault and abuse.

They sent me off to be raped, with a party and a tube of K-Y Jelly.

The lubricant was to reduce the intense physical pain they explained I would endure while being penetrated by a stranger-turned-husband, without foreplay, without consent. Every month. Until death do us part.

The party — a low-budget wedding in 1995 at a Brooklyn venue aptly nicknamed Armpit Terrace — was to distract me from the horrific reality of my forced marriage to the stranger.

“Mazel tov!” they told me, beaming.

In the reclusive Orthodox Jewish community in New York City where I grew up, choices about whether, when and whom I would marry did not belong to me. At home and at the all-girls religious school I attended, where I learned to cook and sew and keep house, I was groomed from early childhood to expect a teen marriage to a stranger my family and a matchmaker would choose for me.

I was allowed to meet the stranger several times before my engagement, but I was not allowed to be alone with him nor to have any physical contact with him. I was a clueless 19-year-old who had never been allowed to “talk to a boy,” and suddenly I was given a matter of hours, over a period of a few weeks, to answer my family and his family and the matchmaker and everyone in the community standing there, tapping their feet, looking at their watches, waiting for me to tell them: You’ll marry this man we chose for you, right?

“No” was never really an option.

During my six-week engagement, I still was not allowed to be alone with the groom nor to have any physical contact with him, which left more time for me to begin experiencing the myriad other abuses that come with a forced marriage.

First, a virginity exam. The groom’s rabbi sent me to an Orthodox Jewish gynecologist, where I was instructed to disrobe, get on the examination table and put my feet in the stirrups. The doctor inserted her gloved fingers into my vagina and confirmed that my hymen was intact.

“Mazel tov!” she told me, beaming.

I attended one-on-one bridal classes, where the curriculum centered on the requirement that I have unprotected sex with my husband on my wedding night and on a monthly basis thereafter. A lifetime of rape.

Yes, the rapes probably would hurt, the bridal class teacher explained. Hence the K-Y Jelly.

“Mazel tov!” she told me, beaming.

My stranger-turned-husband turned out to be violent and abusive. I learned this exactly one week after our wedding, when he became enraged because he had woken up late, and he punched his fist through the wall — hard enough to leave a sizable hole.

His first threat to kill me came only days later. Soon these threats became more frequent, specific and gruesome. He was brimming with creative ideas for how he would end my life, and he took the time to describe them to me in vivid detail. A lifetime of fear.

Yet I was trapped.

“Me as 19-year-old newlywed, in clothing four sizes too big,” the author writes.Courtesy of Fraidy Reiss

My forced marital sex was carefully timed each month for when I was ovulating. The reason for this was obvious: My first child was born 11 months after my wedding, and soon I had a second child.

I love my daughters, but I did not consent to having them. A lifetime of forced parenthood.

This denial of sexual and reproductive rights was not the only shackle preventing me from leaving my marriage. My husband did not allow me to have my own bank account or credit card, and I was taught that, under Orthodox Jewish law, if my husband allowed me to work, any money I earned belonged to him. A lifetime of domestic servitude and financial dependence.

I had limited legal rights too. Under Orthodox Jewish law, only a man can grant a divorce. I, as a woman, did not have the legal right to end my own marriage. A lifetime of being locked in unwanted wedlock.

One escape route for me would have been to move back in with my family as an agunah, a “chained woman” who is bound to a husband who refuses her a divorce. The life of an agunah is brutal; she is shamed for her powerlessness, blamed for her failed marriage and treated as an outcast.

But even this dreadful escape route was closed to me, because my family refused to take me back in. A lifetime of betrayal.

So I remained trapped in my abusive forced marriage. In accordance with Orthodox Jewish law, I was considered “unclean” every time I menstruated. While I was “unclean,” I was prohibited from having physical contact with my husband, sleeping in the same bed as him, handing him anything or undressing or singing in front of him. A lifetime of shame.

Once my period ended, I needed to count seven “clean” days without any menstrual blood, during which time the rules against physical contact continued. To make sure I stayed “clean” for the full seven days, I was required to wear white panties and, twice a day, to insert a white cloth into my vagina, swish it around and inspect it in sunlight to make sure it did not have blood spots. If I found questionable marks on my panties and could not tell whether they were blood, the rabbi would inspect them and give his pronouncement.

And the rabbi would keep my panties. A lifetime of extreme patriarchy.

Each month, after the seven “clean” days, I was forced to strip naked in front of an attendant who watched me immerse in a mikvah, or a ritual bath of rainwater, which frequently left me with a yeast infection and always left me shaking uncontrollably. A lifetime of violation.

All I wanted, every time I left the mikvah, was to take a hot shower and scrub the violation off me. That was prohibited. Instead I was required to go home and have nonconsensual sex with the man who had spent the day describing to me in graphic detail how he was going to murder me. The man who would not let me close the door when I used the bathroom, because “what was I hiding from him in there?”

No matter. I had to get on the bed and spread my legs and forget what had happened to me at the mikvah and ignore the pain while I waited for him to finish, and I had to remind myself how lucky I was that he usually was done after only three or four thrusts. A lifetime straight out of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Forced marriage — in which one or both parties do not give full, free consent — is recognized globally as a form of modern slavery. My story is far from unique: Around the world, 22 million people were in a forced marriage as of 2021.

“Me as a 20-year-old mom, in the world’s second-ugliest wig,” the author writes.Courtesy of Fraidy Reiss

Yet, even though the United States acknowledges that forced marriage is a human rights abuse, few laws and policies are in place to prevent or punish it, and the nation has paid such scant attention to this issue that we do not even know how often forced marriage happens here.

What’s more, child marriage remains legal in most U.S. states, even though it is recognized as a form of forced marriage and a human rights abuse. Some 300,000 children were married in the U.S. between 2000 and 2018, mostly girls wed to adult men. At least 60,000 marriages occurred at an age or with a spousal age difference that should have been considered a sex crime.

My husband would regularly search through my personal belongings in front of me, including in the pockets of the clothing in my closet and in my bag of tampons under the bathroom sink. A lifetime of subjugation. When I finally realized at age 27 that I was the only person who would help me leave my abusive forced marriage alive and I decided I would secretly save up cash for my escape, I found the only safe hiding place in the house: a box of Whole Grain Total in the pantry.

I saved more than $40,000 in that cereal box over the next five years.

During those years I also defied my community and did something no one in my family had ever done: I became a college student. My husband forbade me from attending classes. I informed him, calmly, that nothing he did to me would stop me from getting my education.

And I did something no one I knew had ever done: I threw out the limp, ugly wig I was required to wear as a married woman to cover my own thick, healthy hair. I walked outside with my uncovered head held high — the equivalent, in that community, of walking outside naked.

My family retaliated immediately by shunning me. One of my sisters notified me that my family was planning to sit shiva — or observe the Jewish mourning ritual for me — as if I had literally died. I have had almost no contact with my family since that day. A lifetime of being dead.

But I graduated from Rutgers University (as commencement speaker, the equivalent of valedictorian) at age 32, and I escaped my abusive forced marriage on my own, with my daughters and my box of Total. I fled the Orthodox Jewish community too, and I rebuilt my life.

The author leading a chain-in protest in Boston against child marriage in 2021.Photo by Matilde Simas

In 2011 I founded a nonprofit organization, Unchained At Last, to combat forced and child marriage in the U.S. through direct services and systems change.

The U.S. is one of 193 countries that agree forced and child marriage are harmful practices, particularly for women and girls, and have promised to eliminate these abuses by year 2030 to help achieve gender equality, under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Yet the U.S. is not on track to keep its promise.

I refuse to accept this. Not after I escaped my lifetime of oppression.

We at Unchained are fighting back by providing crucial wraparound services to a long-ignored population: those who are fleeing an existing or impending forced marriage in the U.S. To date we have provided legal and social services, always for free, to nearly 1,000 individuals, to help give them a lifetime of dignity, safety and hope.

We also started a national movement to end child marriage. In the last few years, our groundbreaking research and relentless advocacy have allowed us to help change the law in 10 U.S. states to ban child marriage — a stunning victory for the 7.5 million girls who live in those 10 states — and we are working on the other 40.

A lifetime of preventing other lifetimes of rape.

“Mazel tov!” I now tell myself, beaming, with each triumphant step closer to ending forced and child marriage in the U.S.

Fraidy Reiss is a forced marriage survivor turned activist. She is the founder and executive director of Unchained At Last, a survivor-led nonprofit organization working to end forced and child marriage in the U.S. through direct services and systems change. Fraidy’s research and writing on forced and child marriage have been published extensively, making her one of the nation’s foremost experts on these abuses. She has been featured in books (including as one of the titular women in Hillary and Chelsea Clinton’s “The Book of Gutsy Women”), films and countless television, radio and print news stories.

New initiatives look to help Jewish teens connect to themselves and their community before becoming adults

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Olivia Bakal (left) volunteers at a wheelchair basketball clinic for Angel City Sports in Los Angeles as a part of her bat mitzvah project.

When Elie Klein was 13, he knew that giving back meaningfully and making a mark on the community was part of becoming a Jewish adult; this translated to donating about a tenth of his gift money to charity, he told eJP. But today’s “mitzvah project model” is more effective as an educational tool, he said, “because it highlights personalization and promotes advocacy and action.”

Now the North American director of development at ADI, an organization that cares for and empowers Israelis with disabilities, Klein listed some of the ADI-based projects that b’nai mitzvah have participated in: twinning with an ADI resident of a similar age, running bake sales, bike-a-thons and other small-scale fundraising projects to help the organization secure equipment, therapies and opportunities for those who benefit from ADI’s services, adding that these experiences will enable young leaders to “choose their own adventures.”

As Jewish youth learn the cantillation for their Torah portions, worry about the notes of the haftarah and navigate the social pressures of the parties, they are also giving back to their communities as part of their b’nai mitzvah training, raising funds and awareness for favorite causes or new initiatives, learning new skills and developing their passions.

The mitzvah project has even been in the pop culture spotlight recently: “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” which debuted on Netflix in August and is still a subject of conversation in the Jewish community, featured a throughline of protagonist Stacy’s search for a mitzvah project that spoke to her. The film portrays the mitzvah project as a one-off event, more like a single good deed. Stacy considers making friendship bracelets for dogs or volunteering at a retirement home (where her crush just happens to regularly visit his grandmother). But Rabbi Rebecca, Stacy’s quirky, tough-love-wielding Hebrew school teacher, tells her that “the sooner you do your mitzvah, the sooner you’ll find things falling into place.”

“Mitzvah projects are the norm in hundreds of Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, and Renewal communities, but very few synagogues dictate the exact nature of the mitzvah project,” Rabbi Daniel Brenner, vice president of education at Moving Traditions, told eJP. He explained that the “project” designation encouraged students to do something beyond writing a check to charity, and gave it additional visibility by making it a part of the d’var torah or b’nai mitzvah speech.

Rabbi Jason Miller, who has been officiating private and customized bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies for more than two decades, told eJewishPhilanthropy that the mitzvah project can be a space to be creative and discover new passions. When in-person volunteering was not possible during the pandemic for health reasons, Miller said, two students whose b’nai mitzvah were a month apart joined forces on their mitzvah project: they volunteered to cook food for parents staying at a Ronald McDonald House in Ann Arbor, Mich., whose children were in treatment at a nearby hospital.

“The problem was that neither of these boys had ever cooked before,” Miller said. “They were determined, though, and spent hours learning how to cook by watching YouTube videos and then made breakfast on several occasions for dozens of parents at the Ronald McDonald House. These two boys loved the mitzvah project so much and they both love to cook now. They just never realized it was a passion.”

Elana Beame, who spearheads the mitzvah project program at Tzedek America, recalled a student in Southern California who was extremely passionate about food waste. “He learned how grocery stores and markets will throw away produce no longer at selling standards. This produce was still completely edible. He took the initiative to go to his local grocery stores, markets and farms and started rescuing the produce that would be thrown away and instead donated them to local food banks,” Beame said. “He used rescued produce to create table centerpieces at his celebration, which were then donated to a food bank immediately following the party.”

This week, Tzedek America founder Avram Mandell spoke with a student who has the Torah portion of Bo, which talks about the plague of darkness. “We talked about vulnerable populations and the connection to feeling vulnerable during the plague of darkness, and she connected darkness to depression and no one wants to feel that kind of sadness,” Mandell said, adding that this framework “made her feel more inspired to work with the vulnerable population she chose.”

Todd Shotz, founder of b’nai mitzvah prep company Hebrew Helpers and the Mitzvah Learning Fund, which provides grants for Jewish learning opportunities, said that his organization’s students are encouraged to pick an ongoing project, to “use this moment as a launching pad for a life dedicated to tikkun olam.”

“Our mentors frame it as the student putting their new role as a fully responsible member of the community into action,” he told eJP. Hebrew Helpers also asks its students — now more than 1,200 b’nai mitzvah trained — to go beyond fundraising and actively volunteer for their chosen cause if possible. “It is always engaging to a student if the charitable cause is centered around an interest or passion of theirs,” Shotz said, recalling students who knitted baby blankets for the local children’s hospital; made and gathered dresses for Dress For Success; and made dog toys and raised money for the Israel Guide Dog Center.

Many Jewish programs preparing students for their b’nai mitzvah require that they complete their community service commitment by the date of the synagogue service, as if the project is just another to-do on the b’nai mitzvah checklist, which may not encourage longer-term engagement with the cause in question. And some families do opt out if volunteering is not required.

At Congregation Beth El in Bethesda, Md., Robin Finkelstein, b’nai mitzvah coordinator and hazzan assistant, said her synagogue strongly encourages students to participate in mitzvah projects, but does not require it — of this year’s 26 b’nai mitzvah students only 13 have reported mitzvah projects, “definitely a drop from last year,” she said. This year’s projects included helping new immigrants, cooking meals at an interfaith center, collecting toys for a hospital pediatric unit, raising money for The Trevor Project, supporting an education nonprofit for kids with disabilities and park cleanups.

Making mitzvah matches

From 2000-2013, longtime Jewish educator Sheri Gropper had a thematically appropriate 13-year run helming “Mitzvah Mania” fair, where families would receive a packet of materials, listing various nonprofits grouped by areas of interest with contact information and ideas for helping them. The fair would draw more than 130 families of pre- bar/bat mitzvah students per year, she told eJP.

Today’s technology enables a different approach, but today’s students and their parents still need help to find their mitzvah project match: enter Tzedek America’s Mitzvah Project Central, a password-protected database of partner organizations that have volunteer opportunities available for b’nai mitzvah-aged students. The opportunities are tagged by topic and shown on a map (some of them are marked as opportunities that can be done from anywhere).

“If a student comes to us and is unsure of what social justice topic to focus on, we explore the different options together, or we look at their Torah portion for themes that can be connected to a social justice topic,” Beame said. “Students tend to want to focus on organizations that are in their backyard so they can volunteer in a hands-on way. We encourage the students to look at all of the organizations we partner with, regardless of location, to get inspired and learn more about what different regions focus on.”

Also helping teens find meaningful mitzvah matches, the Atlanta-based Creating Connected Communities (CCC) started as a bat mitzvah project 25 years ago, when Amy (Sacks) Zeide organized a small holiday party for a local shelter.

“The theft of kids’ Christmas presents from a local Atlanta agency inspired Amy to use bat mitzvah gift money to create Amy’s Holiday Party, an annual event that brings local kids together for a fun day of games and music, and to distribute holiday gifts their families might not be able to afford,” Naomi Eisenberger, the executive director of Good People Fund, told eJP. “This annual party is a key activity for CCC teen participants,” she added.

Today, CCC is an independent 501(c)(3) and builds community, provides Jewish teen leadership training and guides young teens, synagogues and other groups in creating meaningful mitzvah projects. A division of the organization, Amy’s Holiday Party, pays tribute to the original project, but now serves thousands of children and families in need year-round, and engages hundreds of teens in hands-on volunteer work.

“As a community, we want giving to become a central part of our young leaders’ identities, and the best way to achieve this is by plugging into what they are already passionate about,” Klein said. “We empower them to use what they love to rally their communities around the cause and help us make a profound impact for disability care and inclusion. In addition to providing the perfect recipe for self-motivation, this method also ensures the greatest possible satisfaction, as teens are excited to be the ones running the show and imparting knowledge and values to the adults in their lives.”

By recycling equipment, this nonprofit puts youth sports in reach

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Max Levitt founded Leveling the Playing Field after his experience as a student assistant for the Syracuse football team. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)

Fifteen years ago, Max Levitt was a freshman at Syracuse University who chose to major in sports management for one reason: It had the word “sports” in it. Students were told that the key to getting a post-college job in the sports industry was to work wherever they could in the sports industry. Levitt became a student assistant in the football team’s equipment room.

There, every August, the equipment staff would arrive before the players and begin the process of replacing the old with the new.

“We were literally taking millions of dollars’ worth of product — footballs, gloves, cleats, socks, everything you could possibly imagine — and we were literally throwing that stuff into dumpsters to clear out space,” Levitt said. “ … I was like: ‘This doesn’t make any sense. Why are we doing this?’ ”

On Wednesday night in Washington, Levitt will join all manner of friends, colleagues and donors to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of Leveling the Playing Field, the nonprofit he founded after college largely based on his experience there. Levitt figured there were food banks and diaper banks. There are centers where those in need could get donated furniture or clothes.

Leveling the Playing Field has a 5,500-square-foot warehouse in Silver Spring filled with old sports equipment. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)

“Those types of organizations exist in every major market, even mid-markets, across the country,” Levitt said. “They’re really effective at what they do. And I thought, ‘Gosh, why can’t we do the same thing for the youth sports industry?’ ”

Levitt has done it and is doing it, and his organization is worth watching. The concept is simple: There is a growing and obvious inequity in the burgeoning world of youth sports, preventing underserved communities from opportunities. Addressing it takes vision and work. For the people who benefit, Leveling the Playing Field is making an immediate impact.

“I went to this warehouse, and they had this endless amount of different supplies,” said Brian Cross, a physical education teacher at Ida B. Wells Middle School in the District. “They had golf equipment, so I was like, ‘Ooh, I’m going to have a golfing unit.’ They had baseballs, softballs, gloves. ‘Ooh, I’m going to have a baseball and softball unit.’ They had tennis balls. ‘I’m going to create that.’

“I was like a kid in a candy store. With all this equipment, the kids were able to experience all sorts of different sports.”

To this point, Levitt said Leveling the Playing Field has distributed somewhere between $13 million and $14 million of equipment among 2,500 to 3,000 schools, rec programs and leagues. There are plans for much more.

But before exploring where the organization is going, it helps to understand where it started. Levitt grew up as a sports-obsessed kid in a Bethesda family with a charitable bent. Small acts of kindness were baked into his upbringing. His mother would make sandwiches, and they would take them to homeless people. That trains the mind to think a certain way.

So by the time Levitt was back home working summer internships — with Washington’s NFL team, with the minor league Bowie Baysox, with Montgomery County’s department of recreation — his experience at Syracuse had shown him excess, and his experience at home showed him inefficiency and need.

“I was always poking around the equipment side of these different jobs and noticed — whether it was youth sports at the elementary school level all the way up to college or professional or minor league baseball — there was just a huge amount of sports equipment that was either being thrown away or just sitting in sheds, garages or closets collecting dust,” he said. “At this point I was like: ‘Wow, there’s an opportunity here. There’s a huge kind of untapped potential here on the secondary market with sports equipment.’ ”

Leveling the Playing Field has distributed somewhere between $13 million and $14 million of equipment among 2,500 to 3,000 schools, rec programs and leagues. (Photos by Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)

Levitt graduated from Syracuse in 2011 and took a job in sales, making cold calls. But to scratch his volunteering itch, he tapped into that sports equipment experience. After failing to land leftover goods from the major collegiate athletic programs locally, he realized, “This is a credibility issue.” To gain credibility, he needed to show some record of success. So he bought a dozen plastic bins, put some crude labeling on them and dropped them at churches and synagogues and the like.

“The amount of stuff that would come in from just these little tubs being put out at a church or community center was insane,” Levitt said.

Levitt began storing equipment in his parents’ basement. He started receiving emails from people wanting to donate, to volunteer, to collect equipment on their own. D.C. United invited him to run a collection drive at one of its games. Youth leagues reached out. Some drives were big enough that he had to rent trucks. The Bethesda basement was becoming too small. In two years, Levitt realized: “This is no longer feasible for me to do as a side project.”

It is no longer a side project. Leveling the Playing Field has an office in the District, fills a 5,500-square-foot warehouse in Silver Spring and has branched out to Baltimore and Philadelphia with openings coming in Buffalo and Columbus, Ohio. It has 14 full-time employees. This year alone, Levitt expects the operation to distribute $4 million worth of sports equipment.

“During covid, when the students were at home, they didn’t really have access to materials,” said Miriam Kenyon, the director of health and physical education for D.C. Public Schools. “That’s where Leveling the Playing Field really jumped in to provide additional support. … To be able to see the students doing stuff, even though it was virtual and in their own space, that was really, really good. It kind of circled back to exactly what their name is.”

Bryan Trueblood, athletic director of Bladensburg High, carries away equipment he has picked out at the Leveling the Playing Field warehouse in Silver Spring. (Craig Hudson for The Washington Post)

“The beautiful thing about it is: It’s instant,” said Cross, the P.E. teacher. “It’s not like I have to put in an order and wait.”

On Wednesday night at Hook Hall on Georgia Avenue NW, Levitt and his community will celebrate the first decade of making that impact with a gala. But 10 years in makes you think: What about 10 years from now?

“Best-case scenario, we’d like to be in every major city across the country,” Levitt said. “I would love to be in the South, the West Coast, the Midwest. Name any city that has a couple major sports teams, and I think we should be in every one of those.”

Levitt and his team are tackling an issue you might not realize is a problem until you think of it like he did. Considering how far they have come from a dozen tubs and an overstuffed basement in Montgomery County, don’t bet against them.