What I have learned thus far is that we all can and must keep learning all the time. We learn from experience, we learn from others – often those whom we least imagine to be our teachers. We learn from whatever we can do to get outside ourselves – to spend time in a different culture, asking others who experience the world very differently to tell us how to deliberately choose to do things that are hard to do.
It is intentional that the American Jewish World Service places young people in service programs in the developing world where they will be outside themselves with people whose lives and culture are very different, but whose values are worth learning.
And I learned to live a maxim articulated by a hero, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who wrote, “In a free society where terrible wrongs exist, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
I learned that there are wrongs in our communities, in our country and in the world; that we cannot allow these wrongs to pass unnoticed; that we cannot retreat to the convenience of being overwhelmed; that there are always actions we can take to assume responsibility, address the problem, and make a difference in the world.
Ruth Messinger is the former president of the American Jewish World Service.
www.ajws.org
