I recently led a group of students from the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto to the small mountain community of Franklin, W. Va., where we spent a week volunteering with Habitat for Humanity.
Working alongside some of the poorest of an impoverished community, we helped renovate trailers and homes for those living in substandard housing. The trip to the community of Franklin, where 20 per cent of homes are without running water or electricity, proved to be an eye-opening experience for our students, exposing them to the harsh realities of poverty faced by too many in our world.
My team worked on renovating a trailer. Seeing the temporary nature of the structure and the cramped and dingy quarters was an education in itself for us.
Our main task was to remodel the trailer to meet the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act as, in the coming months, the elderly owner would lose the use of his legs to diabetes. Along with lessons on how to tear down walls, remove and replace flooring, install a toilet, and use a hammer, saw and drill, we learned about the triple threat of poverty, malnutrition and inaccessible health care.
The lessons of the trip extend far beyond the volunteer work. Our first task upon arriving in Franklin was to kasher the kitchen and then to unpack the endless boxes of pots, pans and dishes we had brought with us. Through careful planning, we had determined what food we would need to bring with us, and with the help of the supermarket manager who had scoured the store looking for the kosher symbols we had faxed him, what we could buy locally. For many students, these lessons in keeping a kosher kitchen were first-time experiences.
It was also the first time that many students were responsible for cooking and serving their own meals and cleaning up. While cooking for 40 is certainly different than preparing the average family meal, every student took his or her turn in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, scrambling eggs and cleaning dishes. One parent sent me an e-mail after the trip, telling me that her daughter, after realizing how much work goes into cooking, has started to help prepare dinner at home.
Even before our large, red coach bus thundered into town, declaring our presence, many of the locals knew about the group of Jews from Canada who were coming to volunteer.
A few weeks before we left Toronto, I received a call from Pastor Craig Richter. He told me that many of his parishioners had never met a Jew, and he was hoping that we might find a way to connect our communities. On Thursday afternoons during Lent, the community comes together for a luncheon and so, during our week in Franklin, our students catered a kosher lunch for the local churches and we shared the meal and stories of their lives.
While we were preparing for the trip, many people asked me why we had to travel to West Virginia when issues of homelessness are so prevalent in our own community. It is true that there is much work to be done here at home, and I hope that the trip will serve as a catalyst for our students to engage in more volunteer work.
Often, however, it is the group experience that is the pivotal piece of education. We could teach about Israel without a trip to Israel, about keeping kosher without a kitchen, or about Shabbat during the week. Living these experiences, however, adds a dimension of learning that cannot be articulated in the sterile setting of a classroom.
On that subject, writer and activist Jane Jacobs once said, “That is why we have cooking classes and cooking demonstrations, as well as cookbooks. That is why we have apprenticeships, internships, student tours and on-the-job training, as well as manuals and textbooks.”
I could teach about volunteerism, tikkun olam and chesed in Toronto, but travelling to West Virginia brought the experience alive, gave it a context and a sense of purpose.