The Avodah Award of our Jewish Federation of Greater MetroWest NJ, named Avodah for the Hebrew word for work, worship and service, recognizes individuals who have helped promote interdepartmental cooperation, in furtherance of our collective goal.
Innovation
The Mitzvah of Travel – Tzeh U-Lemad!
Tzeh U-Lemad = Go out and Learn – see what the people are doing!
Rabbinic Adage
This was addressed to those concerned with Jewish Law, suggesting they observe the people so the ritual practice would be realistic. Today, it would be a command to extend our experiential knowledge of those around the world created in God’s Image!
- Iceland
- Cuba
- Antarctica
- Africa
Pick a time, a theme, chances are there is a Jewish Connection
“Pick a time: choose a place: select a mood: conceive an idea: the chances are certain that Jewish history has encompassed it, that some form of Judaism embodied it. The rationalistic tradition has had its Philos, and its Maimonides: the mystical yearning has produced its Isaac Lurias: the simple religious yearnings of the downtrodden and the illiterates have their Baal Shem Tobs: the austere rigor of the law has had its Joseph Karos and its Vilna Gaons. Poetry, drama, art, historiography, and every variety of literature have found a welcome in some form of Judaism, in some period of Jewish history. Orthodoxy and heresy, compassion and cruelty, creativity and stagnation, innovation and tradition – indeed the total range of human experience and emotion has manifested itself in Judaism.” 33
Ellis Rivkin
The Futurist
The task of the futurist is not to predict, but to try to envision achievable desirable futures and to formulate strategies by which we might achieve such futures. We are not speaking about deterministic or inevitable futures but rather about desirable futures determined by us. A futurist is, therefore, a long-term social strategist, trying to construct a future-oriented social science based on a rigorous critique of the history that has created our present as well as idealized visions of human capabilities. It is a value-laden science. It does not deal with what will be, it deals with what should be or could be. The task of the Jewish futurist is to state the self-evident truths that (1) the Jews are part of world developments whether they like it or not and that (2) the future is more important than the past. We cannot live in the past, but we will either live or die in the future. We cannot change the past, but we can create ate a better future.
Tsvi (Howard) Bisk;Moshe Dror. Futurizing the Jews: Alternative Futures for Meaningful Jewish Existence in the 21st Century (Kindle Locations 86-91). Kindle Edition.
Some developments that must guide Jewish thinking in the next several decades are telecommunications, the creation of a world market and a world cultural market, ecological concerns, and the creation of a unified European Community from the Atlantic to the Urals by the end of the second decade of this century.
Tsvi (Howard) Bisk; Moshe Dror. Futurizing the Jews: Alternative Futures for Meaningful Jewish Existence in the 21st Century (Kindle Locations 99-100). Kindle Edition.