The World is Bigger than Me:
I’ve always been moved by the commercials about abused animals and starving children. The images are so heart-wrenching, and I want to look away, but I can’t. I’m sucked into the message about a world so much bigger than me, filled with cruelty and suffering.
As a child and teen I ran many service projects in an attempt to make a difference, and do my part to help heal the world. I collected luggage for foster children. I ran food drives and fundraisers. I helped organize a senior-senior prom with a local nursing home. Yet the time I felt I made the biggest impact was with a project so small that to an outsider, it would most likely seem insignificant.
Like some of you do or will, I went to Pittsford Sutherland High School. I went to the old high school, before the construction, and by my senior year the building was literally falling down around us. Midway through the fall semester the door on the last remaining stall in the senior hallway girls’ bathroom broke. We told our teachers. We told the principal. But nothing changed. We tried to explain that we knew they were going to build a new bathroom the following year, but it was only October, and we needed a working bathroom now. Perhaps more importantly, our pregnant teacher needed a working bathroom that didn’t involve walking up a full flight of stairs. But nothing changed.
One day after school I bought a huge piece of hot pink fabric with white outlines of Minnie Mouse. I threw the fabric over a metal bar that ran along the top of all the stalls, and secured it in place with Velcro so that it made a curtain that could pull back and forth. I came back to school the next morning fully expecting the curtain to have been taken down, but that curtain stayed up the entire year, a daily reminder of the power of simple mitzvot, and of not waiting for the world to change, but rather of making the change.
To me, Tikun Olam Day is about hanging pink curtains. It’s about remembering that while it’s hard to save starving children from the comfort of our cabins and tents, we can make a difference right here at camp. We can repair bridges, paint murals, clean facilities, and maintain gardens. We can hang the pink curtains, and make those changes, both small and big, that too often get overlooked during the chaos of the busy camp schedule, but that if done with care can change camp, and thus our piece of the world for the better, long into the future.
