Hello Friends!

Welcome to our very first post on Medium.com! Each time we have a social action project we’ll be posting about our experiences right here—so check back often! Until then, below you will find Rabbi Scheldt’s most recent bulletin article that outlines all the exciting new developments for Social Action at TBZ! Enjoy!

August is a time of preparing. Sales for school supplies begin (it is, after all, National Back to School Month). Harvests from vegetable gardens are often underway (and don’t forget to gather seeds for next year!). And those of us in the Jewish world are already hard at work preparing for the High Holy Days. Indeed, August is a time of transition. It is a month that still allows us to enjoy many of the fruits of summer, but also calls upon us to prepare for the ever approaching autumn.

In our preparations and our transitions there is always a mix of emotion. To be sure there is some stress and anxiety around getting prepared for the school year—there is always so much to do! And especially here in Buffalo, it is never pleasant to think about bidding farewell to warm weather. But it is also a time to anticipate new beginnings and fresh starts. Next month, we will honor and celebrate our High Holy Days which directly offer our spiritual selves and our communal self the opportunity to renew and refresh. This month, however, as we prepare and transition, we have the opportunity to renew and refresh in a different way—by making the world a better place.

When we work and strive to make the world a better place, with just a little mindfulness, we begin to open ourselves up to growing and becoming better people. By engaging in mindful social action, we not only create a better world, but we make ourselves better as well!

Month by month, over the summer, we have featured a different way to get involved and make the world a better place. In June we showed our support for the LGBT community and began our Kulanu initiative. In July, we partnered with the Grassroots Garden at the Food Bank of Western New York to cultivate vegetable gardens and help grow food for those in need. And now, this month, we are launching a wonderful new aspect of social action at TBZ. We are making it simpler and easier than ever to find and connect with people and ways to make the world a better place. Making use of our new website, we have added a clearing house section to the social action portion of tbz.org. Starting right now, you are fully able to log on to find volunteer opportunities, projects, and initiatives that you can take part in to make the world a better place. And what is even more exciting, is that if you would like to start a new social action project or initiative, or if you would like some help with a project you have already begun, our new “Social Action at TBZ” Facebook group is a space for you to share and grow your ideas (and learn about even more!)! You can also keep up-to-date on projects as they happen in real time via Twitter (@SocialActionTBZ) and read easily digestible (i.e. brief) articles about our social action projects on Medium.com (at medium.com/@SocialActionTBZ). Each of these new resources are fully optimized for both your home computer and your mobile devices (and of course, if the digital world isn’t for you, you can always pick up the phone and give us a call too!).

It is our hope that these new resources will enable and empower all of us to roll up our sleeves, get active, make this world a better place, and improve ourselves in the process!