Are You Doing A - OK?

I have a soft spot for youthful exuberance. I love to see people get passionate about things. Those of you who’ve been reading my column might understand why, as I’ve been known to stir things up myself. Of course my passion is mixed with the cynicism that can only come with having lived long enough to have some hindsight. While middle age may not be too late to show fervor for a good cause it might come with a little more apprehension. But I’ve found a cause we can all rally around and while I have misgivings as to the long term success of such a noble endeavor (because frankly I don’t think we’re as good as we think we are), I can always hope.

A new neighbor of mine, a young working mother, Leora Mishaan, came up with AOK –Acts of Kindness. To me the concept of AOK sounds like a cross between the movie “Pay it Forward” and those auto insurance commercials that show a chain of good deeds being done by one person to the next. Leora’s goal of course is to get us to be better people by doing act of kindness. Talk to Leora for five minutes and I guarantee you that you will not have met a person with a more bright outlook and with more optimism than hers. Her sweetness permeates every word that she speaks and she has a charisma that won’t let up. While I cannot predict the future, Leora strikes me as the type of person who won’t let a little matter like say, real life, ever extinguish her assurance that everything can and will be just great. And she has reason for the fortitude, she expected a handful of people at the AOK kickoff event, she got a few hundred.

I’m not that surprised. Besides Leora being a dynamo, this neighborhood is chock full of charitable organizations, good neighbors, welcoming hosts, concerned citizens and a plethora of programs where one can volunteer to do some social good. Leora, urges us to take it a step further, it’s not enough to cut our checks or donate food to the food bank, or to do our once a month delivery of Tomchei Shabbos – we also have to be good people. We have to hold the door for others, smile at passerby, say hello to strangers on the street or let someone in ahead of us and so on.

The antonym of kindness is cruelty according to dictionary.com, but I don’t think that lacking kindness makes you cruel. We are all very busy people, preoccupied with our own lives and sometimes just too overwhelmed to notice that we missed an opportunity to do some good. Leora is looking to tap into that part of us that finds it easy to excuse our apathy. In a conversation with her I told her that despite all the great things done in the Five Towns, we still have a deserved reputation for some arrogance and that it’s not just act of kindness that we need but also a conscious effort not be annoying and to improve things like, obeying traffic laws. I gave her an example; there is an exit out of the CVS parking lot onto

Washington Avenue

, it is directly across from Bank of America. I pass by it every day on my way home from the LIRR. Directly across the street is a huge sign that instructs that there is NO LEFT TURN. If you need to make a left onto Washington from that lot there is another exit that allows it but this one clearly states that you can’t, if you’ve seen the area you understand why. Nine times out of ten that I observe people leaving through that exit, I see them attempting the left hand turn. My friend Leora points out to me that this stems from people being busy and wrapped up in their own lives, they easily forget or don’t pay attention or she says perhaps there is some emergency that requires them taking a short cut. I find her judging people only favorably to be sweet but likely naïve, we make the left turn there because we want to. We double park on

Central Avenue

because we want to. We make U-turns when it’s busy because we want to. We drive and use our cell phones because we want to. We honk with impatience because we want to. Consciously changing that is much more difficult than increasing our act of kindness because it requires behavior modification – not easy on any level.

I suppose that behavior modification should start at the top, from our leaders. Look, I’ve never seen one of our rabbis making a wild U-turn on

Central Avenue

but how many times have rabbis in our community chosen the language of confrontation when there has been disagreement? I sit on the executive board of a communal organization that helps families get through the financial crisis, at a meeting with some rabbis to form a rabbinic advisory group, we were told by one rabbi that if a certain Conservative rabbi sat in the group he would not. Is he doing AOK? Not in my book. Or how about the rabbi, who wrote an article in a community newspaper after the community wide Yom Hashoah program and said that he is “disturbed that Yom Hashoah commemorations have been hijacked by non religious speakers and writers of novels?” Is he doing AOK? What about a rabbi sitting on the Vaad Hakashrus while also being a principal in a business that is certified by the same Vaad? Is he doing AOK? I can go on but I think you get my point.

We are the products of our own environment and we need to change from the top down. Leora, G-d bless her is worried about the bottom up and overall we want so badly to follow her lead. If we want her great work to succeed, we need our leaders remind us through WORDS and ACTION that kindness is a state of mind as well as benevolence. If we show tolerance to all those around us, ESPECIALLY those we disagree with, programs like AOK will be with us forever. If we just continue to just pay lip service to kindness all that good won’t be worth the ink on the checks we write.