Returning the Favor: Everyday (and Not-So-Everyday) Meaningful Acts of Kindness

By RABBI SUSAN FENDRICK

In the program for our March wedding, a multi-page document which I entitled “A Verbose Yet Helpful Guide To Our Wedding,” (I believe in truth in advertising), my husband Ben and I let people know that we’d be taking the floral centerpieces to the nursing home just down the road at the end of the day, and invited them to come along.

This plan apparently struck our best man, Neil, as symbolic of who we are and how we met—through a personal ad on the Internet. (Stick with me for a minute.) In his toast to us, he took note of a connection between (on one hand) the way that the online world can be used either for, in his word, “skeevy” purposes or lofty ones like finding true love, and (on the other hand) our taking the wedding flowers—what most people would throw away—so that they might instead bring beauty and joy to those who see too little of both. Skeevy or lofty, refuse or beauty, it all depends on what you do with it.

Among our other wedding guests were many non-Jewish friends—most of whom are affirmatively Christian rather than generically non-religious Americans, including old family friends who are devoted members of their Catholic church. They later told us that they spoke about the flowers in their Lent reflection group, in which they reflected with others about living out their spirituality.

Sweet, touching—that and more. But of course, while we’re happy for all this positive regard, and did hope to highlight similar possibilities for other people, we didn’t do it for the attention. We did it for the seniors in the nursing home, and for ourselves.

“The photographers should be here for THIS,” said my cousin Ralph, as we started pulling the 30-some floral arrangements out of our cars. My new husband and I were still “dressed”—he in his tux, me in my wedding gown—but Ralph and his sons, my brother and sister-in-law and nephews, as well as Ben’s daughters and another family, were already in casual clothes. As we filled the center’s lobby, a passing stranger asked, inexplicably, “Wow, who got married?” Everybody glanced at me—covered in non-froufy-yet-clearly-bridal off-white lace from head to toe—and laughed as we piled into 2 elevators, and rode up to one of the residential floors.

In some rooms, the residents were asleep; we imagined them waking up to flowers, a surprise from a stranger. But mostly we preferred to deliver them in person. That way, we could meet the residents, receive their greeting, allow them what was obviously the pleasure of wishing us “mazel tov!,” and brighten their day for a moment just by being a happy couple in full wedding regalia, surrounded by children.

The faces of the residents—too seldom at this point in their lives attending lifecycle celebrations, seeing two beloveds dance together, visiting with little ones—rewarded us with their genuine pleasure and appreciation.

“A wedding is a test of ethics,” said a recently married friend in the months of our engagement. We tried to remember this—in our tzedakah decisions, and simply in erring on the side of doing the right thing whenever we could. We made the appropriate arrangements to have leftover food donated. We set aside contributions to Mazon: A Jewish Response to Hunger, to the Jewish Funds for Justice, to the Foundation to Sustain the Righteous (helping elderly Christian rescuers from the Holocaust era), and to Lambda Legal Defense Fund (a kind of voluntary tax on our heterosexual marriage in support of legalizing same-sex unions).

But in some ways, the flowers meant the most to me. Maybe because I so enjoy having fresh blooms in my house whenever possible, they represented a kind of quotidian focus on social action—the possibility for acts of beauty and kindness in the ordinary, the everyday. But here, the “ordinary” thing would have been for the flowers to simply be disposed of at the end of the day, and so in the spirit of our wedding, I’ve issued a challenge to myself: to be mindful of the not-so-obvious social action possibilities in every day life as well.

We learn this in Pirkei Avot, the mishnaic tractate which traces the history of Jewish tradition and offers many summaries of core life principles: “On three things the world stands: the study of Torah, the worship of God [through prayer and ritual], and gemilut hasadim.” That last phrase is usually translated as “acts of lovingkindness.” But it might be better rendered as “paying back [many acts of] covenantal love.”

The meaningful acts of kindness we do for each other are not just little niceties to make us feel good about ourselves. They are no less than one of the three pillars on which the world stands. Even more, they represent a kind of payback—a recognition that we are blessed with much and that it is not only “nice” but mandatory to turn around and give, to work for the good of others.

The covenantal love that joins us to God also joins us to each other. And if we want stability and well-being for our world—not to mention the loftier goals of redemption and healing—we’ve got to constantly round out intellectual and spiritual growth with regular actions, small and grand, that change lives.