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Reflections on Volunteering

I am in awe of my children.

For example, my oldest, Avigayil, volunteers as a counselor in our community Teen Advice and Support Center. One evening a week, for years now, she unlocks the door of the center to high school students who come, because they need a place to come to. It's just a room, really, with couches, a few tables and chairs, a coffee pot and some board games. But for some of these kids, it's a place to talk, to get talked to, to feel at home, to feel the structure they don't get or don't want to get in school or at home. Avigayil doesn't thrust rigid programming or moralizing at them. She's just Avigayil. And her modesty, her straightforwardness, her religious way of life, her busy schedule at university, and most important-her complete acceptance of other people, makes her the perfect role model for some of these teens who have turned against authority figures, their faith, any attempt at education.

Another example? Leora and Atara are very involved in Bnei Akiva, the national youth movement for religiously observant teenagers and recently were involved in something that both scared me and moved me. The movement had organized a weekend for its members from all over the country. In Sderot! At a time when the residents of Sderot were fleeing their homes to other parts of the country, in order to escape the Kassam rockets falling daily in their own backyards, my girls were packing to spend Shabbat there. On Saturday each group of teens went knocking at doors, talking to the elderly who never get out anymore, who live in fear every time the siren went off. They gave out snacks to the children and called them down to the streets where they performed cheery little skits for their entertainment. In the afternoon, the hundreds of teens marched through the streets, singing and dancing, showing the Sderot heroes that the country hadn't forgotten them. People were hanging out of their windows, standing on their balconies, waving at this parade of support from their anonymous friends.

One example happened a few weeks ago and is so fresh in my mind that I need to tell you about it. Last year my twenty year old daughter Ahuva, while busy with her National Service, was invited by a friend to take part in a weekend with an organization called Chaverimmeaning "Friends", and since then she has been hooked drawn into a world that I myself never allowed myself to be part of, a world that, as she says "gives my soul the air it needs to

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