Mitzvot
Mitzvah - it's a Jewish word to express any kind of human kindness. Every week in school, C gets a shape and we have to write down a mitzvah she did that week. Then on Friday at the Shabbat time, one of her teachers reads each child's mitzvah shape and puts it up on the tree on the wall. Each shape is a "leaf". At the end of the year, the tree will be filled with leaves of all the mitzvot that all the kids have done all year. It's really a beautiful thing. The mitzvah's have been anything from helping to walk the dogs to making a thank you picture for her uncle to doing something without being asked. She hasn't quite learned to use and manipulate her mitzvah to point out something she didn't do and twist it into something good. For example, many of her classmates have siblings. It's been reported from one of the moms that her child said "Look Mom, I didn't hit my big brother. That's a mitzvah." Hey, they're learning. But I digress.I did a little mitzvah yesterday. As you may know, I play in a flute choir. For the past 10+ years, along with our holiday concert do what's now been dubbed as the "Southland Tour". We go to a place in downtown's skid row called "Lamp Village." From their website, they say "Lamp Community was founded with the conviction that, when given the proper services, supports, and opportunities, homeless people living with a severe mental illness are fully capable of achieving housing stability, participating productively in the community, and dramatically improving their overall health." So, as a group, we go down there and do our holiday concert for them. We bring them holiday music and then end with traditional carols for everyone to sing along. Yesterday, we had a nice turn out and they all seemed to really enjoy and appreciate the music. That's what's it's all about. We try to bring them some warm wishes and good cheer and they really enjoyed our little concert, asked lots of questions about all our different flutes and were very thankful to all of us.
After Lamp Village, we went to the nursing home of the mother of one of our members. This is the 3rd facility we've performed at for S's mom. Mrs. C will be 98 years old next month and while she's now in a wheelchair, she definitely is all there and looks terrific. God bless her! It was nice to perform for this group of people at the nursing home as well. From the sound of it, this was the first time a group came in to perform and bring some joy and music like this. We were all too happy to perform and it sounded like they enjoyed it as well.
I don't feel like I do enough sometimes physically. I'm happy to financially donate to causes that I believe in, and do often, but sometimes you need to actually do something. That's what I don't do enough of, I will admit. But yesterday was a really nice day. I felt honored to help bring a little joy and happiness to everyone. And their appreciation and kind words to all of us really gave more back to me than I feel like I gave to them. So that was my "mitzvah shape" for the week. I hope I can do more.
posted by Juls @ 10:21 PM
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