Rabbi Ron Symons: The Moral Responsibility of Being a Neighbor

Rabbi Ron Symons is the Director of Jewish Life at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh, as well as the Director of the Center for Loving Kindness and Civic Engagement (CFLK), which was established in August 2017 to strategically counter the distressing rhetoric of public discourse and to strengthen the fabric of the community by amplifying the long-held values of ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ and ‘Do not stand idle while your neighbor bleeds’ while redefining ‘neighbor’ from a geographic term to a moral concept. CFLK’s goals are to: break down the geographic, cultural, economic, and racial neighborhood divides in order to build community connectivity; ignite people of good will to move to action; create safe spaces for Pittsburgh police officers and spiritual leaders to build relationships, seeing each other as human beings; and to embolden neighbors to talk to each other through their different political partisan affiliations.

What is community?

One of the foundations of the work that we do at the Center for Loving Kindness comes from a Peter Block book, “Community: The Structure of Belonging,” one of the first books I read when I began my work at the JCC. The quote from this book reads: “Belonging can also be thought of as a longing to be. Being is our capacity to find our deeper purpose in all that we do. It is the capacity to be present and to discover our authenticity, and whole selves. This is often thought of as an individual capacity, but it’s also a community capacity. Community is the container within which our longing to be is fulfilled. Without the connectedness of a community, we will continue to choose not to be.”

I don’t want to be in relationship with people to show off the thousands of people that are my “friends” on Facebook, or to walk into a meeting and pump hands with everyone there. I want to be in relationship with people because that’s what it’s all about.

There is a line in the Hebrew Bible in the book of Exodus, that speaks from the perspective of God talking to Moses about building the tabernacle. It goes: “Asu li mikdash v’shachanti b’tocham.” The first part of this phrase means “let them build me a sanctuary so that I may dwell.” You might think that the line would finish “let them build me a sanctuary so that I may dwell in it.” But it’s not. It’s “let them build me a sanctuary so that I may dwell among them.”

In community we need safe spaces where it’s okay to be in some tension. We need those spaces so that we can experience each other in the fullness of community, which is one of the messiest places to be. It’s so hard to do. But being in community itself is an act of being.

I began by understanding the word neighbor as a noun. I now also understand it as a verb, thanks to my buddy, Reverend Liddy Barlow. Every time we would teach about loving your neighbor as yourself she would bring up the Good Samaritan story. Jesus’s question in that piece of Christian scripture is: who was neighboring best?

I think when we’re defining neighbor as a moral concept instead of a geographic term, embedded in that is action, that you have to do something about being a good neighbor. Neighboring is about having a moral responsibility to each other.

How can we foster these strong and beautiful communities? What types of actions make up “neighboring”?

One of the terms that we came across as we were organizing the Center for Loving Kindness long before we knew how crucial it would be was the term “resilient community.” A resilient community is a community that has everything in place that it needs, so that when something happens, no matter how big or how small, how many or few people it affects, whether it’s a natural catastrophe or a manmade human catastrophe, whether it’s financial or it’s moral, the community can bounce back.

One of the aspects of a resilient community is connecting the ideas of “love your neighbor” and “do not remain idle while your neighbor bleeds.” These two concepts together are the touchstones of the CFLK and part of what constitutes good neighboring. It has always been the idea that those are both important, but it is often a lot easier to talk about something as opposed to doing something about it. During our first CFLK event following the events of Charlottesville, we had 150 attendees who were able to talk to one another, and we were able to include the media to spread the message further. But we also had a statement online that explained “here’s how we stand up against hate,” and we had over 200 spiritual leaders sign it. It wasn’t ever about let’s just talk about being a neighbor. It was about being neighborly towards people.

Since our inception, we’ve kept on trying to figure out how to engage UPstanders. We came to realize our unique place is to find people who are our partners and neighbors in the moral concept of neighbor and follow their lead on what they really need and want. That doesn’t mean we’re going to be passively waiting, but we really wait for there to be a need that identifies itself that we think people will want to stand up and do something about.

I think it was fortuitous that the first thing we needed to do was quite simple—calling people in the Hill District and saying, “I want to help you schedule your vaccine.” In contrast to the way that being anonymous online sometimes gives people the chance to be disgusting, being anonymous on the phone for our UPstander community can open doors and allow for even more kindness and vulnerability.

Another one of my go-to quotes is from “The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging,” by Charles Vogl: “Communities are created when at least two people begin to feel concerned for each other’s welfare. If others join this tiny caring flame, the community fire grows. This is as true for neighbors as for global activists, co-workers or even competitors taking on a big challenge. We are more than the sum of our individual lights.”