Rabbi Julia Neuberger: To volunteer is to embrace of a wider community

From the Royal Society of Arts Aves lecture on volunteering, given in London

What is important for people to understand is that there is no very clear distinction made in Jewish thought between volunteering by giving your time and volunteering by giving your cash. There is a very, very strong tradition of volunteering; you do it because in some sense it gives you brownie points on high. It is what you are expected to do as a righteous and pious person.

But there is a complication, which is the extent to which, within our own set of communities, our activity of doing deeds of loving-kindness is done for ourselves – our own communities – or whether the activity extends more widely.

The truth of it is that, traditionally, Jewish communities are taught about establishing all sorts of social-justice functions; deeds of loving-kindness function for the community. You volunteered, but you volunteered for the benefit of other people within your own community; you looked after the orphans in your own community; you looked after the dowries for the girls in your own community.

If you look at the Jewish community, it is very strong and still involved in its own common support organisations. We have homes for the elderly, we have nursing homes, we have support for people with mental illness (though we are less good on mental illness). We have traditionally had a Jewish temple shelter for people who have come as asylum-seekers and refugees – in recent years that has been for asylum-seekers who are not Jewish, but over a century or more it had been for people who were Jewish.

But, increasingly those people who feel they have a duty towards the Jewish community are beginning to feel they have a duty to a wider community. I think the trick is going to be, if you like, in focusing that sense of obligation that we already have towards our own community to many more of them. It will involve pulling together and trying, as faith groups together, to get people to volunteer for inter-faith activity which will be for the benefit of the wider society.

I think we are on the cusp and I think it is going to be very difficult. But, if volunteering by faith means anything, my view is that it has to mean volunteering for the sake of all our faiths, and not just the one.