JFSE facilitates Rootedness – Not Retreat

By Danielle Dolgoy

It is hard to pay attention these days without feeling overwhelmed.

Every hour seems to bring another crisis, another outrage, another conflict demanding our emotional energy. Our phones pull us endlessly outward: to global politics, social division, economic anxiety, war, antisemitism, and the relentless churn of information. The world feels loud, chaotic, and increasingly fragile.

And yet, in the midst of all this noise, there is a quieter truth unfolding much closer to home.

There are seniors in our own community choosing between groceries and medication. Families quietly carrying impossible caregiving burdens. People navigating isolation, grief, mental health challenges, disability, poverty, and uncertainty… often without anyone realizing how close to the edge they are.

When we look too far outward for too long, we risk forgetting who is standing right in front of us.

Jewish tradition has never asked us to disengage from the world. Quite the opposite. We are called toward responsibility. Toward compassion. Toward action.

At the heart of that call is chesed: loving care, kindness embodied through relationship and responsibility to one another. Chesed is not abstract. It is deeply practical. It asks: Who needs me? What can I do? How do I show up?

And from chesed flows g’milut chasadim: acts of lovingkindness. Not simply feeling compassion, but expressing it. Judaism does not ask us merely to know our values. We are compelled to live them.

This is the deeper meaning of tikun olam.

Too often, we speak about repairing the world as though it exists somewhere far away, in headlines and global movements beyond our reach. But tikun olam also lives in ordinary acts: delivering meals, visiting elders, supporting families in crisis, helping someone access counselling, making sure a neighbour is not alone.

Repair happens through acts both large and small.

This is not retreat from the world. It is rootedness within it.

For more than 70 years, Jewish Family Services Edmonton has been quietly doing this work in our community. Often without fanfare. Often without enough resources. And always with the understanding that strong communities are not built in moments of crisis alone. Strong communities are built through consistent care, relationship, and responsibility.

Today, the need is growing rapidly.

Demand for counselling, seniors supports, food security programs is increasing.  More Jewish and Hebrew-speaking newcomers are arriving and needing assistance, career counselling, and connection to our community. There are real and invisible costs to participating in community life can be real barriers for people. Across the board, the need for these services continues to climb. More people are asking for help than ever before. At the same time, social service organizations throughout Edmonton and beyond are stretched thin, trying to meet rising needs in an increasingly uncertain world.

This moment asks something of us.

Not panic. Not despair. Not performative outrage.

It asks us to refocus.

Jewish tradition gives us powerful language for this work. Tzedek speaks to justice: the vision of a fairer and more compassionate world. But tzedakah is the mechanism through which we move toward that vision. It is the act of giving. The choice to contribute. The recognition that justice is not built through intention alone.

A just world is built brick by brick, action by action, choice by choice.

By whether vulnerable people are seen before they fall through the cracks. By whether institutions of care are sustained before they reach crisis. By whether we are willing to invest in one another not only emotionally, but materially.

Jewish communities have survived and endured for generations because we understood this instinctively. We built systems of mutual care. We supported one another through hardship. We recognized that communal responsibility was not optional philanthropy, it was part of covenantal life.

That lesson feels especially urgent now.

In times of instability, there is a temptation to become untethered… to live entirely in reaction to events elsewhere, to exhaustion, to fear. But our tradition calls us back to each other. Back to chesed. Back to responsibility. Back to presence.

The work of repairing the world begins by strengthening the ground beneath our own feet.

Rootedness, not retreat.

And there has never been a more important time to choose it.

Danielle Dolgoy is Executive Director of Jewish Family Services Edmonton.