How Do Your Measure a Year?

Alexander Jewish Family Service Friends –

Today marks the one year anniversary of when we began to work from home. While I was thinking about what this means, the song “Seasons of Love” from Rent started playing in my head. The song asks the question, “How do you measure a year?”

The song suggests many answers including daylights, sunsets, cups of coffee, inches, miles, laughter and strife but – in the end – decides to measure the year in love given and received. You can listen to the song now if you wish:

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Recently, I have been preparing a number of reports that summarize what we have been doing as an agency for the last year and I have been struck by the quantity and quality of services we have provided as well as the creativity that was demonstrated in finding ways to rapidly adapt our service models to respond to the needs of working remotely. Just a few of these amazing solutions include:

Providing tablets to Holocaust survivors to help alleviate social isolation and keep them connected to family, friends and caregivers
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Providing work boxes for our Celebration Company employees so they could continue to work and be productive while at home and providing over 10,000 hours of virtual support and programming until they could safely return to work
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Transforming forms and assessments for counseling clients to electronic versions to all clients to fill them out from their phone, tablet or computer
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Implementing a Community Needs Survey to assess how our Behavioral and Mental Health Services department could best meet the needs of the community
Transforming our employment program so that we could meet the needs of clients facing job loss as a result of the pandemic
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Transforming our home safety assessment process to a virtual one so that we could continue to meet the needs of seniors at risk and help them age safely at home
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Transforming our annual meeting into a virtual event that was a huge success
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Reinventing ReelAbilities so that not only did it continue, but it opened the festival up to new and larger audiences through the creative and innovative virtual programming

Mother Theresa famously said:

“Prayer in action is love,
Love in action is service.”

By that measure, and so many others, the year that we have been working from home has been a year of action, a year of service and a one that has been marked by seasons of love.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (z”l) echoes this idea when he said:

“What is chessed? It is usually translated as ‘kindness’ but is also means ‘love’ – not love as emotion or passion, but love expressed as deed. ”

Thank you to each of you for the role that you played in making this a year of impact, a year of compassion, a year of service to our community and a year where our love was expressed in our actions and our deeds.

Best wishes,

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