The Jewish month of Elul is a time for reflection – a moment in the Jewish calendar when we are invited to slow down, look inward and consider where we have been and where we hope to go in the year ahead.
As I have been reflecting over the couple of weeks, I found myself thinking about something a little unexpected: the stories we tell.
For the past three years, the JCC team and I have been writing the JCC State of Mind. When we began, I thought of it primarily as a way to share updates about what was happening across our JCC community. But over time, I have come to realize that it is really about something much more powerful: storytelling.
Every day at the JCC, there are moments of discovery, kindness and impact. A child learns something new. An older adult finds a new sense of purpose. A teenager discovers their voice. A family finds community. A member reaches a personal fitness goal. Two organizations come together to make our community stronger. So much of what makes the JCC meaningful happens in these small, everyday moments, and most of us aren’t there to see them all.
That is why storytelling matters. It allows us to bring those moments to life for our entire community and reminds us that the JCC is not simply a collection of programs, buildings and services. It is a collection of people and their stories.
In many ways, the JCC has been supporting the art of storytelling for years through our work with PJ Library, which is locally funded through the support of the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. Created in 2005 by philanthropist Harold Grinspoon and modeled after Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, PJ Library leverages the power of books and storytelling to help families with children ages 0–12 connect with Jewish values, traditions, culture and joyful Jewish identity through reading. (Click HERE to register for PJ Library.)
And this year, through our High Holidays of Hope, we are once again leaning into the power of stories, books and listening.
On the afternoon of September 13, we will host a Rosh Hashanah Book of Life Book Sort at both our Squirrel Hill and South Hills locations. We will collect and sort gently used books that will then be distributed to houses of worship throughout the Greater Pittsburgh region. The initiative is part of Pittsburgh’s Won’t You Be a Reader literacy campaign, which brings together organizations including Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the Grable Foundation, Scholastic, Kidsburgh and others around a shared goal: improving children’s literacy and building a lifelong love of reading.
Then, on Monday afternoon, September 21, we will gather at the Squirrel Hill JCC for Bearing Witness: Hope and Resilience Through Listening. Together, we will engage in the mitzvah of actively listening and deeply understanding other people’s lived experiences – not simply to hear another person’s story, but to listen with the intention of gaining perspective, building understanding and finding hope.
There is something deeply Jewish about all of this. We are a people of the book. Our tradition has placed extraordinary value on reading, questioning, interpretation, learning and debate. We don’t simply preserve our stories; we return to them, wrestle with them, reinterpret them and allow them to shape the way we understand ourselves and the world around us.
As we move through Elul and toward the High Holidays, I find myself grateful for the stories that have been shared with me over the past year and for the many stories that are still being written at the JCC every day.
The JCC State of Mind is one small way of telling some of those stories. But the real story of the JCC is being written all around us – in our classrooms, pools, gyms, camps, programs, hallways and gathering spaces, and in the relationships that form within them.
May this season give us the time to reflect on our own stories, the curiosity to listen to the stories of others, and the courage to keep writing a story of hope together.
Wishing you and your families a Shabbat shalom,
Jason
