Thinking Out of the Box

AT11 p.m. on Thursday night, 21 Shevat, the phone on which Mrs. Devorah Markowitz was monitoring all incoming messages to the Har Nof email list from her hospital bed fell out of her hand. Until then, she had steadfastly refused to allow her daughter-in-law to take over for her. Soon thereafter she was intubated, and before Shabbos she was gone.

With the help of her husband Gershon, the neighborhood handyman for the first 30 years of Har Nof’s existence, Debbie was a one-woman chesed operation. Twenty-two years ago, she established the Har Nof email list, which has grown to 3,000 members. And 17 years ago, she became the national address for anyone who had lost or found a pair of tefillin.

In all that she did, she embodied the quality of “thinking out of the box,” as described to me by the scion of a distinguished rabbinic family whom I recently sat next to on a bus. If one is blessed with great material resources, he explained, the way to help an organization in which one believes is obvious: Write out a large check. And baruch Hashem, those capable of doing so have proliferated in our community.

But what if one does not have the resources to dedicate a building or the like? Then one has to think harder about how one can make a difference — dig a little deeper into the organization, talk to those on the front lines about how it works, and figure out ways in which a bit more discretionary cash could help the organization reach its goals. And then raise the necessary funding.