05/27/2026
After months of applications, interviews, and putting all the pieces together, the fourth cohort (!) of the Harlem Service Corps finally kicked off last night.
Erica often talks about engaging in "responsible place-making," which means that one should be an integral part of the community in which one lives. To be in and of your community is not just about where you sleep, keep your stuff, hang your metaphorical hat, or maintain a mailing address. It is about taking part in the economic, political, social, cultural, and spiritual life of that community.
And the only way we can do this is if we know who our neighbors are.
The most precious resource we have is time, and it is precisely this resource that we invest in each other in the course of building relationships.
This is one way to understand the spiritual mechanism of the mitzvah of V’ahavta l’reacha kamocha — to love your neighbor as yourself. Through the time we spend together with others, we leave something of ourselves behind with them: a trace, a memory, a shared language, a piece of our own heart held in their care. When we later encounter them again and feel that tug of familiarity, friendship, or camaraderie, we are also recognizing that part of ourselves we entrusted to them. Through vulnerability and trust, we make it possible to love one another. And the realization of that love is the discovery that some piece of us already lives in the other.
So here we are, kicking off the summer by starting to build a thick and woven fabric of community and of learning — so that we can really and truly enact what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves.
See you soon?
