The Value of Showing Up
Rabbi Meyer Laniado
At a Sephardic Rabbinical Conference this summer, I noticed a former congregant sitting across the room. I wondered why he was there. He wasn’t a rabbi, and he wasn’t on the panel or the program. During lunch, he approached me with a bright smile and said, “Rabbi, you won’t believe this…” I could not imagine what he was about to say.
I remembered that he once asked me if he could read the Torah, as it was his Bar Mitzvah perasha that week. His reading, while musical, was imprecise. The next time he asked to read the Torah, I told him he would first need to invest in improving his reading. I offered to work on it with him if he came early on Shabbat afternoon. He hesitated at first, but ultimately accepted the offer. Week after week, he practiced and improved. Eventually, I invited him to lead Minha, and later, he became a semi-regular reader of the Torah in our minyan, reading beautifully and accurately. Then he had a baby, and moved to the suburbs.
A few months later, I received the following message from him:
“I wanted to let you know, the minyanim are really starting to turn to me to read Torah and lead prayers. We’re not as knowledgeable, but it’s slowly getting better, and I seem to be playing a role in that. Thank you for teaching me the right way. Our rabbis keep telling me how amazed they are at my precision.”
If the story ended there, that would already be meaningful: a full-circle story that exemplifies the impact I always hope to have. But the story continued, to this very moment at the conference, where he came over to me and said: “You won’t believe this, but my community asked me to teach Qeri’at haTorah in the elementary school!” My primary intention was to help this one person learn how to read accurately. To me, that was the point.
The temptation is to evaluate human interactions using the tools we borrow from business and management: productivity, scalability, and measurable outcomes. These tools and modes of thought are effective in business, but have crept into how we think about our human interactions. And so, we tend to judge impact by volume, how many showed up. But, if someone had asked me, ‘How many people came that Shabbat afternoon?’ The answer would have been one, and it would have sounded insignificant, unimpressive, and maybe even seen as a bad investment of time and resources. But, we should not evaluate whether to engage, support, or be present with another based on return on investment. That would have been a mistake.
Each human being is not just part of the whole of humanity; they are, in and of themselves, an entire world. The Mishnah makes this point by noting that Adam was created alone, so that no single life that emerged from him could ever be dismissed as marginal or insignificant. As the Mishnah states: “Anyone who sustains a single soul is considered as though they sustained an entire world” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5). Once a single life already carries the weight of a world, human encounters can no longer be evaluated by quantity or scale. When a person stands before us, there is already a whole world present, and that alone is enough to demand our attention.
Our forefather, Abraham, did not first evaluate whether to show up for another based on projected impact or effective use of resources. When three ‘men’ appeared at his tent, Abraham ran to serve them. He had no information about who these men were, what they represented, or whether anything would come from the encounter.
He even personally selected the choicest of the cows. And then, he stayed with these guests, with presence, as they ate, veHu omed alehem tahat haEs vaYokhehlu (Beresheit 18:8). Abraham had hundreds of servants that he could have sent to serve these individuals. But, for him, serving these individuals was of the utmost priority and importance, and so he ran forward to serve them himself.
With Abraham, the Torah text tells us nothing about how he influences them, nothing about what he gains from the encounter. Only presence: veHu omed alehem, he stands with them. Whatever else may later emerge is not part of the calculation. The presence, in and of itself, is the value.
I care deeply about human transformation. I often evaluate my work through stories of growth, change, and impact, and those matter. But I am also realizing that these cannot be the only lens. Presence itself has value, even when nothing measurable follows. Hearing what became of this young man was deeply moving to me. But, even if there had been no transformation beyond those Shabbat afternoons, showing up for him would still have been worthwhile. If we truly believed this, we would stop explaining ourselves when only “one person came.”
