Rabbi Yoel Shwartz once gave a troubling speech at a Kedushas Tzion convention, saying our camp must actually do worldly things for people, not just educate them.
(By “troubling” I mean the message haunts me, not that it spells trouble about the speaker!)
His example was the contrast between the superior Rosh Yeshiva whose crowd is what it is, in contrast to the average Chassidic Rebbe.
Why? Well, only one of the two is known to give out free, piping hot kugel…
I recently read a similar story (unsourced) of effective “propaganda of the deed”:
Communists are out to try to prove to people that they care about them as people…
It has not been simply on the basis of pouring out words. They have tried to think of various means of convincing the public that this is so. For example, in various parts of Asia recently, when Communist Party congresses have been called—the annual congresses at which all the topmost leaders and the local leaders meet—they have followed the technique of aiming to prove to the people that they care.
The congress is called, not at some big city which provides accommodations like this, but quite deliberately they call it to meet in some remote place. Those of you who work in mission areas or even those of you who know your history will know that roads break down isolation, link up communities with other communities, and pave the way to development. If any of you work in areas where there are no roads, you know how isolated you can be. And so some of the Asian Communist Parties have called their congresses to be held in some area which is quite cut off from all development because it has no road to link with the main highways. The Indonesian Communist Party did that. They called their congress (this is a powerful party with 2,000,000 members) to meet in a place where there was no road to link it up with civilization. They called their delegates together a week before the congress was due to begin. Then they spent the week—top leaders and all the other leaders—working together to build a road from that village to the nearest highway. So the people would never forget that the communists came there and opened up the way to development.
I’m impressed.
(By the way, I was once forced to visit a Chassidic Tisch. ערום ראה רעה ונסתר. I made sure not to eat the kugel…)