We live in a ‘hardball’ world, where the business too often requires insensitivity, distinguish (or conjurer ingenuity) and behavior, which resembles steal and ice. This behavior is reinforced by a macho social image as someone who does not cry, and yet is sociable; but does not waste time;and yet banters easily. Such as steel, which is ice.

The business world progress and it is a progress we require for an efficacious, democratic society, by hard heartedness. Yet precisely the hardheartedness which advances economic social life (of the individual, the family, the corporation, the community, and the society) is unbearable.

The hardheartedness, which bracketed and captained by a macho image if what a “real” man is, drives men to seek camaraderie. Depending on his natural inclinations, fellowship may be found in a sports arena, or a beer hall, on the couch around campfires, or with the family.

I suggest the reason the more successful business, which logically require the most hardened managers and vice-presidents, recommend that their most valuable employees participate in volunteer action, which bring on them, a socially beneficial nature to accomplish two proposes. First, volunteering time is an expenditure of energy, which may be pent up, is the fundamentally restrictive environment of steel and ice. It is directive to find camaraderie in an atmosphere, which will allow an employee to work toward creating away from the policy book, at living far from the deadened atmosphere of the workplace. Indeed, it is understood that the enlivenment and creativity which is found in volunteer activity, which is generated in an arena agreeable to genuine relationships, will be found in back by way of new ideas, renewed vigor, and renewed health.

If the above characteristics of the agreeableness in volunteer activity are fairly conscious, the second reason may not be so clearly understood. The first may be “rationalized” as good pubic relations. These are the type of people we hire. Our people are the types who have the pride of community involvement. They are the self-scarifying in the way of contributing to social betterment. This company may think it is helping the society. The people becomes better people, not just by “showing off,” but by doing good work, more important work.

The company does not put a sign out, but it becomes known that they hire caring, sensitive, type of people. In fact, to a certain extent, the corporation may not be so far wrong as it initially appears. I have suggested that it is an inherent proclivity of any human being to seek refreshment and renew away from the work place. This is the case whether the employee is a typical grunt, or a C.E.O. The pressure of the requirement of policy and procedure, instinct and dedication at achieving the object need release. The subsequent pressure for the employee on his or her leisure time, to find suitable relaxation is appropriate.

Volunteer activity parlays mere time off into an activity, which rejuvenates the essential nature of the human being: contact with effective human relations and contributions from a variety of sources (mostly as other people) to a goal, which consistently elicits own growth and maturation.

Volunteering, in other words, is public relations because it helps prevent off duty employees from becoming couch potatoes (and thereby revealing in the business inducement unclear), beer guzzling (and, therefore celebrating simply an alternative form of unreality), or pent-up hostility (and therefore perpetuating the executive necessary of frustration into the most sheltered area of private life, personal existence and intimate relations.

If so, volunteering is a search for personal health, through human relationships. It has little if anything to do with personal guilt. ///END///

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIC SKETCH: G. David Schwartz is the former president of Seedhouse, the online
interfaith committee. Schwartz is the author of A Jewish Appraisal of Dialogue.
Currently a volunteer at Drake Hospital in Cincinnati, Schwartz continues to
write. His new book, Midrash and Working Out Of The Book is now in stores or can
be ordered.