​YOU CAN

​Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.    John Wesley

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.    John Wesley
 
My friend Hugh Halpern is the Director of the Government Publishing Office.  The title used to be Public Printer, which sounds cooler, but the job is even cooler than the title by any name.  I asked him for a tour of his place, and he and his aide Abe Sussan arranged for me to feel like a senator on the Appropriations Committee (without neglecting a minute of their performance obligations, I might add).
 
I am very proud of my friend, but for different reasons than I came away with from my tour with an increased appreciation for public servants at every level, for whom I already had great admiration. It’s not because the GPO is in the process of updating its operation to be at the cutting edge of printing technology, nor because the passports and other identification documents they produce are among the most secure in the world in ways you can barely imagine, nor because they have the capacity to take the raw ingredients of everything from Congressional speeches to federal court proceedings and turn them into accessible (and attractive) public information. And never mind the digital iteration, govinfo.gov.
 
It is because of the people.
 
In my brief visit, I met people who were devoted to doing the very best they can, by all the means they can, in all the ways they can, in all the places they can, at all the times they can, for all the people they can, with all the talents they bring to the job.  They take enormous satisfaction in the parts they play in the larger operation – formatting the text, choosing the appropriate papers, running the machines, creating the binding (stitched, glued, saddled, or spiral-bound), covering the volumes, embossing the covers, and (coolest part of the tour) marbling edges of certain volumes.  They are journeymen, artists and artisans, forklift operators, IT specialists, and security guards who believe themselves to be part of an essential service to the people of the United States of America.  Some of them are at GPO as the children and grandchildren of other “deputy printers.”
 
And to Hugh’s credit, as we walked most of the eight floors of the mammoth building, everyone we encountered seemed to know him.
 
There is a “vision story” popular among motivational speakers about President John F. Kennedy who encountered a janitor sweeping the floor at a NASA facility.  “What do you do here?” he asked.  The janitor responded, “I am helping to put a man on the moon.”  I’ve heard the story in plenty of other framings, most often about bricklayers building a cathedral.  The story is often deployed to encourage people to imagine themselves as part of a grander project than their own limited tasks.
 
I am certain that is possible.  After all, my years as a rabbi were spent in one of thousands of Jewish communities in one of dozens of local institutions where I saw my task as serving the Jewish people, past, present, and future who are “as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the beach.”  But I never see it in action as much as I do in public service, even among high-profile elected officials who are often disparaged for their self-promoting posturing.  From the executives, legislators and justices to the clerks and runners, public servants are forming a more perfect union.  Don’t let the occasional outlier fool you.
 
Maybe it is a little ironic to use the quotation from John Wesley to describe the GPO.  He was the founder of Methodism, which underpins the Methodist Church.  Hugh, like me, is a traditional Jew.  And a version of Wesley’s formulation is a favorite invocation of Hillary Clinton. Hugh, unlike me, is a lifelong Republican. But it’s just another example of why I call this series of columns “Wisdom Wherever You Find It.”  Sometimes it is in a different tradition, sometimes across the aisle, and sometimes in a big honkin’ government building.