For the fifth consecutive year, on August 31, the Association for the Advancement of Being Nice is running its "Be Nice" Day in Israel.
Booths have been set up at shopping malls around the country, mainly in central Israel, for the dissemination of literature explaining the importance of being nice. "This is our annual opportunity to bring the subject of 'being friendly' to public awareness," say volunteers for the organization, known in English as the Society for a Friendlier World (SFW).
As the largest-scale expression of this initiative, dozens of cars set out for Sderot today, to do their shopping - and smiling - in the rocket-besieged Negev city.
The focus this year is on people one may usually regard as "transparent." The SFW recommends "surprising yourselves and those around you by relating to someone you are not generally accustomed to relating to. This can be done by saying Shalom [Hello], smiling, showing interest, engaging in a short conversation, giving a flower or a cup of cold water, or offering a ride."
Last year's focus was on being nice to relatives and friends, "on whom we sometimes take out our frustrations more than on others."
The Tel Aviv-based SFW has been in operation since 1999, and has made it its goal to promote niceness as a way of improving interpersonal communications both in Israel and around the world. "Our goal is to make humanity more pleasant," its mission statement reads. "We believe that the way to achieve this goal is raise the level of friendliness. Friendliness is a way of life, and as human beings who live in this hectic day and age, we often forget how easy it is to be friendly."
"Everyone knows what friendliness is," SFW posits, "but in general, we define it as 'giving other people the feeling you're happy they are around.' This, regardless of any conflicts that exist anywhere where people come in contact. This idea may seem obvious, yet we feel that people, in general, are not behaving in a friendly-enough manner, and our goal is to make more and more people adopt the Friendliness philosophy."
"Being friendly does not mean giving up your rights," the statement concludes. "On the contrary: it strengthens you, and asserts that being friendly is being happy."