Miami, Florida, 21st October 2026, ZEX PR WIRE, Rabbi Steve Karro is asking his community to make one concrete act of giving part of their holiday preparation this year.

A season that asks something of us

Every year, the weeks before the holidays fill up fast. Cleaning, cooking, travel, gifts. Rabbi Steve Karro has spent decades studying the parts of Jewish tradition that ask us to slow that rush down and make room for someone else.

As a rabbi and scribe based in Miami Beach, Florida, he sees the holiday season as more than a checklist of preparations. He sees it as a yearly reminder to look outward.

“Every situation, I ask what the Creator expects from me,” Rabbi Karro said. “Before the holidays, the answer is usually simple. Give something. Give it now, not later.”

The invitation

Rabbi Karro is encouraging people in his community to take on a simple practice ahead of this holiday season: one act of direct giving to someone nearby, done before the holiday itself begins, not during it and not after.

“It does not need to be large,” he said. “It needs to happen before the holiday starts, not get folded into it. That timing matters. It says the giving came from you, not from the season telling you to.”

Why the order matters

Rabbi Karro draws a distinction between giving that happens because a holiday requires it, and giving that happens because a person chooses it ahead of time.

“When you give during the holiday, you are following the calendar,” he said. “When you give before it, you are following your own decision. Both are good. But the second one changes something in you.”

He points to family life as the frame he uses to think about this.

“When your closest family is happy, and the people around them are happy too, that is the real measure,” he said. “Giving before the holiday is one way to widen that circle a little further out from your own table.”

What giving back can look like

Rabbi Karro is not prescriptive about the form giving should take. He suggests people start with someone they already know needs something, rather than searching for a cause far from home.

“Start close,” he said. “A neighbor. Someone at your synagogue. Someone in your family nobody has checked on in a while. The person right in front of you is usually the answer.”

He also encourages people to think about what they can give beyond money: time, a skill, a meal, a conversation.

“Everyone has something they know how to give,” he said. “Teaching, cooking, fixing something, listening. Find yours and give it before the holiday, not during it.”

A practice, not a one-time gesture

Rabbi Karro hopes this becomes something people return to each year, not a single gesture tied to this season alone.

“I want to see this duplicated,” he said. “Not from one person, but from many people who hear about it and decide to do their own version. That is how something small becomes something that lasts.”

He also connects the practice to teaching, which he considers central to his work as a rabbi and scribe.

“Teaching what I have learned means more people can do good for the people around them,” he said. “That is the whole point.”

About Rabbi Steve Karro

Rabbi Steve Karro is a rabbi, scribe, artist, and teacher based in Miami Beach, Florida. Born in Russia, he moved to Jerusalem at age 10 and began his Hebrew education there. At 13, he continued his studies at Yeshiva Ponovich in Bnei Brak, and by 19 he had earned his rabbinic certificate and diploma. Rabbi Karro works internationally as a Judaica calligraphy and oil painting artist, and as a scribe specializing in restoring old Torah scrolls, writing new Torah scrolls, mezuzahs, and tefilin, and checking Torah scrolls, mezuzahs, and tefilin for communities around the world.

Chicago, Illinois, 21st October 2026, ZEX PR WIRE, Chicago jazz and folk vocalist Sundas Naqvi shares the lesson she learned when she moved her music from southern England to the American Midwest, and what she now tells other musicians who relocate.

Leaving One Sound for Another

Sundas Naqvi grew up in southern England, singing in school choirs and small community concerts before she found jazz and folk music at university. That sound, built around British choir traditions and acoustic folk, was the only musical language she knew.

In her late twenties, she moved to Chicago. The city had its own musical history, built on blues, jazz clubs, and a folk scene that worked differently than anything she had performed in before. She had to figure out where her voice fit inside it.

“I thought I was bringing a finished sound with me,” Naqvi says. “What I actually brought was a starting point.”

What Changed, and What Did Not

Naqvi did not rebuild her style from scratch. The jazz standards she loved stayed. The folk influences she picked up in England stayed too. What changed was how she used them.

Chicago’s jazz lounges rewarded a different kind of phrasing than the rooms she had performed in back home. Its coffeehouses wanted something quieter and more conversational. Private events and seasonal festivals each asked for their own pacing. She learned to read a room the way she once read sheet music.

“The songs didn’t change,” she says. “I changed how I told them.”

That shift shaped the storytelling that now runs through her sets, songs built around resilience, family, and the small moments that connect strangers in a room. Naqvi says those themes came less from any single influence and more from paying attention to what audiences in her new city responded to.

The Lesson She Tells Other Musicians

Naqvi now volunteers with youth music education programs around Chicago, leading beginner songwriting workshops and vocal sessions. She says the musicians she meets, young and experienced alike, often make the same mistake she almost made: treating a new city, a new audience, or even a new venue as a place to perform an existing sound rather than a place to grow one.

“You don’t have to choose between where you came from and where you are,” she says. “But you do have to let the new place change you a little. If it doesn’t, you’re not really there yet.”

Her advice to musicians who relocate, or who are simply trying a new room for the first time, is to treat the first several performances as listening exercises. Watch how people react to pacing, silence, and song choice before deciding what to keep and what to adjust.

“A song that works in one room can fall flat in another,” Naqvi says. “That’s not a failure. That’s information.”

Still Bringing England Into the Room

Naqvi returns to England when she can, to see family and lifelong friends. She says those visits keep her connected to where her musical instincts started, even as her sound has grown around Chicago’s own traditions.

She still reads British literature alongside contemporary fiction, a habit she picked up long before she ever sang jazz. She spends free time exploring Chicago’s older neighborhoods and photographing its architecture, work she says sharpens the same instinct for detail she uses when she is writing a song.

“Noticing a building’s small details isn’t that different from noticing what makes a lyric land,” she says. “Both come down to paying attention to things most people walk past.”

That habit of attention, more than any single technique, is what she now tries to pass on in her workshops: slow down, notice the room, and let the place you are in actually shape the art you make there.

About Sundas Naqvi

Sundas Naqvi is an independent jazz and folk vocalist, songwriter, and occasional vocal coach based in Chicago, Illinois. She performs at neighborhood jazz lounges, coffeehouses, private events, and seasonal festivals throughout the city, blending jazz standards with contemporary folk influences. She also volunteers with youth music education programs, leading beginner songwriting workshops and vocal sessions for children in Chicago’s local arts community.