Alef: The NEXT Conversation
Supporting Jewish Causes
by Tracie Karasik
There are too many evil people in the world looking to destroy, defame, or humiliate the Jewish people. And this sad truth is unfortunately not a novel one. For thousands of years, Jews have been easily targeted as the scapegoats, being blamed for all the problems in the world, persecuted for their beliefs or religious traditions, or had their reputation marred by those who lack tolerance and foster hate.
I feel that it is my responsibility as a Jew to be a champion of Jewish causes. I believe that it is an imperative responsibility as a Jew to preserve, to advocate for, and to give to Jewish causes primarily over those that are not.
That does not mean that I do not advocate for global, secular, or non-Jewish causes, because in its essence, the values of Judaism reflect that of tzadakah, righteousness and doing the right thing, and tikkun olam, repairing the world. Judaism, after all, teaches that performing both ethical mitzvot as well as ritual mitzvot are of paramount importance to the process of tikkun olam. Additionally in Jewish thought, carrying out acts of mitzvot includes giving to all of humanity, not just ourselves. In fact, most Jewish non-profit organizations provide aide to both Jews and non-Jews alike. However, I believe that there are causes worth fighting for, and that helping to ensure the Jewish future, caring for Jews in need, and supporting the land of Israel are foremost on my list.
If we, as Jews, do not support each other than who will? What will be left of the Jewish community and of Jewish traditions if we, ourselves, do not stand behind and provide for each other? We must take a proactive and thoughtful approach towards supporting Jewish organizations and causes around the world. If not, future generations are at risk of losing the indispensable traditions, moral code, and incredible strength of community that have enabled the Jewish people to thrive and exist for over 5,000 years.
One critically important program that exists today, which has sent nearly 300,000 young Jewish adults from all around the world on a free 10-day educational trip to Israel is Taglit Birthright. This program has fostered the growth, solidarity, and reconnection of young Jewish adults to the land of Israel. If not for programs like Taglit-Birthright, supported by organizations such as the North American Jewish Federations, the Jewish Agency for Israel, The Birthright Israel Foundation, the Government of Israel, private philanthropists, and Jewish communities around the world, there would be a dramatic decline in Jewish relevance among contemporary youth, an increase in the division between Israel and Jewish communities around the world, and an even more dramatic rise in assimilation. In June of 2010, I was fortunate enough to participate in a Taglit-Birthright trip to Israel. I would like to share with you a little about my story and how it has affected me in a positive way, however, my story is just one of the thousands of young, Jewish adults who just like me were awarded the opportunity to go to Israel.
From beginning to end, it was evident that the entire trip was extremely safe, well planned, and structured with great care and thoughtfulness. During the trip, I especially felt especially connected to my Jewish identity while visiting Independence Hall in Tel Aviv. It was there that I listened to an actual recording from May 14, 1948, of the voice of David Ben-Gurion, who had declared the creation of the State of Israel from the exact location where I was sitting. Following that, the Hatikvah was played, and I not only felt like I was a part of one of the most significant events in Israel’s history, but that I was proud and grateful to be a Jew in Israel. Furthermore, one of the most significant moments in my life was experienced while in Israel, when I visited the Western Wall. The instant I laid my hand on the wall, feelings of pride and excitement mixed with empathy and awe filled within me, and I began to burst into tears. I felt my Jewish heritage stemming from thousands of years come alive. I felt a deep sense of gratitude to be able to be there as a living descendant of the strong lineage of the Jewish people. To be able to stand there in that moment, and touch a lasting remnant of The Old Temple, in a Jewish country, in which millions of Jews in history had only dreamt of being able to do, was truly remarkable. I felt a deep sense of accomplishment and humility.
Going to Israel not only strengthened my connection to Judaism, but has led me to feeling a much stronger commitment to living a Jewish life, raising a Jewish family, and supporting the Jewish community here and around the world. The continued support of programs such as Taglit-Birthright help to allow each new generation of young Jewish adults to understand their Jewish identity and motivate them to give back to the Jewish community and Israel.
Jewish causes need a place now more than ever. I believe that charity is a fundamental part of the Jewish way of life and that we need to invest in the future of the Jewish people or risk losing it all because of the lack of it. We are such a small percentage of the world’s population, and the survival and prosperity of the Jewish people rests on the amount of support that others can provide for it. I am committed to supporting Jewish causes primarily over those that are not because the future of the Jewish religion, its people, and its posterity depends on the present.
Photo by zeevveez, licensed under Creative Commons.
Why I Give
By Robby Kaufman
I donate to a few Jewish causes that I care about deeply. I can give you the 30-second elevator pitch on why you should stop what you’re doing and open up your wallets to these organizations, but this is not my goal.
While I had a Bar Mitzvah and attended Hebrew school growing up, I never had a desire to involve myself Jewishly until I went on my Taglit-Birthright Israel trip in college. I can go on and on about how incredible, motivational, inspirational, etc., the trip was, but I want to talk about one outcome of my Taglit experience – the trip made me understand why many Jewish organizations exist and how donations from generous individuals literally enable them to exist.
When I returned from the trip as a freshman at UC-Berkeley, I became involved with two particular Jewish agencies: Hillel and AIPAC. I learned a lot from these organizations and they helped me develop into the person I am today. Without Berkeley Hillel, for example, I would not have had a rich Jewish college experience or met some of my best friends today. I think these two organizations have important missions and are successful in achieving their goals. At some point, I realized that I wanted to help these organizations because I am a true supporter of their goals and purposes and that they are vital to the Jewish community.
Although I have limited knowledge of the philanthropic world, I have become a strong believer in developing a culture of giving. A Jewish nonprofit organization that is seeking to be around in the future needs to grow and develop a donor base. This may be common sense, but the harsh reality is that large donors that make up a significant portion of an organization’s budget will likely not be contributing in a generation or two. Most Jewish organizations lack significant endowment structures that are designed to sustain them indefinitely.
Instead, younger donors – such as myself – may very well be the donors that enable these organizations to succeed in the future. So when I write my $18 check and motivate my peers to do the same, my goal is to instill a sense of importance to donating to causes that we find important. These $18 checks may not be terribly meaningful by themselves, but my hope is that each individual who is donating at a young age will gain an understanding of the importance, necessity, and value of philanthropy. I am also hoping that these donors will step up to the plate when the time comes many years down the road when an organization they care about needs them more than they do today.
Read more posts from Issue #11: Money, Greed, & Guilt.
Photo by Mr. Kris, licensed under Creative Commons.
J.A.P. – "Jewish American Princess" or "Just Another Person"?
By Emily Kapit
Somewhere between growing up in the South with a Jewish doctor as a father, having a private school education, going on countless cruises, and owning a second home at the beach, I became somewhat used to the epithets thrown around at my expense:
“Yeah, the Schwartz’s are going on a cruise this year…again.”
Or “Do you think Emily’s parents will invite us down to their house in Hilton Head for Labor Day? Not if it’s around their New Year, of course…”
And, my favorite, “Ohhh…you go to THAT school…makes sense.”
The comments never bothered me very much, as my parents were far from flashy and strove to raise me and my siblings to be the same way. They believed in the importance of working hard; to that end, allowances were small and academic expectations high. Of course, I am the first to argue that they went too far in making us perform extensive lawn work, including pushing a heavy lawn mower up a sizable hill. Though my father claimed it “built character,” I still suspect he took great joy in ensuring that we knew how to get our hands dirty. Even so, those who knew us well understood that, upper-middle class status aside, we were a fairly humble bunch.
So while I occasionally heard comments like those written above, I rarely thought about my parents’ level of affluence and never really believed others cared about it either. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but that blissful shell was broken by the unlikeliest of sources one Sunday afternoon during my early tween years.
One of my closest friends growing up in Winston-Salem was another Jewish girl who was in my Sunday school class at our temple. Since she went to the area public school, we rarely saw each other during the week and would catch up on the weekends. On any given Sunday afternoon, she and I could be found at each others’ houses, dreaming we were back-up singers for New Kids on the Block, pretending to be the 8th and 9th members of The Baby-Sitters Club, and generally just wreaking havoc with early 90s kid culture.
One Sunday, as we were saying goodbye to our Temple Emanuel classmates, and I climbed into the back of her mother’s white-out colored minivan, the topic of conversation somehow turned to interesting acronyms.
“I know one!” I said, volunteering what little information I knew about my dad’s ophthalmology practice. “LASER. My dad told me it stands for ‘light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.’”
“That’s a good one,” my friend responded, mouthing the words in an attempt to remember the acronym itself. “Know any others?”
“SCUBA, as in scuba diving,” I replied, drawing on the brief lecture we’d received prior to jumping into the warm Caribbean Sea a few months prior for an introductory scuba lesson. “Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus.”
At this point, I noticed my friend’s mother raise her eyebrows at me as she pulled up to a light. My eyes wandered outside, taking in the restaurants, stores, and gas stations that lined the road. At that moment, another acronym popped into my head, the result of a recent Jeopardy! answer that I happened to remember.
“BP! I saw it on TV the other night! It stands for-”
“British Petroleum,” her mother cut me off before the words had a chance to pop out of my own mouth. “Really, is that what they’re teaching you over in that private school of yours?” She spat out the words, “private school,” sounding not only caustic but with a pinch of resent thrown in as well.
The shell to my ignorant world cracked a little at that moment, as I tried to respond in a respectful manner without showing my hurt feelings. I don’t recall my response but do remember thinking about the whole exchange later that evening and in the days that followed. While I was aware of the supposed connection between Jews and money, I was under the impression that non-Jews were the ones who harped on such lame stereotypes; but instead, this thirty-second conversation shed light on a much different landscape for me: Jews criticizing one another for having more or less money and breaking my own belief that Jews stood up for one another whenever possible.
Though I now realize that this was a classic case of keeping up with the Jones—er, Steins, I still find it somewhat unfathomable as to how a group of people who have been targeted for countless reasons for, well, countless generations, would actually turn on one another for the smallest of reasons. The incident in that car so many years ago was my first experience of hearing one Jewish person negatively comment on another’s financial status, though it’s hardly been the last. I wonder if this trend will continue and my own children will also deal with members of the Chosen People choosing to insult one another unnecessarily. If so, I wonder what other stereotypes about Jews we risk perpetuating in addition to people believing there is a connection between Jews and money?
Read more posts from Issue #11: Money, Greed, & Guilt.
Photo by Refracted Moments™, licensed under Creative Commons.
Labeled Goods
The first time I realized that Jews had money was when I began attending Hebrew school at my synagogue in fifth grade. I remember staring at Lindsay Stein’s maroon wool sweatshirt that said “Fitch” in white letters and having no idea what it meant. I thought that maybe it was a bad word, since it rhymed with one.
But no, it was a brand name, Abercrombie & Fitch, of course, and it was the first time I realized there was a such thing as a “brand name.” Suddenly it seemed like everyone but me was wearing brand name clothing. I began noticing how lame my Kohl’s bootcut jeans looked next to their A&F flares. When I asked my mother to buy me these expensive lines of clothing, she laughed.
“What do you need those for?” Â she said.
“You want me to pay $90 for jeans that come with holes already in them? They’re shmatas – I don’t think so.”
That was when I started feeling inadequate.
Once the bar and bat mitzvah years approached, the differences between my background and theirs became even more apparent. I remember the after-parties: artists hired to draw caricatures of guests, photo booths where you could take a photo that would be transferred to a button that said “Jacob’s Bar Mitzvah – July 10th, 1997″ around the border, entire buildings of country clubs rented out and elaborately decorated to look like a “winter wonderland.” My bat mitzvah party was in the synagogue social hall. It was nice, but certainly humble compared to my peers’.
We’ve never been poor. My parents both have masters degrees and good jobs. We’ve never had financial assistance from the government as far as I know, not that there’s anything shameful about that. We took vacations, went out to eat every Thursday, and my parents paid for my entire college education. But we were simply always middle class, like most of my peers that attended public school with me in St. Paul, MN. And I never felt bad about that until I started my Jewish education. My peers at Hebrew school were all from the suburbs, had huge houses, their mothers all had plastic surgery–you could simply tell they just came from money.
If it were just that they were richer than me, maybe I would have gotten over it. But these girls were also snobby, cliquey, and simply not that nice. I never became good friends with any of them. I remember crying one Sunday morning on the way to the synagogue because of how much I dreaded feeling like an outsider when I was there.
I would have eventually figured out that there were people out there who were much wealthier than me. But I regret that it had to be Judaism that introduced me to it. It put a bad taste in my mouth — one that took many good Jewish experiences for me to get over. As I became older, I started life guarding at the Jewish Community Center. I volunteered with little kids for the JCC plays. The summer after 9th grade, I became a camp counselor at Jewish day camp, where I made a ton of friends and had one of the best summers of my life, and great experiences over the three summers that followed. I went on a Birthright Israel trip my senior year in college, which gave my perception of Judaism a new richness, and eventually led me to where I am now, working at an exciting Jewish organization that does follow-up for Birthright Israel alumni and their peers.
I want to excel in my career and become successful to the point where I don’t have to worry about money, where I can go out to eat whenever I want, own a nice home, and take vacations. I value money to the extent that it can help me live a comfortable lifestyle. But my views on money will always be informed by the way my parents raised me and the things they taught me – that I shouldn’t flaunt my money, that I should follow a budget and pad my savings account, and as for brand names, they can be overrated.
Read more posts from Issue #11: Money, Greed, & Guilt.
Photo by margolove, licensed under Creative Commons.
Loose Change
By Benjamin Pinkhasik
My first lesson in dealing with money took place on one of those long double buses with a stretchy accordion middle. I must have been six or seven years old at the time and was holding a shiny new coin. While this doesn’t sound like much, it was enough to buy a delicious, carbonated, syrupy drink, and I was looking forward to having one that day.
For a six-year-old, those long buses held incredible allure as the middle rotated while the bus took turns.
“You should put that away,” I remember my father telling me, pointing to the coin held loosely in my fingers.
But did I listen? You can probably predict how this story ends. The bus hit a pothole, Newtonian laws of motion took over, and the coin escaped from my fingers, leaped into the accordion part of the bus I was so fascinated by, and got lost in an abyss of wrappers, chewed gum, and grime. The loss of this coin was agonizing and brought on much personal unhappiness at the time.
My view on money – why we need it, the drive to have it, and the best way to spend it – took shape as I grew up and observed how my family dealt with money. While I never had a real need for money, by the time I reached my early teens, I realized it was important to have it. It gave you the ability to buy things without being a burden on your parents, without having to ask anyone for anything. It gave you personal freedom, which I strived for, and so I started working to amass it. At fourteen, I packed my briefcase, put on a suit, donned shiny shoes and a pink tie, and got a job. I spent the summer building park benches and flower boxes for the town – hard, sweaty work – and I still remember that first paycheck. I felt incredible – I cashed that check, asked the teller to give me all singles, and for the next few hours I had a “stack” of cash.
A decade ago, my thoughts on money could be summarized by this opening line of an essay I wrote in high school – “Whoever said money doesn’t buy happiness surely didn’t know what he was talking about.”
i.e., money=happiness.
I predicted that George Bush Jr. would be the next president. My logic: “the monetary contributions to his campaign are greater than the other candidates. Doesn’t matter that he doesn’t know who the leader of Pakistan is.”
i.e., money=power.
I espoused that happiness and money are intricately linked – “just ask the local bum if a little money would make him happier.” I proposed and reflected on the idea that the rich don’t really have problems. These were childish sensibilities, for sure, as I had never, at that point, given money or even talked to those bums.
A little more than ten years passed and my thoughts on money evolved. While money is still important to me, today I focus on the the ability to earn it and how to utilize it once I’ve attained it. You can go to that hot new restaurant, buy yet another piece of clothing, purchase that new iPod when your old one is still good, but do you really need it and would it actually make you happy?
My first trip to Israel was not a traditional tour like a Birthright Israel trip. It was titled “Mission Possible” and it had a philanthropic bend to it. Before leaving, all the participants were asked to present an Israeli charity that they were interested in and convince the rest of the group why it should support that charity. Then we voted for the best four. While in Israel, we visited these organizations, saw what kind of work they did, and in the end, the top charity selected by the group received ten thousand dollars. I wanted to learn how to best choose a deserving charity and was pointed to the Torah. In Deuteronomy 15:7, there are references to the “maser” or what’s called the 1/10th rule – the eight levels of tzedakah and the explicit guarantee that the mitzvah of observing maser comes with a assurance of wealth.
My lofty goals for earning money didn’t change over the years, but what has changed are my goals of what to do with it once attained. Armed with the power of tikkun olam, I think about how to become active in philanthropy, why one charity performs over another, and how I can have a lasting impact. Today I realize that money doesn’t buy you happiness, but it can buy happiness for others. For many, a few extra dollars are meaningless, but for a homeless person, the money can mean survival and potentially the start of a new life.
As I learned on that bus, money can be in your possession one moment and not the next. Today, I’m determined not to let it slip away, and to do some good with it.
If you feel you have the answer to why and how we should choose one charity over another or on philanthropy in general, please comment below.
Read more posts from Issue #11: Money, Greed, & Guilt.
Photo by cometstarmoon, licensed under Creative Commons.
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