When I was little, giving tzedakah was fairly straightforward. A portion of your allowance? Into the tzedakah box. Find a penny on the street? Into the tzedakah box.
Once or twice a year, we’d dump all the money out onto the dining room table and count it up, lining up neat little stacks of pennies, and group nickels and dimes into dollars. We’d decide where to donate the funds, and sometimes my brother and I would just show up, parents in tow and cash in hand.
(I’d be remiss if I didn’t add: “Thanks Mom, for making tzedakah something mandatory, reflexive and lots of fun!”)
Today, however, it’s not quite as simple. Sure, we still have tzedakah boxes around the apartment that we fill with loose change. But the last time my husband and I made an actual plan for donating tzedakah (something I’m embarrassed to admit we only did once, and haven’t done since I finished graduate school and got a job), it required multiple subway conversations, pro/con lists and a Google spreadsheet.
Admittedly, it did feel pretty great to make donations in excess of $18 or $36, and to be proactive about our giving, instead of just responding to appeals from friends and family (apparently we know a lot of people who do charity marathons, half-marathons and 5Ks). But frankly, it was a lot of work, and the fact that we haven’t done it again is a sign that maybe it is a bit too much work. For better or worse, we need something easier, or at least we could use a bit more guidance.
So what do you and your family do?
• Do you base your giving on the calendar year? The fiscal year? Center it around certain Jewish holidays?
• How do you decide what causes and organizations are worthy causes? Do you differentiate between tzedakah (to causes that aid the poor and disenfranchised) and philanthropy (supporting other causes)? How do you balance between giving to Jewish and non-Jewish sources?
• How do you determine how much to give: 10 percent? More? Less? A percentage of your gross income? Your net taxable income? Your post-tax income? What’s left over after paying for groceries and housing?
• Do you have a process for making these decisions? Do you have checklists? A ritual? Do your choices change every year or have you found some routine?
Rachel Petroff Kessler is a family educator at Temple Isaiah in Fulton, Md. She holds a master’s degree in religious education from HUC-JIR in New York. This blog is reprinted with permission from an October 2011 Sh’ma journal discussion about tzedakah and philanthropy (www.shma.com, www.shmadigital.com).