Byline: Toby Rosenstrauch

Highest level of tzedakah

Ever hear of Heifer International? No? Until recently, I’d never heard of it either. I was talking to my grandsons, ages 7 and 3, via the webcam perched atop my computer screen. The boys were telling me about their Shabbat observances. They wear kippahs, they have a special dinner with challah and wine, Mommy lights candles and Daddy says brachas. And their job is to put money into the tzedakah boxes, the pushkes, they made at Hebrew school. They held the boxes up to the screen so I could see them.

“What do you do with the money when the boxes are filled?” I asked.

“We give it to people who don’t have as much food or money as we have,” the older boy said.

“How do you do that?” I asked.

“We send it to this place called Heifer International.”

Intrigued, I looked it up. To my surprise, it’s actually a well-known charity started by a Midwestern farmer named Dan West who was ladling out rations of milk to hungry kids during the Spanish Civil War. He realized that simply doling out food does not solve the problem of hunger.

“These children don’t need a cup; they need a cow,” he said.

He formed Heifers for Relief, dedicated to ending hunger by providing livestock and training, as well. The first shipment of 17 heifers left Pennsylvania for Puerto Rico in 1944. Why heifers? Because they are cows who have not yet given birth. These young cows would supply milk and would also be a continuous source of more cows. Families receiving a heifer agreed to donate female offspring to another family, thus continuing the process.

Today, donors to this organization get to choose which animal they would like to donate: a cow, a goat, chickens, rabbits or geese. In concept, this way of using what my grandmother called “pushke money” is far beyond the pushke concept of her time. The website’s online visual association makes the process more real and less abstract for the kids.

The globalization of the 21st century influences our thinking in many ways, including the choices we can make for charitable contributions. We can think not only of local charities or Israel, but also of the victims of earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, hurricanes and wars around the world. We are aware of the needs of children, refugees, the hungry and the sick in every country. This is as it should be.

However, charity is more than just giving a donation to a faceless organization. It really involves the feelings of the recipients, too.

Many years ago, I wrote a children’s story that was published in Young Judean magazine. Two boys, Jason and Marty, liked to go together for ice cream every Sunday until Jason stopped going for lack of money. For a while, Marty treats him, but Jason feels uncomfortable with this on a permanent basis. When Jason stops going for ice cream, Marty’s grandfather refers Marty to Maimonides’ Ladder of Charity in an effort to get Marty to figure out a solution. Marty does. He gets Jason a job walking a dog so that Jason can buy ice cream with his own money, thus allowing him to maintain his dignity.

Here is the Ladder of Charity conceived by Maimonides. The levels are ranked in order of preference, from the lowest to the highest.

1. Giving sadly and begrudgingly.

2. Giving less than is fitting but with good cheer.

3. Giving only after having been asked.

4. Giving before being asked.

5. Giving to a recipient whose identity the giver does not know.

6. Giving so that the recipient of the tzedakah does not know the identity of the giver.

7. Giving so that neither the giver nor the recipient knows the identity of the other.

8. In place of giving money, taking the sort of action that will help people to no longer be poor.

An example of level eight would be helping a poor person find a job, or lending money to finance an education for someone in poverty. For example, friends of mine wanted to help a married child who was in financial trouble. They gave the couple a car instead of cash, thus enabling them to have access to jobs in their rural area that did not have public transportation.

There’s a Chinese proverb that says, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” It is interesting to note how close in concept this proverb is to level eight of Maimonides’ ladder. You can see that the highest level of charity helps a person become independent and self-reliant, and human dignity is also taken into full account.

We might all do well to assess what we do with our pushke money and other donations. My little grandsons are already learning that there are those less fortunate than themselves. I am proud of my son and daughter-in-law for teaching this to their children at so young an age. I have faith that these boys will grow up to be caring citizens of the world.

Toby Rosenstrauch is an award-winning columnist and a resident of Florida. Her first novel, Knifepoint, was recently published.

A grandmother reflects

On a hot Sunday in June, a grandmother climbs up to a backless seat in the bleachers of a high school gym whose air-conditioning has conked out. Students are handing out water bottles to the sweating crowd. She fans herself with a sun hat and listens to the principal testing the mic. The graduates in their caps and gowns have lined up in the corridor.

The band begins to play and the smiling graduates march in. The grandmother knows that most of them are wearing sneakers or flip-flops (except for a few girls who have saved up to buy Jimmy Choos or Manolo Blahniks). Under their robes, many wear shorts and T-shirts, not the fancy clothes she would have expected.

As the speeches begin, she waves to her grandson, who tips his cap to her. Her daughter and son-in-law hold hands as they watch the ceremony. The grandmother shifts in her uncomfortable seat and remembers the growing-up years of the young man whose achievement she has traveled 1,200 miles to celebrate.

He was such a tiny baby that the rabbi and mohel who officiated at his bris insisted on consulting a pediatrician before going ahead with the event. Now he is six feet tall. He was a friendly child who introduced himself to other kids easily at the playground when he was three or four. On holidays, he loved to lay out cookies on a platter in her kitchen but his nose barely reached the table top. Somebody had to put him on a chair to do the job.

His family moved around a lot and somehow he did not get into a Hebrew school at the right time. His great-grandfather saw to it that he was enrolled in a special program for kids who fell through the cracks and might not otherwise have received a Hebrew education. His bar mitzvah was a gala event and the grandmother remembers unexpectedly weeping with joy.

In high school, this child blossomed like a flower. His grades were excellent and he began to read voraciously, both assigned books and those she often fed him. His grandfather discussed science, astronomy, astrophysics and current events with him. His friends were children of many cultures, races and religions. He got involved in politics when the mother of a friend ran for local office and he volunteered to work on the campaign.

In the summer following his junior year, he won a scholarship to study globalization in the 21st century at Brown University. Now, he knows the facts about the issues of the day and is familiar with the problems affecting other countries. He speaks Spanish and French and is teaching himself Chinese. On a televised program with New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, he asked questions that prompted compliments by the governor. On his feet, the boy thinks fast and is comfortable at a lectern addressing school assemblies of 500 people.

Now, as she watches him stand with his fellow graduates and toss his cap into the air, the grandmother knows that it’s only a few months until he is gone – off to college to study international relations – probably leading to a life among people of other cultures with whom he is already quite comfortable. Undoubtedly, he will do something to make a difference in the world – something meaningful. She is proud of him. Yet, she is concerned about the economy and the job situation he will face. She worries about outside influences in the freedom of a college campus for a child who has never been on his own before. She prays that he will be safe.

Already the grandmother misses him but she has been through this leave-taking with her own three children. She missed her artistically inclined boy who drew pictures on his bedroom wall. She remembers her other little boy who stood on his bed and insisted that he saw elephants when he had a high fever. She thinks of the lovely girl who baked hamantashen from scratch in her kitchen. All three of them are married now and have children of their own, but the grandmother has not forgotten the feelings she had when they went away to college.

She remembers mailing packages of salamis, bagels and cookies. They lived in expensive dorms with cockroaches and bees. She visited them at college in sloppy rooms with all their clothing strewn across futons on the floor.

“How do you know which stuff is clean and which is dirty?” she asked. “Easy,” the boy said. “You pick it up and smell it!” He was straight-faced and serious. Yuck!

Sometimes they came home for holidays. Other times they went on trips or partied in some exotic locale that hosted spring break for young people. The grandmother had gone to college, too, but she had traveled by subway and had worked after school. At that age, she had never been anywhere but the Catskill Mountains.

Now, she looks at her daughter and son-in-law, remembering how it feels when the last child, like her grandson, goes away. There is no point in telling them that, after the child leaves, an emptiness settles on the house. The clock ticks louder. The silence in the mornings and at mealtimes is deafening. You close the door to the child’s room and do not go into it for weeks, even to clean up the mess left behind. You’re all choked up when you finally do it.

The grandmother will not tell her daughter and son-in-law that the hardest part of raising a child is the letting go.

Toby J. Rosenstrauch is an award-winning columnist and a resident of Florida. Her first novel, Knifepoint, was recently published.