I’m going to do something which I don’t
usually do here: write about money. This isn’t an ask;
it’s a mull. But I’m aware as I write that this comes
at the time when the good folks who organize our Jewish
community for us are asking...I had a chat recently with friends who live somewhere else. They were reflecting on how they give tzedaka in their family. One particular question they were asking could be phrased, I think, something like: ‘In a community and world of such enormous need, where should contributing to the local shul’ [they actually used another, bigger-city term] ‘fit in to our priorities?’
As it happens, I’ve been chewing on this question ever since our tzedaka series at the shul last year, and it’s been one of those little questions that opens for me into bigger and bigger questions. I remember the panel we held to open that series last year, in which four or five of people in our community spoke about how they make their tzedaka decisions. Each speaker had a different approach: one only gives to individuals, another only to organizations. One looks to foster social change; another wants to meet immediate needs, and so on.
As you all know, I meticulously don’t know who contributes to MCJC. (Here’s a tip of my kippah to the effort which our Board extends to keep it this way! That policy is a small but crucial part of our vision of MCJC as a community encompassing everyone without preference.) Still, I might guess that a number of people on the panel that night do in fact contribute to MCJC -- but they didn’t mention it. If this were a sample of thousands instead of a sample of five, it would lead me to hypothesize that, while people may find it important to support their religious community, they don’t see this support as part of their charitable giving. Which is an interesting little hypothesis.
For ten points: how is contributing to a shul, or a church or a mosque or a sangha, different from contributing to (to pick a noble charity at random) Doctors Without Borders? Or our local Food Bank? One answer might be that we hope never to need the services of Doctors Without Borders or the Food Bank. So contributing there has an air of impeccability which is different than contributing to sustain a resource that we do use ourselves. It’s for others, needier than ourselves.
How then is supporting a shul different than paying dues to a health club? Well, with the health club, once you flake out on your exercise program, you stop paying dues. And the qualms you feel are not about the nobility of the health club enterprise and its reliance on your generosity but about what you should be doing (Zumba) versus what you actually are doing (lying on the couch.) So contributing there is strictly fee-for-service. It has very little moral content.
I think that the shul/church/mosque/sangha occupies an interesting middle space between the purely altruistic charity and the purely fee-for-service business. It’s an institution that we do use ourselves, or maybe think we should use ourselves. It’s not really for someone else. But it has a kind of moral weight which feels a little more serious than does the health club. We have some funny, hard to pin down need for the shul to be there, however little or much we partake. (One might or might not say the same of theater, opera, museums...)
I actually think that a better metaphor than either the food bank or the health club and contributions thereto is that religious institutions are like the government, and our contributions are like taxes. Sounds weird, I know -- but stay with me a minute.
Until the modern era the local Jewish community was the government of the Jews. A feudal lord somewhere might demand payments, but schools, hospitals, care for the poor, marrying and burying, culture, crime prevention, defense, not to even mention religious life -- all these were the purview of the local village council, beit din or whatever. There was very little distinction between responsibility for the bodies and responsibility for the souls of the community’s Jews. Jewish law covered banking, home construction and the content of marriage contracts no more and no less than it did the timing of Shabbat or the shape of the shofar.
Once the Emancipation happened, Jews could be, and more or less had to be, citizens of nations. And at this point, one might say, a kind of psychic separation began between the purview of the government -- which was largely, though not entirely, on the physical plane -- and religious institutions, which became -- largely but not entirely -- the address for matters of the soul.
Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement, said famously (well, famously to Reconstructionist rabbis anyhow) that Jews today live in two civilizations. And we’re constantly moving back and forth between them. We live in secular civilization and we live in Jewish civilization both. Secular civilization does everything we know it does, for good and for ill. And Jewish civilization does some things we see and some maybe we don’t. It’s a huge oversimplification to say that the Jewish community administers services to the soul. But it’s not totally off-base either. The Jewish community, like other religious institutions, sees to the moral, cultural and spiritual development and nurture of its constituents.
We don’t usually think of the taxes we pay to the government as tzedaka. But in an important way they are. They are the vehicle through which our secular civilization pays for its enterprises of maintaining the bodies (and to some extent the minds and hearts) of its constituents. In fact I was surprised last year, when doing some research on tithing, to learn that something like half of the Federal budget goes to safety net programs, if you include Social Security and Medicare in the equation (only about 9% if you don’t.) We may be appalled by how our taxes are disbursed. We may see the need for revolution! But I don’t think many of us would feel it right to have a world in which there was no social entity charged with organizing how we care for each other in need, educate our children or build and maintain infrastructure bigger than our own home, and no responsibility to pay taxes to support all this.
Okay, now let’s try the tax analogy on the Jewish community. The infrastructure which religious groups build and maintain isn’t as tangible as roads and bridges, because it has to do more with the spirit. Religious institutions of all kinds build and maintain calendars of celebration and introspection. We build community. We build moral education. We build structures for people passing through life transitions. We provide soul support, and some amount of resource, to the enterprise of caring for people who fall through the safety net. We provide access to traditional texts and practices designed to accomplish all of these things. Like the government we may do it well or poorly. Our very ideas may be wise or ridiculous, life-affirming or divisive and dangerous, in the eyes of any viewer. There are certainly times for revolution in the religious world, even in little old MCJC. But I think that many of us understand the need for there to be some kind of social institution charged with nurturing and maintaining souls.
Okay, dear friends, it’s time for me to step away from the computer and make some pretty things for the table for Tu B’shevat. Not exactly roads and bridges (or tanks or rockets), but hopefully something tiny that feeds a little morsel to the soul of the world.
© 2010 Rabbi Margaret Holub