Falafel and Tzedakah

I finished a lively and informative meeting at the office of Shatil at about 1:15 and headed down Peter Koenig to Emek Refaim on the way to the UJC office on King George. I wasn’t really hungry as I approached Rachel Imenu, but this intersection is populated by small, bustling restaurants and cafes and my eye was drawn to a falafel shop with an open front and two people standing at the counter to order. I paused for a second at the coffee shop next door, because a friend frequents it, but then just took the next few steps to the falafel counter and ordered. Because I did not see water in the drinks case, I even managed to ask in grammatically correct Hebrew if they had water, to which the server pointed to a different case. There were three small tables, each with one person seated, so I turned from the counter and asked the elderly diner if it was o.k. to sit. He had grey, closely cropped hair, blue eyes, firm features, and a slight, but strong build.
Before I took the first bite, he asked in heavily accented English, “Where are you from?”
“Artzot Habrit (U.S.), tzafon Carolina,” I replied.
“Is .....(garbled) there?”
“Excuse me?” I said, leaning forward, to better catch the sound.
“Is Raleigh there?”
“Yes, I am from Chapel Hill.”
“Is this your first visit?”
“No, I have been here several times. I am on sabbatical from the University.”
“What is your specialty?”
“I teach public health, but I am in Israel to learn about philanthropy in Israel.”
“You only need to know for more money, they always want more money, shnorrers (beggars in Yiddish).”
I could have just laughed knowingly, but I wanted to know what he meant.
“Why do you say that?”
“I come from a religious family. I am not religious any more, but the heredi (ultra-Orthodox) are a terrible problem. They ask for money, but they do not know how to do anything. They just beg. A friend asked me to give a contribution for his son’s wedding. ‘Why should I?’ I asked. ‘Why doesn’t he get a job?’ The father said, ‘he works for God, he studies Torah.’ ‘Then God should pay him,’ I said. I come from Belgium. I was in the Holocaust. The heredi in Belgium don’t know anything. There was a book about the Jewish community before World War I, World War I, and even then Jews came from the east to beg for money in Brussels. I am a bachelor, but I have a lot of cousins, many cousins."
“I understand. It is a problem.” Not wanting to end my conversation with this intriguing person, I continued, “So, tell me, what kinds of things do you give money to?”
“I bought a Torah scroll from a cousin. I have a lot of cousins. I paid him $30,000, but only $10,000 per year, because they do not know from what to do with the money. They only know from begging, Schnorers!”
“Do you give to any organizations?”
At this point, the crowd was re-arranging itself, so a rather stocky scraggy-bearded American, with a large black, skullcap, a too small, frayed and slightly stained white shirt, sat down at our table and started to listen in.
“No, you give money and it goes away. You give to feed poor people and how much goes to the poor? There was a man, a pious man, Sholem Weiss, did you know him, who went to prison for 850 years for stealing life insurance. Stealing life insurance, stealing people’s life savings.”
“How many years?”
“850 years. The salaries are too high.”
“So what do you do for a living?”
“I have a business, diamonds.”
He then confided with a hint of a smile, “I have a non-Jewish girlfriend. I can’t go to any weddings or family things with her.”
“Does she live here or in Belgium?”
“Do you know Europe?”
I nodded.
“She lives in Lille, about 70 kilometers.”
Not wanting to drop his gift giving philosophy, I pushed a little. “Aren’t there ways to be sure that the gifts go where you want them to go?”
“No, no, you can’t believe anything,” he asserted, reminding me of the elderly gentleman in the supermarket at Pesach who cautioned us about that we probably could not believe the expiration date on the butter we were about to buy. “I gave money for food and the card had an address. Do you know that it was? The home of the man. A nice house.”
At this point the new arrival joined in. “Maybe, it was just his address, because he did not pay for an office? Maybe he really did use the money to help people. Before the war, an American gangster, Mickey Cohen, gave $50 million to the Nazis for trucks in trade for Jews. Sometimes you can do good things with money that came from bad behavior.”
“No, no, that did not happen. Would the Americans allow the Nazis to have trucks? In the war? Kastner, maybe traded. He was murdered.”
“So what could organizations do to make you o.k. with them?”
“The salaries are too high, 30,000 shekels per month. The highest salary should not be more than 3 times the average.”
As the conversation was winding down, our young friend asked, “do you know anyone who wants to give away money? I am trying to start a settlement near Bet Jala.”
“Why?” Mr. Feig demanded. “The Arabs will outnumber the Jews and then it will be like South Africa, apartheid. They have many more children than the Jews. Then what? Then what?”
“But they die younger,” the young man offered. “Have you heard of AIDS?”
With a dismissive wave of his hand, my elderly friend reminded him that Jews have AIDS too, but the retort was not as much. I think Mr. Feig joined me in realizing that this three-way conversation was getting a little out of hand so we both got up, shook hands and went on our ways.

This serendipitous encounter reflected several important philanthropic/tzedakah themes. Family is at the core of tzedakah in Jewish tradition, as demonstrated by my friend. Giving is personal. Mr. Feig gives directly to people he knows. Trust is paramount. For him at least, there are no trustworthy sources of information beyond his own personal knowledge. A challenge is to translate this seminal value of trust into the fiber of organizations and to be transparent in communicating with the public and potential donors. People gave their funds to Madoff because he seemed like family. He should be excoriated as much for violating that trust as for his criminal use of the funds. Donors are concerned about overhead, administration, the costs that do not appear to help people directly. Another challenge is to communicate how our ability to help people—beyond our families—entails some measure of operational expense, but the fundamental principle is to use gifts wisely. Our third friend shows as well that one person's important cause, may be folly to another. Mr. Feig had a lively and enlivening personal story to tell. Our giving comes from our hearts, from how we define ourselves.