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Jewish Community News
Ask the Rabbi: November 2007
Ask the Rabbi: Have you done your Chanukah “tzedakah audit”?
By Rabbi Joshua Fenton,
Director of the APJCC Center for Jewish Life & Learning
If Rosh Hashanah is a time of spiritual accounting, Chanukah has become a time of financial accounting for many American Jews.
Americans give more to charity in November and December than any other time of year. One reason is that the American winter holidays are traditionally associated with giving. The other reason is the lure of the tax deduction – make your donations to charity by December 31, and you’ll save on your taxes in April.
That makes Chanukah the ideal time for a personal “tzedakah audit;” take stock of how much you’ve given to charity this year. Making a list of your charitable donations will get you a head start on your tax preparation, and provide you with time to discover if you need to give more, both from a tax perspective and also from a Jewish perspective.
Jewish tradition prescribes giving 10 percent of our net income to charity, but most of us don’t come near this amount. The reasons are obvious. The cost of living in California is expensive. Housing is expensive, food is expensive, children are expensive… but everything is relative. Recently members of our community participated in the Food Stamp Challenge, a program run by the JCRC of the Jewish Federation. Participants ate for one week on a food stamp budget, $21.00 per week, less than $100-a-month. Now imagine how much good 10 percent of your income could do. How many families could you feed for a year on that 10 percent?
A study by the Chronicle of Philanthropy a few years ago found that Silicon Valley residents give less to charity than their counterparts in the rest of the Bay Area – less than 2 percent of annual income.
Many reasons have been suggested for this phenomenon, in particular the younger-than-average age at which many Silicon Valley residents have achieved prosperity. But whatever the reason, it’s never too early or too late to think about increasing our level of tzedakah.
This past summer, the New York Times published an article on “Silicon Valley Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich.” The article quoted several of Silicon Valley’s “working-class millionaires,” people who see their accumulated wealth as puny compared to the vaster fortunes of other people around them.
Doing a personal tzedakah audit can be an antidote to this type of thinking.
Instead of looking at how much you can’t buy this Chanukah season compared to your neighbor whose company’s stock price is soaring, consider how much your money can buy for a family in need. It’s a good way to get perspective on your personal finances. What better gift can you give yourself then the realization of your own blessings, the opportunity to truly change the world for the better.
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