fbpx

How Not to Give When Giving to Others

[additional-authors]
November 14, 2018

In a Journal story about giving, is it fair to write about how not to give? 

Our leaders love inspiring us to give, but I believe that many of us have caused damage — whether to ourselves or to precious relationships — by inappropriate giving. 

It’s shortsighted to think about giving only in terms of philanthropy. We all give in one way or another, to the point that life simply embodies the energizing or depleting act of giving, and the gracious or painful act of taking.

Inappropriate giving entails anything that you offer to others with an emotional price tag that could be annoying at best or received with contempt at worst, like the time that an elderly female relative took one look at our baby and asked why I was feeding him formula.

“You should give him your own milk,” she advised. “Don’t you want to give him breast milk?”

My mother (and childhood in Iran) taught me to always respect an elder, rather than being tempted to hit her over the head with her own purse. When given such unsolicited advice from a person who had no idea that I sobbed for hours each day because I worried about how much breast milk our baby was getting, I felt even more like a failure. I also wanted to retort, “Why are you so interested in breast milk? You have some to spare?

Why do we give advice that no one has asked for? Are we just dying to share some nugget of wisdom with a simpleton who obviously lacks our life experience or the many hours we’ve logged on WebMD? 

Some people give unsolicited advice, others give generous financial donations that are accompanied by … a lot of unsolicited advice. 

If you’re giving to a worthy cause, whether $36 or $36,000, know that nonprofit leaders want to hear from you, but understand that they hear feedback from donors primarily when something has gone wrong, and seldom when things have gone right. 

During my time as executive director of 30 Years After, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that aims to promote participation of Iranian-American Jews in leadership roles, it hosted an event that was particularly timely, engaging and well-executed. Naturally, the only call I received the next day was from a donor who thought it “looked very bad” that we had not served bagels during the event.

“Of everything we give to others, it’s the small pieces of ourselves we give away that matter most.”

He gave what he deemed to be an innocuous piece of advice, but he took much more, and I ended the phone call feeling depleted.

Of everything we give to others, it’s the small pieces of ourselves we give away that matter most: precious days spent trying to help a stubborn friend who reverts to his destructive, alienating ways; decades spent giving your all to a husband who continues to tune you out while on his phone; and, more recently, giving of yourself, through exhibitionism and often inappropriately, by disclosing too much on social media, whether through a photo or a post. 

On social media, we give primarily because we want to take.

We want to take in the glorious endorphins from how good it feels to see “like” after “like” and validating comment after comment. Social media gives us permission to own our opinions — because they’re constantly validated by others — whether we’re posting about pandas or policy. It gives us something that we should all intrinsically have, but most of us lack, which is a sense that we — our experiences, opinions and struggles — are worth something, even if no one knows about them enough to “like” them.

We also do our own fair share of inappropriate giving by offering our often dogmatic and divisive opinions on others’ posts, and then simply disengaging from the conversation. It’s the internet’s equivalent of throwing raw eggs at a house and driving away.

There are also times that giving is enabling, and one of the most upsetting recent examples of this is the people who continue to give, financially or through their star power, to Women’s March organizers who have publicly stated that there’s no place in feminism for Zionists and warned American Muslims not to “humanize” Israelis. Every seemingly enlightened female celebrity who continues to give to this cause without asking for more is enabling its anti-Semitic overtures. 

And then there’s the kind of giving that actually bankrupts you financially and emotionally. I know a young man with a huge heart who gave loans to a few friends totaling $50,000 and is struggling to recoup even a fraction of his money. He lost so much that he was forced to move back in with his parents. He feels depressed and hopeless.

It seems that as imperfect human beings, we’re programmed in the art of taking but need instruction in the art of appropriate giving. This is exemplified in every infant and toddler. No parent has ever had to teach a child how to take. 

We grow up and assume that we know how to give, only to give either too little or, in most cases, too much and at great cost to ourselves. Every woman who has ever lost herself in trying to make an emotionally unsatisfied man happy knows exactly what I mean. 

Try typing “how to give” into Google and you’ll see that it fills in the rest of the words for you based on popular inquiries about giving. Incidentally, those words are “how to give a hickey.”

Other online searches for healthy giving tell you how to pamper yourself by taking relaxing baths. Healthy giving seems either all about you or all about hickeys.

So how do we learn about healthy giving? If I knew the answer, I’d still have some friends whom I’ve lost because of giving unsolicited advice. 

All I can do is cast a light on the worst kind of giving, which happens when we pretend to give without actually doing so. 

It occurs when we make our children think we’re emotionally present while we check our phones as soon as they run into another room, and hide our phones as soon as they return.

It occurs when we spend time on the phone with a struggling friend, but tune out his pain by online shopping on our phone while he pours his heart out to us.

And it occurs when we give our employer the impression that we’re focused, while reading random online articles that have nothing to do with our jobs. 

Judaism teaches that giving and receiving need not be mutually exclusive. King David’s eloquent words of Psalm 145, which we often recite before the blessing of bread, refer to God by saying, “You open your hands and satiate the needs of every living thing.” When we speak this, we open our own hands, as if to receive everything that God will send us, but we also emulate the ultimate giver. 

Opening our hands embodies the desire to be the ultimate giver and the ultimate receiver. For most of us, it will take a lifetime to perfect this delicate dance.


Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer and speaker. 

Did you enjoy this article?
You'll love our roundtable.

Editor's Picks

Latest Articles

More news and opinions than at a
Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.

More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.