I like entitlements. I know that’s somehow a terrible thing to say. “Entitlement” has become a dirty four-syllable word in our deranged political culture.
Mount Sinai Memorial Parks and Mortuaries is recognizing the importance of traditional charitable giving. Los Angeles’ largest Jewish funeral home has begun offering free, limited-edition tzedakah boxes to California, Arizona and Nevada residents, hoping they’ll give to charities of value without being told where to give.
What do you do when you run out of money? When you’re about to be evicted from your home, or having trouble feeding your kids, or simply can’t afford the basic necessities of life? What happens, also, when you can’t afford certain things you consider crucial — like sending your children to a Jewish day school?
In the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in eastern Turkey on Oct. 23, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) has begun collecting funds for relief efforts.
Judaism has a lot to say about how to create a balance between using the resources we have and abusing or destroying them.
This is not the time to extinguish the many institutions that have risen up to create a civil society. The arts nourish the soul, schools nurture the potential of our youth and promote the scientific and creative research that will secure our future.
A young boy with a serious illness was a big football fan. So Grossman, Usdan and the staff made some calls and found someone to donate two Super Bowl tickets, and someone else to sponsor the trip. When the boy found out about the trip, his parents said it was \”the first time he smiled since getting his diagnosis.\”
So here we are seven years later, about to enter the Jewish year 5769. The deaths of Sept. 11 have been compounded by more deaths in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. In many ways our world is more violent and certainly more fearful than it had been. Evidence of evil abounds.
I\’ve spoken about Darfur for five years straight now, and sometimes I get tired of talking about the genocide that has claimed 450,000 lives, just as I\’m sure people get tired of listening to me talk about it. Yet for me, as for many other Jews, there is simply no choice in the matter. This is because as Jews, we know what it is like to have the world forget and to have the world fail to act.
Parshat Shoftim (Deuteronomy 16:18-21:9) One of the biggest misnomers in the Jewish vocabulary is the translation of tzedakah as \”charity.\” This mistranslation has gone on for so long in the American Jewish community that it\’s a hard habit to break.
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