Mik Moore is the editor of jspot.org, a project of Jewish Funds for Justice. This is his first contribution to the Daily Shvitz.

Earlier this week, I sat down for lunch with several co-workers to talk about our personal philanthropy. How did we make decisions about our tzedekah? What motivated us? Where did our money go?

Let me back up for a second and provide some context. This is a topic of no small interest in my job,Don't Write Off the Rambam!: Mik Moore makes the case for quiet charity because we are a public foundation. That means we give away money, but unlike most foundations you’ve heard of, we aren’t funded through an endowment. We raise our own budget each year.

In the Jewish world, we are unique – a Jewish foundation whose grantmaking is focused on supporting community organizing in low-income communities, mostly immigrants and people of color.

So, back to lunch. We all went around and spoke about our personal tzedakah. For many of us, myself included, we were not terribly strategic about our giving. Although there is consensus among us that poverty issues are a priority, we often gave significant amounts of money to support causes that had nothing to do with poverty. The reason for giving? Usually because we were asked to give by a close friend or relative. We were giving mostly for them, not for the cause.

As the conversation progressed, one of us raised the question of anonymous vs non-anonymous giving. The example cited with greatest disapproval was the practice by one Jewish Federation to publish and distribute a list the exact dollar amount of all of its contributors. This was an egregious enough sin to convince one of our lot to forgo future contributions.

Stop. Fast forward a few days. I’m reading Jewcy and enjoying the mutual admiration society forming between Joey Kurtzman and Peter Singer over whether or not the former should be pleasuring himself in front of the world for his $1000 contribution to fight global poverty.

As Kurtzman wrote:

Uh oh, do you find my self-satisfaction nauseating? Of course you do. You've been indoctrinated with all that insufferable Judeo-Christian twaddle about good deeds being noblest when done quietly, without public display or recognition. Jesus's favorite talking point. The Pharisees couldn't walk an old lady across the Cardo without sending the Lamb of God off on another tiresome rant about the hypocrisy of good deeds done for public display.

And it wasn't just Jesus. In the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides broke charity down into eight forms, and the more selfless your intentions, the more noble the charity.

It's all a bunch of destructive hippy-dippy bullshit. The real hero is the person who gives, and then struts and preens in public like they just fucked the prom queen.

Somehow, I find it hard to believe that Kurtzman actually thinks that the reason we haven’t tackled global poverty is because of JC and Rambam. Individuals and corporations have not been shy about touting their philanthropy for years; everywhere you look in the non-profit world you’ll see the names of donors prominently placed. At Jewish Funds for Justice, where I work, we follow the common practice of listing our donors by giving category: big donors first, little donors last. Several years ago Ted Turner made a very public $1 billion donation to create the U.N. Foundation , with the goal of convincing other philanthropists to give. The Gates Foundation and other Silicon Alley types engage in a form of competitive philanthropy that has been common among mega-donors for years.

While some people find this public giving distasteful, they are a minority with little power. So Kurtzman shouldn’t worry so much…

The real problem with Kurtzman’s approach is that his $1000 gift doesn’t really mean shit. Or, to be more kind, we don’t know enough about Kurtzman to know if it means shit. Instead of donors like Kurtzman publicizing the dollar amount of their gift, we should be publicizing the percentage of income we are giving and the object of our philanthropy.

In others words, Kurtzman’s prideful boasting can only really be justified if the $1000 is a significant amount of money for him. If you make $40,000 a year, that’s a very generous gift. If you make $200,000, well, not so much.

Unless we think the rich are somehow better than the poor because of their wealth, we should stop making a big deal out of $1 million gifts by billionaires and start making a big deal out of $200 gifts by low wage workers. Ultimately, if the rich gave as much as a percentage of their wealth as do the poor, we’d be well on our way to ending poverty.

But only the rich – and those with websites like Kurtzman – are able to “strut and preen in public like they just fucked the prom queen.”

Finally, a few words about Maimonides. It’s true that he placed a premium on anonymous giving. But we would do a disservice to tune him out because of it, even if you’re behind Kurtzman 100%. Maimonides cared about anonymity so that the recipient wouldn’t feel indebted to another person, often someone they knew. I don’t doubt Jewcy’s reach, but despite his best efforts Kurtzman’s money is, in Maimonides’ eyes, essentially anonymous. Furthernore, Maimonides cared about much more than anonymity; his top level of giving requires us to provide a person with a loan or to help them find a job, so that they can support themselves. Today we’d call that a structural approach to poverty, which is exactly what we need to end poverty, rather than simply indefinitely subsidizing the poor.