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I’ll Take Maimonides Over Peter Singer
By Mik Moore / May 29, 2007
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,
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.
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Is the Man!
maybe staying anonymous is the best way to avert envy
and/or embarassment…if i gave away enormous amounts of
money- i certainly would not want anybody to know.
Yep, the very same. Singer inspired Unger to write Living High and Letting Die, but the book was all Unger's. It's a classic. But I can't even deal with the whole envelope thing. I'm still trying to figure out what the feck to do with Bob's Bugatti and all those idiot kids who can't stay off the train tracks. In fact, at this point I'm so frustrated with them that I'd whore out Bob's Bugatti just to guarantee that the kids get nailed by the train.
i’m browsing this site for the first time. IS this PETER SINGER the co-conspirator (w.Peter Unger) of Living High and Letting Die?? Does this man know how many hours of sleep my yeshiva roomate and I lost arguing the premise of this book! (or should i say his idea-”the letter and the envelope”). Not a good idea to discuss the book with someone reading ayn rand.
it is. But your theory, it seems to me, is that because we buy SUVs to one-up our neighbors, we will also one-up our neighbors in charitable giving, and that the only reason we are NOT already doing so is because hippies, or JC, or Rambam, or whomever has convinced us not to talk about our charity. I disagree on two levels.
First, we talk about our charity to the same extent that we talk about our money. Which is to say, not muh. There are many, mostly bad reasons why Americans in particular are reluctant to talk about money, but tackling that issue is a very heavy lift. While this kind of competition may work among the super rich, I don't see it happening among regular folks. So good luck with that.
Second, I'm not convinced that if we were willing to talk about our charity in the way you describe that we would give more. Americans, for all of our faults, give considerably more to charity that, say, Europeans. They pay more in taxes, and have a more substantial welfare state and safety net, but they don't give much to charity. Why don't we look at what works and build on it? As I note in my comment, personal asks can be very persuasive. More so than abstract appeals to end poverty, which don't work well at all.
Mik, the point I was trying to make is that, yes, as you say, "We don't give to keep up with the Joneses." But why not? If we spend extraordinary sums of money in other areas to keep up with the Joneses, and if charitable contributions in the fight against extreme poverty can be made one of those areas, isn't it worth making this a reality? What's more important? The purity and nobility of the people who give, or the causes to which they are giving? To me, it's the latter.
as i re-read this piece, that the conversation i relate in the opening raises an interesting question that i don't address at the end. so, i'll close that circle here.
Is competative philanthropy an effective means of getting people to give, particularly smaller donors? Based on this conversation, I'd say "no." We don't give to keep up with the Joneses, we give because the Joneses, who we like, ask us to give. In short, it would be more effective for Kurtzman to send an email to all of his close friends, asking them to do him a favor and make a donation, rather than telling an anonymous crowd of Jewcy readers of his grand deed.
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