Tzedakah (Charity) in Israel

The Working Poor

Posted by admin under Uncategorized

Thursday is “Israeli day” at the Tel Aviv branch of Kav La’Oved (Workers Hot Line), so among the dozens of foreign workers crowded into the fourth-floor lobby, there are a few minimum-wage Israeli laborers looking for help.

One, Rosa, a 59-year-old cleaning lady, is visibly distressed over the letter she’s just received from her ex-employer, which ends with the words “and I intend to sue you according to the laws of the courts of the State of Israel.” Rosa was fired after returning the cleaning company owner’s Pessah gift, a cheap little toaster she considered an insult.

After getting fired, she went to one of the company’s clients, whose office she’d been cleaning for the last year, to get a letter of recommendation so she could look for a new job. The letter she got describes her as “a complete professional who works well with others and who would be an asset wherever she is employed.” When the owner of the cleaning company found out, she wrote to Rosa to expect a lawsuit “for acting against my instructions [by] contacting my clients and causing unpleasant provocations.” More…

Capitalism at it’s best

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Could not believe my ears. A “friend” of mine had a problem with one of the the computer systems in his office. All his workers are paid hourly. Since there was not the “regular” work to be done he chose to tell people not to come in, and of course not be paid either. I told him:

“I was thinking (a lot) about your thinking today. You had considered (decided?) to ask Ali and/or others to not come in on Sunday because the import function is not working. Though my suggestion is business related, I think there is room to think of her, or that of the other’s side as well.

These people are not paid very much, in a country that is not the easiest, to say the least, to make a living. Having her miss those hours of work is a serious hit on her pocket. I would like to suggest that we give her other important work like updating old records, researching people who have moved on (Zev should have a list of these) etc.

I agree that business must be separated from Chesed. Otherwise business does not profit and those profits would not be available to do chesed. In our case though, there is work that needs be done in any case, and there is the added bonus of the chesed side as well.

Just some thoughts…”
I hope he listens.

Jonathan Rosenblum: “The Gym is Only a Metaphor”

Posted by admin under Self Improvement, Tzedakah, What can "I" do

by Jonathan Rosenblum

Returning from a successful run on the treadmill last week, I contemplated how much better I felt than when I dragged myself to the gym, after an early morning minyan. The most obvious reason was that I had made it there at all. Just showing up at the gym is its own triumph. The yetzer possesses an incredible number of ways to talk one out of subjecting oneself to pain.

No doubt the endorphins released by vigorous exercise also played a large role. There are few better guaranteed mood enhancers than exercise.

But the best thing about the gym, I suspect, is the feeling it gives one of growing. Whether one runs faster or farther or just stays the same while growing steadily older, there is measurable improvement.

Every run includes at least a half dozen conversations in one’s head, in which any number of strong reasons are presented why right now would be a good time to stop. One experiences the truth of Rav Dessler’s statement that ever since the Sin of Adam the yetzer hara speaks from inside us – “I want.” When the yetzer hatov speaking from outside us – “You should” – wins one of those arguments, there is a real sense of accomplishment.

What I derived from my morning run was the close connection between happiness and personal growth. Human beings are the only ones of Hashem’s creations whose actions are not determined by instincts common to every member of the species. Only we can contemplate the future and set individual goals for ourselves; only we can decide to forego immediate pleasure in pursuit of a long-range goal.

Hashem has planted in each of us a need to grow. That growth depends on overcoming our weaknesses, whether physical, emotional, or intellectual. The attraction of the gym is that it provides us with constant objective measures of improvement.

Recognition that human beings are hard-wired to seek growth has important implications for our role as parents. Most of us devote our parenting energies to shielding our children from pain and protecting them from experiencing failure. That desire to protect our children from failure has fueled the self-esteem movement of the last thirty years. My friend Rabbi Avraham Birnbaum wrote recently in Yated Ne’eman about the trend in our educational institutions to give every child not less than an A minus on their report card, regardless of either achievement or effort.

Instead of protecting our children from setbacks, our energies would be better spent on helping them develop the tools to overcome those setbacks and not give up in the face of adversity. Instead of inundating them in praise – which they, in any event, come to distrust when it is not linked to tangible effort or achievement – we have to teach them how to set goals and work towards attaining them. Let them experience the pleasure that comes from overcoming obstacles, both internal and external, while reminding them that growth is only measured in relationship to themselves and what they need to overcome, not in relationship to anyone else.

In short, our task as parents is to provide them with opportunities to experience the truth of Chazal’s statement: l’fum tzaara agra – according to the pain is the reward. As Rabbi Noah Weinberg used to say, the idea that the opposite of pleasure is pain is a product of Western decadence: Pain is often the precondition for true pleasure. He felt it important to speak frequently about all his many failures prior to founding Aish HaTorah.

WHEN I PRESENTED my gym-based insight about the innate human need to grow to my morning chavrusah, he entered an important caveat: Don’t confuse the moshol with the nimshal. The attraction of the gym is that it provides concrete, objective measures of growth. But such objective feedback is often not available in the most important areas of our striving. It is not easy, for instance, for a yeshiva bochur to measure his growth in learning b’iyun (in-depth). There may be indicators of growth – e.g., when one constantly meets “good friends,” in the form of Rishonim and Achronim, as one plumbs the depths of a sugya – but progress remains notoriously hard to quantify.

Faster-paced bekius learning offers more concrete measuring sticks in terms of the number of dapim (pages) covered. And it is easier to formulate tests of students’ command of the material in bekius learning. Those tangible measures of progress in bekius learning attract many to focus their energies there. I can still remember my rosh yeshiva warning me when I went off to learn the blatt, with regular tests, in the afternoon at Mirrer Yeshiva, “You’ll find bekius so enjoyable that you won’t be able to get back into iyun.”

Yet it is a tragic mistake to focus our energies in life based on the ready availability of objective feedback. Some areas are intrinsically more worthy of our striving than others. Not all improvement is equal. Otherwise, we would be well-advised to spend every available moment in the gym, where feedback is both objective and instantaneous.

Middos development, for instance, is not easily quantified. Situations like that described by the Rambam in Hilchos Teshuva, where one finds oneself in exactly the same situation in which one failed in the past, do not occur every day. Yet the difficulty of measuring our development in middos does not detract one iota from the necessity of constantly striving to improve.

The perfection of our middos is ultimate goal of our lives. The more that we succeed in emulating the middos of HaKadosh Baruch Hu – just as He is gracious and merciful so must you be gracious and merciful – the more we are capable of bonding to Him, and the greater connection we will experience to Him in the World to Come. But we will only know our final score on the test when we reach the World of Truth.

From the gym we gain a sense of the close connection between our personal growth and our joy in living. Nowhere else do we so readily experience the pleasure of carrying on to reach a goal when part of our brain is screaming, “Quit.” But once the lessons have been learned (and the endorphins released), it is time to apply them to more important goals than running faster or longer.

Reprinted with permission from the author.  Originally published in Mishpacha Magazine, March 17, 2010.

How You Can Help Alleviate Poverty

Posted by admin under Solutions to Poverty, What can "I" do, World Poverty

by Susan White

The majority of us are in this situation - we were neither born with silver spoons in our mouth nor born on the wrong side of the tracks. We’re average middle-class citizens who have never had obscene amounts of money or been dirt poor and unable to afford the basic necessities of life. But even if we don’t have hoards of money and even if we’ve never experienced what it’s like to have no money for food, there are ways in which we can help alleviate poverty and raise the quality of life of those who are not as lucky as us.

• Sponsor their education: Education is the key to a better life. With a degree, it’s easier for people to gain access to the job market and secure a position that pays well. So if you really want to do your bit to uplift a child’s future, sponsor their education. It will not cost you much, but the returns that the child gains are priceless.
• Provide them with jobs: Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime – there’s more than a modicum of truth to this saying. So if you want to help someone come up in life, provide them with the opportunity to earn decent money by giving them a job. Don’t exploit their poverty by paying them less than or bare minimum wages in return for a large amount of work. Rather, pay them according to the work they do, and encourage them to use the opportunity to further their career and work harder towards building a better future.
• Discourage begging: We often feel sorry for beggars and those who are homeless and drop a coin or two into their bowls. But we’re only encouraging poverty with this act. It’s worse if the beggar is a child who should either be in school or helping his family earn a daily wage. So instead of doling out alms, provide them with jobs or get them to go to school so that their future is better.

Poverty is more often than not a mantle that’s passed on from generation to generation –you’re unlucky to be born with it and it’s a rut that’s hard to break out of if you don’t try hard enough with a combination of education and determination. When you are willing to give the poor but determined that much needed push to get them out of the rut, you’re doing your bit to eradicate this social evil from your country.

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This article is contributed by Susan White, who regularly writes on the subject of Radiology Technician Schools in California . She invites your questions, comments at her email address: susan.white33@gmail.com.