The Zayde Chronicles

  F ew items are as ubiquitous in Jewish lives as Tzedakah boxes.   They stand proudly in our homes, synagogues, and Jewish organizations. As the “Greatest Generation”, the “lost generation” and “baby boomers” we grew up with tin blue and white JNF boxes and watched our grandparents and parents, returning from work or preparing for Shabbat, drop in precious coins.   For our people and our communities, Tzedakah, supporting those who need our help is not charity, it is social justice. For her first birthday, I bought Bina, my granddaughter, a Tzedakah box. Clearly, she did not know what it meant, but she enjoyed the clinking sound as the coins dropped. The visceral pleasure of guiding the coin into the narrow slot, watching it disappear, and hearing the pleasant “clink”, led to habit, which led to muscle memory. Now as a first grader in a Jewish day school, the act of giving tzedakah is becoming a shared experience and part of the social contract of her six-year-old communi...