NEW YORK — It’s that time of year again.
My mailbox is filled to overflowing with solicitations from Jewish organizations of every stripe, seeking contributions for every conceivable cause.
It happens each High Holy Day season.
Just as secular and Christian charities — Amnesty International, the Foundation Fighting Blindness, the United Way — deluge me with requests each December, the Jews do it before Rosh Hashanah.
Secular charities don’t hesitate to remind those on their mailing list that the “season of giving” has arrived, and even though Jewish solicitors are not so overt in their mass mailings, that is the message.
Jewish tradition says that if God has written us into the book listing those individuals marked for death in the coming year, three things can avert the evil decree: repentance, prayer and charity.
And so the mail comes. From everyone. From more Jewish groups than I had any idea existed.
From the most massive, best-funded institutions comprising the Jewish establishment — institutions whose leaders are frequently quoted in the New York Times — and from tiny groups whose entire annual budgets are smaller than the cost of the huge organizations’ direct-mail campaign.
I got a set of New Year’s cards from UJA-Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York; they’re hoping I’ll return one of the cards to the charity with a check enclosed.
And that ubiquitous Orthodox yeshiva, the Hebrew Academy of Cleveland, which each December sends a slightly smashed box of Chanukah candles, this year sent a packet of New Year’s cards as well.
Envelopes clotting my mailbox arrive daily from organizations dedicated to working toward tolerance and pluralism, and from those who work for what they say is the only authentic Judaism, a religion based on Torah truth as it was interpreted in the shtetls of Europe.
Sociologists may fulminate about it, and Israeli politicians may use the issue as a bargaining chip, but when it comes to collecting money, no group — even the most ultra of the ultrareligious — gets too picky about defining “Who is a Jew.”
CLAL — The National Center for Learning and Leadership; the National Jewish Outreach Program; Agudath Israel of America; the Orthodox Union; the Reconstructionist movement; and the Jewish renewal-born retreat called Elat Chayim all mailed me entreaties for donations.
This year, stuffed between the magazines and catalogs, were sophisticated appeals from the Anti-Defamation League and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. I wonder whether there’s a Jew in America who doesn’t get mail from them.
Then there were two different pitches from the Beer-Sheva Foundation, asking me to help support the poor, the elderly and recent immigrants in that southern Israeli town of 165,000 souls.
Perhaps the most interesting solicitation was from an Israeli organization named Just One Life, the Jewish version of America’s right-to-life movement.
Its anti-abortion brochure features gauzy pictures of fat and sassy infants and toddlers, overlaid by a quote from the Talmud: “He who saves Just one Life in Israel is as one who has saved an entire world.”
On the back of the brochure, the group lists its advisory committee members, including several teachers and high-ranking administrators from Bar-Ilan University and a woman identified as a representative of Israel’s Ministry of Health.
Another envelope arrived, this one from the Jerusalem Shelter for Battered Women. It contained a Rosh Hashanah card with a black-and-white photo on the front of a young woman walking with her arms around four little kids, everyone’s arms intertwined in an embrace.
Inside is a note, in Hebrew and in English, wishing recipients a happy new year, and thanking supporters for pitching in after a summertime fire destroyed one of the shelter’s halfway-house apartments.
No direct pitch is made; another little slip of paper lists an address, should recipients want to send contributions.
The Great Charity Chaye Olam Institutions of Jerusalem, which supports “orphans, poor scholars and unfortunate children,” sent me a “complete Hebrew-English pocket calendar.” And when they say complete, they mean complete.
It lists the days of the week in numerals, Hebrew and Yiddish, and reminds its owner of the Talmud page scheduled to be studied on that day.
It includes candlelighting times for the New York City area, major holidays and minor fast days and pictures of the zodiac signs appropriate to each month.
This is probably the only publication in the world that includes both the Yiddish language and a picture of a crab to illustrate July’s birth sign.
In the back are more than a dozen prayers, in Hebrew and English. You might expect it to include Kaddish (the prayer said in mourning), and the traditional traveler’s prayer, and it does.
This one also includes a special prayer to be recited when traveling by airplane, a prayer for success in life, a prayer of thanksgiving and faith, a prayer for peace and “a prayer when in deep trouble.”
I hope I don’t have to recite that last one too many times this coming year.
But I guess that depends on whether I send the Great Charity Chaye Olam Institutions of Jerusalem a check.