Math Makes my Head Hurt

I just had an Oskar Schindler moment.

A while back I went to the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews site, and I ordered one of their free DVDs. I always take anything that’s free. I watched most of it yesterday. Wonderful stuff, about the Jewish underpinnings of Christianity. And of course, during the breaks, they talked about what the IFCJ does. At one point, they showed Ethiopian Jews, walking off an airplane onto the tarmac at Ben Gurion. I think it was a mother and two small kids.

A thousand dollars. That’s about what they cost. It costs $350 per person for you to fly a Jew to Israel, via the IFCJ’s On the Wings of Eagles program, so those three people represent about a thousand dollars.

I was thinking about that a minute ago, and I thought of Eliot Spitzer, spending $5500 an hour on prostitutes. For the price of an hour you could bring about 16 people to Israel. Lives changed forever. Oppression, gone. Persecution, gone. Charitable operations that give people one-time gifts of food and clothing are wonderful, but those things are of fleeting value. Change a person’s nation of residence, and with one act, you’ve made a change that will bless that person every day for the rest of his life. What if Eliot Spitzer had decided, on ten occasions, to send Jews to Israel instead of hiring prostitutes? There would be 157 people in Israel now, who would owe him a debt they could never repay. So easy for him, so hard for them.

I know it’s a crazy way to think. Unless Spitzer is very unlike other wealthy Jews, he has given plenty to charity. And if he hadn’t spent the money on prostitutes, he probably would have spent it on some other selfish item, and we all do that. It’s part of life. But it’s fascinating to think of the very different ways in which the same sum of money can affect the world. An hour of stupidity and lust, or sixteen changed lives.

I guess this is why I like telling people about matching gifts. Just as money spent on prostitutes differs from money spent flying poor Jews to Israel, one charity dollar spent on one program can differ from money spent on another, if the second program has a matching gift. For a certain sum, you might buy ten pounds of rice for people in Africa, or you might buy a hundred and fifty pounds, because various corporations match your gift. Money is so strange. One sum can do so many different things.

The IFCJ’s program has something many charities lack. Measurable, substantial, final results. As I said earlier today, they say they’ve flown over 300,000 Jews to Israel. Think of that! One in twenty Israelis! It’s not like other efforts, like the one in Darfur. People give and give and give, and years pass, and it seems like nothing changes. The bucket has a hole in it. Obviously, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give to people with persistent, stubborn problems. But there is something wonderful and reinforcing about knowing you accomplished something that can’t be undone.

Other charities have opportunities that are equally quantifiable, if less lasting. You can use the Gift Catalog at World Vision and buy a certain number of named items for a given price. For example, Bibles at $18 each. If you were to spend $72, you would know that somewhere in the world, four people had Bibles you paid for. You wouldn’t wonder if your contribution ran out of a hole in a sack in a grain warehouse. You wouldn’t wonder if some local fat cat skimmed it off the top. You could make yourself a list, and whenever you got discouraged about giving, you could look at the list and see the things you put in the hands of individuals. You wouldn’t necessarily know who they were, but you’d know what they got. Charities often have a “where most needed” option, and that seems like the most logical way to direct your money, but maybe the reinforcement of knowing exactly what you gave outweighs the benefit of doing more good, because it might make you more likely to continue giving.

The Gift Catalog is very humbling. You look at the things World Vision’s beneficiaries are thrilled to receive, and it breaks your heart. A small fishing kit. A single blanket. A handful of seeds. Seriously. Go look.

I guess that when you decide you want to give, you have a responsibility to shop, the same way you would shop if you were buying a computer or a refrigerator. This is why I generally turn down people who solicit money on the street. I usually can’t make a sound decision in five seconds. And I guess that when you decide what luxuries you want to buy for yourself, you might be smart to think about how many blankets or fishing kits the money would buy. Maybe that’s the way to understand how blessed you are and how much you owe to God. I have a custom-made suit I have probably worn six times. Suddenly I’m ashamed of it.

Don’t start telling me I’m an angel. If you read this blog, you know better. God has done a lot of work on me over the last couple of years. God gives you the ability to be good, and then He gives you the pleasure, and then He gives you a reward for it. How wild is that? If I had had my way, I would have stayed the same or gotten worse.

Lately I feel better about being good. Isn’t that crazy? Why would anyone need to feel better about being good? I have absorbed a lot of garbage from my surroundings, and I have made it part of me. For many years, I tried to squelch the empathy and openness I was born with, because I was surrounded by aggressors. Maybe God is peeling that uncomfortable crust off of me.

I had an idea the other day. A way someone could do a tremendous amount of good with no exertion and no cash out of pocket. You could put up a blog–Blogspot would be adequate–and you could contact a few charities. You could ask them to email you when they had special opportunities or needs or matching gifts. Then you could post links every day or two. People could come by when they wanted to see what was available. And if they wanted, they could copy the code from the latest entry and repost it on their own sites. Pretty easy.

Turns out the domain “matchinggifts.com” is taken. But it’s not a very good site. I couldn’t get it to work.

Maybe someone more focused than I am will figure out a way to do it.