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Charity Boxes
User Experience designers talk about mobility meaning independence, individuality, and personal freedom. Or mobility meaning communication, income, and literacy.
What if mobility means you might be blown up by a terrorist? If mobility means vulnerability and insecurity? What happens when you combine a culture that glorifies charity with an environment of mortal vulnerability?
Israel is a country brimming with charitable acts. The phone book has 50 pages of free loan society (”gemach“) listings, offering interest- and payment-free loans of money, cell phones, baby strollers, pacifiers, Sabbath meals, medicines, photocopies, fax machines, tools… you name it.
The 600-pound gorilla of free loan societies is, of course, Yad Sarah, founded by Rabbi Uri Lupoliansky, currently mayor of Jerusalem. But gemachs are a common family activity.
It’s normal for Jewish homes worldwide to have one or more charity boxes, into which small change (usually) is collected over months or years, then picked up by the organization who owns the box. Our home currently has about five of them, including one shaped like a tractor to help support farmers during the sabbatical shemitta year.
A field between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, left fallow for the Sabbatical (Shemitta) year.
A typically Israeli sight is that of charity boxes in public places — available should a sudden philanthropic urge strike, or you just have some spare change in your hand. Or you get nervous about taking public transportation.
Here’s a common one (affixed to a pole near a bus stop):
Here’s a collection box outside the counter of a downtown bakery (note that the money collected isn’t for the shop owner):
The translated sign reads: Hidden Charity — i.e., the donor and recipient don’t know one another, which is a more sensitive form of charity — for Sabbath charity and kindness to families blessed with many children (may they live long) in honor of the holy Sabbath and the holidays. [The money will be donated to] the charity [in honor of] Rabbi Meir Baal haNes and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, may their memories protect us. May you be blessed from on high with good fortune, blessing, and success.
Here’s one I saw just down the block from my home, also next to a bus stop, but somehow it has been grown right into the knot of a tree:
