Home › Blog › Aligning Your Family’s Philanthropy with Jewish Values in 5787
Last month, as we moved through Elul, we suggested sitting with three questions about your giving: where it aligned, where it had drifted, and what single commitment you would make walking into 5787. That kind of reflection is essential, and it is also, by design, a solitary exercise. An accounting of one’s soul.
However, philanthropy is rarely practiced alone. It happens at kitchen tables, in collaborative funds, and the moment when a child becomes an active actor in philanthropic decision-making. If Elul is the season for asking: “what do I believe?,” then the New Year ahead is a good time to expand the questions to your community: “what do we believe?”
This year, the Jewish Community Foundation is proposing a different kind of values exercise. Not a worksheet you fill out alone, but a conversation with loved ones that builds connection and deepens understanding.
The idea is intentionally simple:
Every member of your household, partners, children, grandparents, and others, independently names three topics or organizations where they think giving could have the biggest impact. Topics can be broad, like “environmental sustainability,” “world Jewry,” or “access to healthcare.”
Write them down separately. Don’t compare notes until everyone has finished.
Then put the lists side by side.
What you’ll likely find is more interesting than a tidy consensus. Some answers will overlap in ways that surprise you. Perhaps your teenager names the same Holocaust educational organization you’ve quietly supported for a decade. Others will reveal real gaps opportunities: a partner who has never once mentioned an interest in humanitarian work suddenly listing that as the number one cause they’d give to. Or a child who lights up describing a summer camp for terminally ill kids that you’ve genuinely never heard of. Either way, you’ve learned something about the people you love that a lookback at last year’s giving would never have told you.
Jewish tradition has never treated tzedakah as a private transaction between an individual and a cause. It’s communal by design, passed from parent to child, and modeled more than taught. The tzedakah box on the Shabbat table is not primarily a fundraising mechanism, but rehearsal for a life-long repeated ritual that teaches a child, long before they understand abstractions like “philanthropy” or “values alignment,” that giving is simply part of what this family does.
But rehearsal only works if the child eventually gets a turn to lead. Foundation’s own Tzedakah Across Generations guide outlines how to talk about & teach philanthropic giving at different developmental stages. The exercise we’re describing here fits naturally into that progression, but it works at any stage. You don’t need a twelve-year-old earning new “moral agency,” in the language of bar and bat mitzvah, to ask a five-year-old what they’d donate their tzedakah to if they could give it to anything. Besides, you may be surprised by what your little ones have been quietly observing.
Once you have your three lists side by side, resist the urge to immediately turn it into a spreadsheet. The goal isn’t to produce a five-year family giving plan in one sitting, but to surface the shared alignment and respected differences.
If you find genuine overlap, a cause that shows up on more than one list, that’s a strong signal. It may be worth designating a portion of your family’s giving specifically to that shared interest this year, even if it’s modest. A donor-advised fund opened in a child’s name, with even a small contribution, can hold that overlap and grow over time.
If you find a gap, a cause one person named that no one else had even considered, treat it as an invitation, not an oversight. Ask the person who named it why this cause is important to them. What’s the story behind it? Where did they hear about it? Sometimes the most meaningful philanthropic relationships in a family begin with one person noticing something the rest of the household missed entirely.
And if everyone’s lists look completely different, with no overlap at all, that’s useful information too! It may simply mean your family’s philanthropy this year should look less like one shared fund and more like several individual ones, each person directing their own portion toward what moved them. There is no Jewish law that says a family’s giving must be unified to be meaningful. Tzedakah given by each member toward what speaks to them is still tzedakah.
5787 doesn’t ask you to arrive with a finished plan. It asks you to simply begin, honestly, with where you and your family actually are and to reclaim the sacred act of generosity.
This New Year, before the next grant cycle, gala invitation, or “where should we give this year?” conversation, try the three-cause exercise instead. See what your children, partner, and yourself actually say when nothing is constraining the answer but one’s own convictions.
At the Jewish Community Foundation, we know that family philanthropy conversations can be wonderful and complicated. Whatever this exercise uncovers, whether it surfaces a cause you’ve always known mattered or one you’re only just discovering, we’d love to help your family carry it forward. Our Philanthropic Impact advisors are available to work with both individuals and multigenerational families as you navigate your giving through the lens of your Jewish values.
Wishing you and your family a meaningful 5787, full of conversations that lead toward greater good.
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