Max blogs on our second meeting

In this week’s lesson the foundation determined our own personal values that each person assigns through Tzedekah. We learned that each person applies their personal circumstances which influence our ability to perceive value. The majority of the organization seemed to support the majority of the money being donated to influence college loans, which may be because we all have college on our minds.

After this exercise we moved on to narrowing down what exactly Tzedekah is, and how it is unique from Gimelut Chasidim, and Charity. We determined that Tzedekah is unique because it is a combination of both of these Jewish values, and that Tzedekah not only is the giving of money, but it is also determined by the motive. Without these key elements of value it would be hard for the foundation to determine Tzedekah’s worth because it would be nebulous.

Finally we worked on creating the foundation’s mission statement. The group managed to reach consensus and the struggle led to the fruitful results of our new mission statement. It is focused around helping Jews who are ailing from the plight of poverty. We came to a consensus that it was necessary to not focus on location because it would blind us from the troubles occurring in Israel, Europe, Africa, etc… if we specified locally. This consensus was a large leap forward in accomplishing our goal.