Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

The Gift of Giving

Is a panhandler deserving of charity or is the person a threat to public safety? I see the issue altogether differently. When a stranger asks me for money, I believe that that person is offering me the opportunity to give.

I once read that it is no more ethical to give than to receive. Confounded, I struggled with the concept for days. We have been conditioned to associate giving with righteousness and moral superiority. In truth, giving and receiving are in a delicate balance, neither being possible without the other, and neither holding more value. While we may feel a moral obligation to donate, there is a deeper reason that motivates us: It feels good to give. In order for you to experience the joy of giving, there must be someone willing to receive. So whatever your final answer is, the best way to respond when someone on the street asks you for money is to acknowledge that giving is a gift in itself: “I’m sorry, my answer is no, but thank you for asking.”

Many of us worry about what our money will be spent on; however, a gift, by definition, has no strings attached. When you give a relative a check as a birthday gift, do you tell him or her how to spend the money? If that relative bought a bottle of wine, would you despair?

Believing that panhandlers deter downtown shopping, the city of Peterborough in Ontario, where I live, was inspired by other municipalities across the United States and Canada to install “care meters” downtown. Instead of putting money in a human hand, we are encouraged to place our spare change into a brightly painted parking meter. The money is reportedly shared by various local social service agencies.

The care meters were erected despite the fact that food banks, shelters and community groups already offer the basics to those in need. Spare change, unlike a social service, can be used for anything: for a birthday gift, or for a coffee in a cafe instead of in a church basement. Maybe it will be spent on alcohol, just like the average person’s disposable income. If you have some change to offer, that’s great, but it doesn’t confer upon you the right to control or to judge.

Do we really need to have our human interactions mediated by parking meters? If you feel put off, annoyed or righteous when you are asked for money, it may be an indication that you need to look more closely at your own defensiveness and insecurity. I don’t despair when I see people asking for money downtown; instead, my heart is warmed with gratitude at our humanity, our ability to connect and to offer each other the opportunity to give and to receive.

If you want to address systemic issues that lead to homelessness, then donate to an organization that is doing that work. But when you meet a panhandler, remember that the person is asking for a gift, not a savior.

Ziysah von Bieberstein is a parent, activist and spoken word artist living in Peterborough, Ontario.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.