Boxes Teach Lessons of Charity

Binghamton, NY — Family’s spare change offers help to those less fortunate

They’re boxes.

Big, little. Ornate, plain. Rectangles, ovals. Wood, metal, cardboard.

But these aren’t ordinary boxes. They’re tzedakah (tse-DUH-ka) boxes, and they’re in their various spots around the Slonim household for a very special reason.

Rabbi Aaron Slonim, wife Rivkah and their nine children are followers of the Chabad-Lubovitch movement of Judaism.

The Slonim home on Murray Hill Road in Vestal is steps away from the Chabad House, the center visited by some 400 Jewish Binghamton students — and anyone else who wants to come — on any given Sabbath.

It’s in the Slonim home and in the homes of many other observant Jews the world over that one finds these many and varied boxes.

They carry with them a “pervasive consciousness,” explains Rivkah, 43. Even the one in the kitchen, which she sees when she’s cooking, serves as a constant reminder of the needs of others.

Even 2-year-old Zalman Slonim knows what to do with them. Put coins within his eager reach, and he grabs them and shoves them into the tzedakah box.

“We train them from a very young age that if they find a coin, they should put it in the tzedakah box,” Rivkah explains.

The etymological root of the Hebrew word is translated as “righteousness,” connoting that giving to charity is the right thing to do.

The biblical mandate is a baseline offering of 10 percent of one’s income — with or without counting those pennies, nickels, dimes and dollars.

Zalman’s still too young, but brothers Motty, 4, and Mendel, almost 7, can expound at length on many aspects of their deep-reaching faith.

“Because Hashem (God) is watching over you,” Mendel explains. “And it’s all Hashem’s so we’re just giving it back.”

“And it’s a mitzvah,” Motty says. Giving money to charity means a blessing for both giver and recipient.

Mendel takes his name from the middle name of the now-departed leader of the movement. According to chabad.org, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson was the seventh leader in the Chabad-Lubavitch dynasty.

The names of Mendel’s younger brothers, Schneurzalman and Mordechai — Zalman and Motty — honor Rivkah’s deceased maternal and paternal grandfathers respectively.

She grew up in a household in Brooklyn much like the one she and her husband now head. In that home were about 20 boxes, she says.

She has trouble recollecting her first exposure to the boxes or the practice associated with them: “It just was always something that was part of life.”

It was — and is — part of Meryl Sasnowitz’ life, too.

The concept is much more far-reaching than coins in a box, Sasnowitz, of Vestal, explains. To her way of thinking, a Jew’s life contains the giving of time, energy and compassion, as well as money.

When floods washed over Greater Binghamton last year, Sasnowitz, who’s part of the local Beth David congregation, volunteered her time with Nechama, a national Jewish disaster relief group that swooped into the area to help with cleanup.

Sasnowitz delights to watch her grandchildren put their pennies into the tzedakah boxes, knowing what’s being instilled into their hearts through the practice.

They’re just boxes — but they’re really much, much more.

Mendel Slonim, almost 7, shows money his family has tucked into one of the tzedakah boxes in their Vestal home.

At 2 years old, Schneurzalman “Zalman” Slonim may be too young to understand the meaning behind the coins he drops in tzedakah boxes. But as he grows, such daily giving of charity will become as natural to him as breathing.