In reality, there is one class of Jews who already do fill out a de facto Jewish Tax Return – the masses of middle class and poor parents who fill out school scholarship forms and pay a disproportionate and inequitable share of their income and assets to educate their children. In doing so, many fall into debt, practice early birth control, and suffer domestic strife – even divorce.
At a minimum, the Jewish mother, once the bulwark of the fabled Jewish home, is sent unceremoniously into the workplace while her children are raised, to a large degree, by a patchwork of housekeepers and child care workers. Modern studies bear out that families with a working – as opposed to a stay-at-home – mother suffer a greater share of social problems such as smoking, drinking, drugs, abuse, and kids-at-risk. (See Home Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes by Mary Eberstadt, Sentinel, 2004.)
Surely this inequitable state of affairs needs to be fixed. All Jews, not just parents, need to pay their fair share of “Jewish taxes,” just as the Torah prescribes. Jewish taxes need to be paid by the rich, the super-rich, the middle and working classes, the young marrieds, the grandparents, the singles, the childless, the rabbis, the newly observant – in short, everybody.
America’s Founding Fathers said “no taxation without representation.” They never said “no taxation” period.
The Midianite priest Yitro (Jethro) once had a great idea and decided to approach Moshe directly. Moshe, he said, your current system of dispensing justice is inefficient. You need to establish intermediate courts. Moshe recognized that Yitro was right, and it was done. (For an illuminating discussion of parshas Yitro, see Eyes to See, ch.22, by Rabbi Yomtov Schwarz, Urim Pub., 2004.) In that spirit, let us look at what some other religious and educational institutions have done in this area and see what we can learn.
The Mormons are the prime example. The Mormon religion was founded in 1830 in New York State by Joseph Smith. Today, Mormons number about 5 to 6 million in the U.S. and about 12 million throughout the world – numbers very similar to those of the Jews. The Mormon Church is also very, very rich. Why? Because Mormons tithe. Every Mormon annually meets a church elder in a “settlement” to determine the amount of his tithe (not so dissimilar to the scholarship parent annually meeting a yeshiva’s executive director).
According to Time magazine religion editor Richard Ostling’s 1999 book Mormon America (HarperCollins), the Mormon Church is conservatively worth $35 to $40 billion. The church owns, outright, the Guardian Life Insurance Company. It owns vast real estate, oil and mineral holdings in Utah and elsewhere. There are also prominent wealthy Mormons who are known to tithe, including two Marriotts, the famed hoteliers. (Ironically, many Jewish communal functions are held at Marriott hotels.)
Another example is the Manhattan Country School. Who? Let me explain.
I subscribe, via e-mail, to Education Week. One day, as I was on the magazine’s website, I typed the word “tithe” into the search field, and what came back was a remarkable January 19, 1982, article by Alex Heard titled “Novel Funding Plan For Private Schools Termed Successful.”
The article tells the story of the private Manhattan Country School, founded in 1965 and located on East 96th Street, just off Fifth Avenue. In 1972 this lieral-minded school adopted a “tuition-reform plan.” Families below the poverty line are required to pay as little as three percent of their income, and families at or above median income level pay up to 10 percent of their income. Higher income families pay an additional “mandatory commitment.” Each family’s tuition is calculated through a mandatory financial disclosure worksheet, available on the school website (ManhattanCountrySchool.org).
