Brother, can you spare a few grand?

Tomorrow brings that time of year again, Super Sunday, when L.A.'s Jewish federation will raise about 10 percent of its yearly support. This year, Jewish social-service agency are eagerly anticipating the outcome of tomorrow's effort because state funding is shrinking at the same time the economy is skidding.

I lede the Jewish Journal's annual advance-article with the obligations of Alfred Katz.

It was 1952, and Katz was a first-year surgical resident at Cedars of Lebanon. His wife, Cecilia Eve, had just given birth to their first son, and she told Katz they needed to thank God by giving $35 to The Federation.

"I said, 'We can't give $35,' and she said, 'We must,'" Katz, 82, recalled Monday. "She called up The Federation and they asked, 'Who solicited you?' and she said, 'God.'"

More than half a century later, the Katzes still give consistently to The Federation. And on Feb. 10, Alfred Katz again will be working the phones trying to get other Jewish Angelenos to give back, something he's done each Super Sunday, save one, since the annual fundraiser's 1979 inception.

"There are so many Jews who are needy," he said. "We were lucky; we survived. We have kids and grandkids, and we were so blessed by God. It's important that we give."

'Giving makes you rich'

This week I am going to try to post some of the stories I've had sitting in the queue for a little while. This piece from Portfolio is apt for the holiday season and plays into the idea of the prosperity gospel, meaning that the more you give, the more God gives you.

In John Bunyan’s 1684 classic The Pilgrim’s Progress, the character Old Honest poses this riddle to the innkeeper Gaius: “A man there was, tho’ some did count him mad, / The more he cast away, the more he had.” Gaius solves the riddle thus: “He that bestows his Goods upon the Poor / Shall have as much again, and ten times more.”

Less poetically, the idea is this: Giving makes you rich. A lovely sentiment, to be sure, but quite backward-sounding to an economist. You obviously have to have money before you can give it away, right? Or in the pithy words of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, “No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions—he had money too.”

Well, it turns out that Gaius was right, and new economic research backs him up.

The rest of the article by economist Arthur C. Brooks reads somewhat like a balance sheet, but in it he explains that people aren't just giving more because they make more, but that evidence shows people give more before they become wealthier. In essence, the egg is laying the chicken.

This is a good thing, and a good reminder that charity does pay (oddly, it appears, literally). There could be a biblical explanation for this: If you give your resources back to God, He will reward you with even more.

But the gospel of wealth, something televangelists love to trumpet, takes this too far. Yes, I believe God wants us to give back (at least 10 percent), and yes, I have faith that I will never be fully without means (though I'm uncomfortable with the idea of being rich in spirit and poor in the world). But there is a difference between a place to sleep and a house in the Hollywood Hills. The church is not an investment plan.

Ole E. Anthony, founder of the Trinity Foundation in Dallas, a televangelist watchdog, said he knew people who had given the last of their savings to TV preachers, hoping for a windfall that never came.

"The people on TBN are living the lifestyle of fabulous wealth on the backs of the poorest and most desperate people in our society," Anthony said. "People have lost their faith in God because they believe they weren't worthy after not receiving their financial blessing."

Thomas D. Horne, of Williford, Ark., a disabled Vietnam-era veteran, said that in 1994 he was swept away by the rhetoric of TBN pastors and donated about $6,000 in disability benefits.

Time went by and he did not receive the promised surfeit of money. Last year, he found out that TBN had purchased a Newport Beach mansion overlooking the Pacific. He wrote to the network, asking for his money back.

"I want to recoup my hard-earned disability money I sent to these despicable people," said Horne. He said he has received no reply.

Philip McPeake is another donor for whom God's economy of giving did not deliver. Out of work and out of luck in November 1998, McPeake heard the Rev. R.W. Schambach make an impassioned plea for donations on TBN's Kansas City television station, KTAJ.

Schambach promised that if viewers sent $200 as a down payment on a $2,000 pledge, God would give them the rest within 90 days - with a bonus to follow.

McPeake sent in his money and waited for his luck to change. When it didn't, he complained to the Missouri state attorney general's office and the Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites). TBN refunded his donation.

To see how the gospel of wealth can support the luxurious living of those at the top, read this and this.

"Mansions, big planes, money, fame. That's what it's all about now," said the Rev. Hector Gomez, a former Without Walls staff member who left in 2000. "There are prophets for God, and there are prophets for profit. That's the category they fit in."

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What's so good about Judaism and the Boy Scouts?

"I see them as human values, not to say those aren't Jewish values also. But I think it would be unfair to credit them to a certain sect of humanity. Listen, I think there is great stuff in Judaism; I think there is great stuff in Christianity; I think there is great stuff in the Islamic faith. I think there is great stuff in the Boy Scouts and Little League, all these different manifestations of these value sets. At the end of the day, I think they are just logical principles that one would arrive at if one didn't know who they were going to be. It's like 'Alright, this is a basic set up for how to do right.' Which you could say is a stronger word than good."

Ben Goldhirsh, the 27-year-old millionaire behind GOOD magazine, told me that when I asked him if his company, which is aimed at people with a strong social conscience -- like Mother Jones or Sojourners from a more humanistic perspective -- was rooted in the Jewish values he learned as a kid. I profiled him in this week's Jewish Journal:

Goldhirsh sees the GOOD brand, which also includes Reason Pictures, a film company he started in 2004, as much more than a media organization. It's "a meta-company," he said, "a lifestyle brand" that appeals to the "reason-based sensibilities" of people like him. People who know privilege and yet want to change the world in a big way.

"It is a revolution of self-interest," said publisher Max Schorr, a prep school friend of Goldhirsh's who skipped law school to help start the magazine. "In the past, if you pursued your self-interest, it was considered selfish. For us, the process of pursuing our self-interest leads to more than ourselves. If we just pursued ourselves all the time, it would lead to a lousy life."

The timing for GOOD was not a month too soon. Not long before the first issue was published in September 2006, Al Gore (whose son, Albert Gore III, happens to be associate publisher) and "An Inconvenient Truth" made combating climate change fashionable; going green and being eco-friendly got downright trendy. Suddenly, it was cool to care not just about the environment but societal issues and the whole world around you.

"If doing good used to be a pejorative and kind of lame, or somehow was characterized that way by culture, which I don't know how the hell that happened, then certainly being ignorant and living an irrelevant life is now that way," Goldhirsh said. "An engaged life is where it is at, which is thrilling to me."

Personally, Goldhirsh is "cause agnostic," so he didn't want to encourage some passions and stifle others; he simply wanted to celebrate a social awareness, which is why the magazine's debut cover featured in white block lettering "_____ LIKE YOU GIVE A DAMN."

"If this doesn't become the dominant sensibility," Goldhirsh said, "we are f---ed."

Who will love the dead?

East Los Angeles is at least two freeway interchanges and several generations removed from today's L.A. Jewry. But there the community's early history rests eternally, amid well-worn bungalows, rusted chain-link fences and canopy-free, sun-bleached streets.

Head north on Downey Street across Interstate 5, and you'll immediately be greeted by the tattered and peeling black-and-white sign of Beth Israel Cemetery, where hundreds of Jews have been buried during the past century and continue to be. Half a block north is Agudath Achim Cemetery, which similarly is operated by Chevra Kadisha Mortuary. Neither is regal or elaborate, mostly concrete crypts stacked side-by-side, only loose dirt for landscaping.

But between the two cemeteries is a more forgotten home. The wrought-iron gate, pinned shut with two Master locks, simply says "Mt Z." Inside is Mount Zion Cemetery, rows upon rows of headstones baring menorahs and the Star of David, Feldmans and Ungers and Goldbergs and Rosens and Nefts and Pearlmans and Schwartzes and Raskins and Segelmans. Some of the crypts are tagged with graffiti, others simply cracked. It's not maintained by a mortuary but by The Federation or, in essence, the whole Jewish community. It looks peaceful now, but throughout the years, the graveyard hasn't always fared well.

"Jewish law commands that people honor the deceased," a 1995 New York Times story began, "but the weeds thriving at Mount Zion Cemetery appear to have deeper roots than the local Jewish community, which long ago moved out of the neighborhood and stopped tending the graves."

This section is toward the end of an article I have in this week's Jewish Journal about the challenges fundraisers face in the new world of Jewish philanthropy. I thought this was a poignant example because there is nothing sexy about supporting the long-since dead -- it's not like providing aid in Darfur -- but somebody has to do it.

The 2,000-word article ran as a sidebar to my profile of new Jewish Federation chairman Stanley P. Gold. (Sheesh, when I was at dailies, rare was the occasion when a front-page story waxed for 2,000 words, let alone a sidebar.) Let me know what you think.