She is not your typical philanthropist. There are no grant proposals cluttering the dining-room table in her Hermosa Beach home, no stack of checks waiting to be mailed out.
By all accounts, Julie Byren is a pretty ordinary 13-year-old. She prefers art to algebra, loves shopping at Nordstrom, was thrilled to win a spot on the volleyball team.
And she's been more than a little bit surprised by her newfound celebrity, spawned by the spate of interviews and television spots that catapulted her into the news last week. You may have read about her in The Times . . . how her $800 gift to Dorsey High allowed students at the Southwest Los Angeles school the luxury of a book-buying spree.
Julie had been moved by an essay in The Times, written by a Dorsey High teacher, urging big-time philanthropists to spread their wealth beyond churches and universities, to help impoverished public schools.
No big-time philanthropists replied. But Julie and her mom visited Dorsey, met teacher Alfee Enciso and left behind a check big enough to stock the shelves of two ninth-grade classrooms and allow 20 students to shop for books of their own.
I sought out Julie to satisfy my own curiosity. After all, $800 is not chicken feed. That's a closet full of Abercrombie & Fitch, a raft of Backstreet Boys CDs. . . .
What would make a teenage girl spend that much of her money to buy books for a bunch of kids she'll never meet?
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It's a central tenet of Jewish law, the concept of tzedakah, or righteous giving.
"It's often translated as 'charity,' but it's really more 'justice' or 'righteousness,' " explains Tamarah Chancellor, office manager at the Byren family's synagogue, Congregation Tifereth Jacob in Manhattan Beach.
"Recognizing that everything comes from God and that, for some reason, he's given some people more and some people less. Tzedakah is [the way of] evening things out," she says.
It is among the most important of the commandments Jews are called upon to obey, Chancellor says. "The Talmud teaches that tzedakah is equal to all the other commandments combined."
And the Byren family takes that responsibility quite seriously.
"Julie's family is one that has a strong commitment to the ideal of caring for others," says Debi Rowe, the synagogue's director of education. "They take to heart certain values that other people in the world, Jewish or not, just don't."
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