Reduce, Reuse …
Regift? Finding the positive — and the Talmudic —
in presenting someone with your unwanted presents.

BY HILARY DANAILOVA
ecently, I visited a friend and her young son, bearing as a
gift two books purported to be wildly popular with the tod-
dler set. “Oh, I already have these,” said the 3-year-old upon
tearing open the package. “But that’s OK — I can always regift them.”
When a neologism emerges from the mouth of a babe, you know
that verb is firmly in our lexicon. Merriam-Webster cites 1995 as
the year “regift” was formally defined as the act of passing along an
unwanted gift to another, presumably unwitting recipient — a date
that probably owes less to etymologists than to a famous Seinfeld
episode about a regifted label-maker. But Rabbi Chaim Goldstein,
who oversees Chabad at Drexel University, pointed out that the phe-
nomenon is at least as old as Moses, whom the rabbi called the orig-
inal regifter for passing along tablets God had already given him.

Moses was pretty upfront about the tablets’ provenance — but
in the 21st century, the implications of regifting make a lot of people
squirm. This, despite the fact that regifting is as much a part of
R December as latkes and Mariah Carey, if decidedly less heralded.

And from a Jewish historical standpoint, “Chanukah is not pri-
marily about gifts,” noted Rabbi Eli Freedman of Congregation
Rodeph Shalom. “The gift-giving custom is a fairly modern invention
to try to compete with Christmas.”
But good luck telling that to your kids. While modern Jewish
families increasingly incorporate charitable rituals into the winter
holiday, the pressure to proffer shiny new prizes continues unabated
— and a lot of those prizes get rewrapped, despite the fact that regift-
ing can feel cheap, furtive, even ignoble.

So is this moral discomfort justified? From a Jewish perspective,
is the act of regifting ever ethical — or is the person just a schnorrer?
Do we have an obligation to disclose a regift? And which is morally
preferable: keeping an unused item, tossing it out or passing it on
to someone who might put it to better use?
The bottom line, according to the experts we spoke with: It really
See Regift, Page 40
38 NOVEMBER 19, 2015
WINTER HOLIDAY GUIDE
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM



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