Have you ever heard of Charles F. Feeney? I didn’t think so and neither had I until about a month ago — and that’s what’s amazing. I first learned his name in early January reading a Jim Dwyer column in the New York Times entitled “James Bond of Philanthropy Gives Away the Last of His Fortune.”

My eyes grew wide as I read for the first time about an 85-year-old man who over the course of the last 35 years has given away virtually his entire fortune of eight billion dollars and in such complete anonymity that Forbes dubbed him the “James Bond of Philanthropy.” Five years ago Atlantic Philanthropies a group of foundations he used to disburse his contributions still had about $1.5 billion left and Feeney pledged to give it all away by the end of 2016 since as he put it “while giving when dead you don’t feel anything.” He kept that promise making a final grant of $7 million to Cornell University in late December.

We’re talking about a person who only flew in coach class until he was 75 still buys clothes off the rack and eats at burger joints. I’m sure readers are wondering about his children: He apparently has made “decent though not extravagant provisions for his four daughters and one son… all [of whom] worked through college as waiters maids and cashiers.”

If there’s anyone involved in this saga that I’d want to interview I think it would be those kids to learn how they feel about their dad’s provisions for them and more generally about how they were raised. The story attributes to Feeney the quote that “You can only wear one pair of pants at a time ” and I’d be very interested in hearing from his kids whether they feel the same way and what their father did to inculcate that way of looking at life within them.

Mr. Feeney made his fortune operating duty-free airport shops around the world and then investing the handsome proceeds in technology stocks that became wildly successful. His billions have gone toward causes around the world ranging from healthcare to education to helping end longstanding armed conflicts in Northern Island and South Africa. A listing of some of the causes he supported shows him to lean somewhat left in his worldview.

In 1984 he secretly transferred all his shares in the duty-free business to Atlantic and since then he has gone to great lengths to keep everything he’s done well below the radar. $2.7 billion of his money has funded the construction of 1000 buildings across five continents yet not a single one of them so much as bears his name anywhere. It wasn’t solely a matter of modesty: Atlantic’s CEO said “It was also a way to leverage more donations — some other individual might contribute to get the naming rights.”

He set up his foundations in Bermuda Dwyer writes “in large part because that would allow him to escape United States disclosure requirements.” That also meant he couldn’t take US tax deductions for his contributions to the offshore charities but he apparently deemed the ability to avoid publicity worth the steep cost.

Only in the last 15 years did he go a bit more public even allowing his biography to be written in the hope that his story would inspire other rich people to give away more of their wealth. Warren Buffet has called Chuck Feeney the “spiritual leader” of Buffet’s by-now famous campaign to get billionaires to do just that.

Above everything else — the anonymity the focus on not just his own giving but getting others to give the simple lifestyle — what fascinates and impresses me the most is the fact that according to Dwyer after having had spectacular wealth within his reach Mr. Feeney now lives with his wife in a rented apartment in San Francisco having left himself with a personal net worth of slightly more than $2 million.

That’s not a sum to sneeze or even sniffle at. But you can just barely buy a house in certain Jewish neighborhoods for that money. If it’s invested in the stock market well in the last few years lots of people lost even more than that in an instant on Wall Street.

To allow billions to flow through one’s hands and leave oneself in one’s old age with just that much to have the desire expressed by Chuck Feeney that “I want the last check I write to bounce ” takes an astounding ability to simply let go. It means ceding the perceived control of one’s destiny that most people are desperate to retain at all cost.

I’d love to know the answer to the question: How did Charles Feeney do it?

ONE SHY OF A HAT TRICK Peter Berger is a well-known American sociologist who has written important works on the sociology of religion. Now 87 he is retired from academia but still writes a column for The American Interest (TAI) periodical.

It is in those pages that his latest offering recounts a personal encounter he had with none other than… a shtreimel. The point of the piece is to discuss what he calls “experiences that lead to the suspicion that there may be something to religion after all.” Berger actually wrote an entire book on this theme in which he coined the phrase “rumors of angels ” to describe the glimpses people get through everyday life experiences of the existence of something transcendent and undeniably supernatural.

In this recent TAI essay he writes: “One thing is very clear: Those of us lacking any self-validating religious certainties must rely on intimations of the divine intuitions signals of transcendent reality. I will conclude by describing two events that happened to me some years ago.”

The first of the two events took place while Berger was driving on the section of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that cuts through the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn with bridges at various points enabling pedestrians to cross over it:

There was a strong wind. Suddenly a large typically Hasidic hat flew off one of the bridges and landed right in front of my car. It was a shtreimel a velvet and fur concoction imitating the headgear of medieval Polish noblemen (it can be ordered online for about $600). My options speeded in my head. It would have been very dangerous to brake suddenly at the speed I was going. I would have braked for a person but surely not for a hat! When I arrived at home I said to my wife: “Something very strange happened just now — I drove over a Hasidic hat!”

A few weeks later a statistically improbable event: The scene repeated itself same spot on the BQE same type of hat. I drove over that one too.

It gives new meaning to those bumper stickers one sometimes sees warning that the driver is someone “who brakes for furry creatures.”

Berger goes on to relate that a short while later he went to Israel to deliver some lectures and had an eerie lingering sense throughout his stay that “a third hat was waiting for me there.” He concludes however this way: “I don’t want to keep you in suspense. There was no third hat.”

Who am I to second-guess the claim of a preeminent sociologist to have had a transcendent experience on the BQE? I’ve probably had a couple hallucinatory episodes of my own while staring at the car in front of me on the LIE as we inched along the “world’s largest parking lot” at a clip of five miles an hour. But I must say the whole thing left me scratching my head.

Everything that happens is most assuredly decreed in Heaven but as for why this particular incident was so ordained that’s anyone’s guess. And given that Peter Berger is an Austrian-born Lutheran we can reasonably assume the repeat run-in with (or run-over of) Hasidic headgear was not some Divine summons to teshuvah.

Then again was it perhaps a moral test of whether the driver would get off at the next exit and circle back to find the hapless and hatless Hasidic fellow to whom the “velvet and fur concoction” belonged express regret to him and maybe even offer a bit of compensation?