Charity

Don Isaac Abarbanel served as finance minister to Ferdinand and Isabella prior to the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492. He is reported to have told them that all he owned is what he had given to others.

Giving charity to the poor has a special place among the 613 commandments of the Torah. Actually, the word "charity" is a poor and misleading description of this important precept. Charity implies offering something that you are not obligated to give; the Hebrew "tzedakah" means righteousness, implying that what we give to others is their's by right.

The Jewish Bible mandates opening our hands to give to the poor. (Deuteronomy 15:10). The message of giving to others is reinforced by several other commandments. A Jew who grew grain in the Land of Israel - the place on earth where living by G-d's commandments was assumed to have maximum spiritual potency - had to set aside no fewer than ten portions of what he produced by his sweat and labor to others. Before he enjoyed what he grew, he had to provide for the Priests, the Levites and the poor. (The blessing that observant Jews all over the world recite over bread to this day has ten words, recalling these ten obligations.) The Jewish farmer in the Land of Israel had to leave a corner of his field for the poor, as well as grain dropped in the course of harvesting, and sheaves forgotten behind. The poor then collected what they needed through the dignity of their own labor, and without the embarrassment of asking for handouts. Once every seven years, the land lay fallow, and what grew of its own was accessible to all, erasing distinctions between the haves and the have-nots.

Going back to Biblical times, then, Jews learned that possession did not mean entitlement, that Man's success in any of his endeavors was a result of Divine blessing, and that the oftentimes the blessing was intended for others. He was just privileged to be the custodian. The commandment to give is so important, that even the poor are required to give to other poor!

The Code of Jewish Law instructed that no holiday was properly observed unless Jews invited the poor to their festival table. In 17th century Poland, the Council of the Four Lands ruled that for every ten people invited to a wedding, space had to be made at the wedding feast for one poor person. In more modern times, Jews gathered on Thursdays to put together baskets of food to be delivered to the poor before the Sabbath. At weekday prayer services, a charity box is sent around the congregation, allowing people to fulfill a custom to give some charity with every prayer. The bulk of charitable contribution is through larger donations, amounting to between ten and twenty percent of all income for traditional families. Even in the horrible conditions of the ghettos during the Nazi Holocaust, community charity organizations were organized for the poor to help those who were even more needy.

By Talmudic times, over fifteen hundred years ago, rules had already been worked out governing charitable giving by the organized community. Each location was required to have an apparatus to give meals to the poor on a daily basis, and another fund to give assistance for more long-term needs, like clothing. People gave as well for a host of other worthwhile causes, employing the formula that the greatest obligation was to local needs, before reaching out to more distant cities. There were rules that determined who was eligible to receive assistance, and how to prioritize giving when there was not enough money to go around. Collecting and disbursing funds was an honor that was left to people with sterling reputations and knowledge of the law.

In medieval Fostat, Egypt, the great codifier and philosopher Moses Maimonides wrote about a hierarchy of giving. Tzedakah was at its best when the recipient did not know the donor and the donor did not know the identity of the recipient, which would minimize embarrassment and preclude the expectation of receiving anything in return. Better yet was to lend money to the poor or otherwise help them earn a living so they would not have to accept charity.

According to Jewish tradition, Jews are never supposed to "test" G-d by linking their performance to some Divine payback. There is one exception. We are invited by G-d to give more and more charity, with the assurance that one never loses what one gives. G-d pays back those who give more with blessing in the here and now, not just in the afterlife.

Jews are guided by a sense of responsibility in their giving. When there are needy individuals within one's own family, they must come before others. The needy of one's own circle of acquaintances, of one's own city come before those more distant. In this way, Jews are taught to take a strong interest in problems closest to home - an ethic which maximize the likelihood that the poor of any community will not be ignored. At the same time, Jews are instructed to help those entirely outside their community, and to feed the non-Jewish poor alongside their own brethren. Indeed, in the Western world it is hard to find a Jewish community of any significant size in which hospitals and social service agencies were not funded by Jews for the benefit of the general community.

THOUGHT TO INSPIRE

The funeral for the son of the Rabbi of Tshebin was ready to begin, but his mother could not be found among the relatives who sat together mourning their tragic loss. Her husband would not begin without her. People began to look, and did not have to look too far. She was found among all the other mourners sitting further back, walking among them holding a pushka (charity collection box). They tried ushering her back to her seat, but she refused. "I have a practice of collecting money for the poor at all funerals. They have come to depend upon it. Just because it is my own son who died, why should the poor lose out?"

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