Tzedakah - To Give is to Live
London Jewish News

13 December 2003

I have always been struck by two episodes in the Torah. The first was the making of the golden calf. Aaron, leader of the people in the absence of Moses, asked them to give up their gold ornaments, hoping that this would cool their enthusiasm for idolatry. As a delaying tactic, it failed. The men (not the women) enthusiastically handed over their gold ear-rings as well as those of their wives and children.

The second was as different as possible - the construction of the mishkan, the Tabernacle, the first collective house of worship built by the children of Israel. Moses was told by G-d to ask the people for contributions. Overwhelmingly, they gave - men and women alike. Some gave gold, silver or bronze. Others gave skins for the hangings, jewels for the breastplate, oil for the menorah, or spices for incense. Some gave of their time and skills. It was the most unusual fund-raising campaign in history - Moses had to say "Stop" because the people had given too much.

The Talmud Yerushalmi makes a marvellous comment on these two episodes. "How can one understand this people? If they are appealed to for an idol, they give. If appealed to for the Tabernacle, they give." As they say in America: Go, figure! Jews give. It is one of our enduring and endearing characteristics. We don't always give to the right things, but we give.

This fact inspired something close to wonder in the greatest Jewish figure of the Middles Ages, Moses Maimonides. In his law code, the Mishneh Torah, he is not generally given to parenthetical comments. Yet when he comes to tzedakah, he is moved to say in amazement: "We have never seen or heard of a Jewish community that does not have a charitable fund."

This was, in fact, one of the most distinguishing features of Jewish communities in the long centuries of exile and dispersion. Wherever Jews went they established their own mini-welfare state. There were funds for the poor. There were self-imposed taxes to ensure that an education was available to all. Jewish doctors usually treated for free those unable to pay. Virtually every centre of Jewish population, however small, had a multiplicity of chevrot ("friendly societies") for visiting the sick, burying the dead, comforting the mourners, making sure that poor brides had dowries and those in need had basic food and shelter.

It was not a perfect system. One should not over-sentimentalise. But it was deeply humane, and by the standards of the time, astonishing. How did it come about? It was a marriage of virtue and necessity, high ideals and harsh realities.

The concept of tzedakah is one of the most ancient and revolutionary in the lexicon of Judaism. Abraham, we are told in the Torah, was chosen "so that he would teach his children . . . to keep the way of the Lord, doing tzedakah and mishpat." Mishpat means retributive justice and the rule of law. Tzedakah means distributive justice, the idea that everyone must have the means of dignified existence.

There is no adequate English translation of tzedakah. The reason is that it brings together in a single word two ideas that, in Western thought, are opposites, namely charity and justice. To give a simple example: imagine that I give you £1,000. Either you have a legal right to it, in which case it is justice, or you do not, in which case it is charity. In English an act cannot be both at once. In Hebrew they can and are.

The reason is that in Judaism we believe that there is no ultimate ownership of property. What we possess, we hold in trust from G-d. One of the conditions of that trust is that we share what we have with others who have less. In biblical times this meant leaving parts of the harvest for the poor, as well as cancelling outstanding debts every seven years. In post-biblical times, when Jews rarely owned land, the same principles were applied to money rather than produce. I find this one of Judaism's most glorious ideas, and one badly needed in an age in which economic inequalities within and between nations is growing to unacceptable proportions.

Alongside the ideal came the tough reality that Jews - with the exception of the successful few - were often poor, landless, denied entry into the professions, heavily taxed and exploited by medieval rulers, periodically expelled and forced into exile, and subject to more uncertainties and persecution than any other group in Europe.

Again it was Maimonides who provided the insight: "All Jews and those attached to them are like brothers . . . and if a brother will not show mercy to his brother, then who will have mercy on him?" In ages of blatant discrimination, Jews had no one else to turn to than their fellow Jews. Their enemies frequently levelled this as a charge against them. Jews, they said, help their own - sidestepping the fact that it was non-Jews who forced them into a position where they needed help, which was rarely forthcoming from society as a whole.

Much has changed since then, but not the Jewish capacity to give. To this day Jews still contribute to charitable causes - Jewish and non-Jewish alike - out of all proportion to their numbers. The very existence of Jewish life depends on it, for without our contributions few Jewish organisations could survive.

A rabbi once pointed out that there are two seas in Israel, the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea. The Sea of Galilee is full of life, but the Dead Sea has none. How is this, since they are both fed by the same source, the River Jordan? He answered: the Sea of Galilee receives water at one end and gives out water at the other. The Dead Sea only receives water but does not give - and if you only receive but do not give, you do not live. Geographically true? I don't know. But morally it is. In Judaism, giving is part of life itself. May it long continue to be so.