Chapter 5: Tzedakah Is Justice, Not Charity
Giving is not generosity. It is setting the world right.
The Source
If there is a poor person among you, one of your brothers, in any of your gates, in the land the L-rd your G-d gives you, do not harden your heart and do not shut your hand against your poor brother. Open, open your hand to him, and lend him enough for what he lacks.
Deuteronomy 15:7 to 8
Tzedek, tzedek tirdof. Justice, justice shall you pursue.
Deuteronomy 16:20
The Teaching
A word that means justice
In English, the word charity comes from the Latin caritas, love. Charity is something you choose to do out of the goodness of your heart. It is admirable, and it is optional.
The Hebrew word for giving to people in need is tzedakah, and it comes from a different root altogether: tzedek, justice. The same root gives us tzaddik, a righteous person.
The difference is enormous. In Jewish thought, giving to the poor is not a favor you do for them. It is setting right something that was wrong. The world is out of balance when some have more than they need and others have less than they need, and tzedakah is how a person helps bring it back into balance. It is not a kindness added on top of a just life. It is part of what a just life is.
This is why the Torah does not say “consider opening your hand.” It says open, open your hand, the words this book is named for: the Hebrew doubles the verb, as if to leave no room for hesitation.
Everyone gives
Because tzedakah is justice and not a luxury, it is not only for the wealthy. The Talmud teaches that even a poor person who is supported by tzedakah must give tzedakah (Gittin 7b).
At first this sounds strange. Why ask someone who has almost nothing to give some of it away? The answer says something beautiful about human dignity. Giving is not only something the poor receive. It is something they are entitled to do. No one is so poor that they have nothing to offer, and no one should be denied the dignity of being a giver.
Enough for what they lack
The Torah says to give the poor person “enough for what he lacks.” The sages took those words seriously and read them personally. What he lacks, they said, depends on who he is and what he has lost.
The Talmud tells a startling story about this (Kesubos 67b), which closes this chapter. Tzedakah, it teaches, is not only about keeping a person alive. It is about restoring what they lost, including their dignity.
The ladder of giving
The best-known teaching on tzedakah comes from Maimonides, the great twelfth-century sage, physician, and philosopher. In his code of Jewish law, he describes eight levels of giving, from the lowest to the highest (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Gifts to the Poor 10:7 to 14). Climbing it from the bottom up:
Rung 8. Giving grudgingly. You give, but unhappily. It still counts. It is the lowest rung.
Rung 7. Giving gladly, but less than you should.
Rung 6. Giving what is needed, but only after being asked.
Rung 5. Giving before being asked.
Rung 4. Giving where the receiver knows who gave, but the giver does not know who received. The sages used to tie coins into the corners of their cloaks and let the poor come up behind them and take what they needed.
Rung 3. Giving where the giver knows who received, but the receiver does not know who gave. Some of the sages would quietly leave coins at the doors of the poor.
Rung 2. Giving where neither side knows the other. The giver never learns who received, and the receiver never learns who gave. No one has to feel indebted, and no one has to feel ashamed.
Rung 1, the highest. Helping someone so they no longer need help. A gift, a loan, a partnership, or a job, given so that a person can stand on their own and never have to ask again.
Look at what the ladder values most. The higher you climb, the more the receiver’s dignity is protected. What happens at the very top is the subject of the next chapter.
The Chamber of Silence
The second rung, where neither side knows the other, was not only an idea. It was built into the holy Temple in Jerusalem.
The Mishnah describes a room there called the Lishkas Chasha’im, the Chamber of the Silent Ones (Mishnah Shekalim 5:6). People who feared sin would come into it and leave gifts in silence. And poor people from good families, who had fallen on hard times, would come into the same room and take what they needed, also in silence.
No one saw who gave. No one saw who took. In the holiest building in the Jewish world, there was a room designed to protect the dignity of the poor.
A kind face
Maimonides adds something that is easy to miss. It matters not only what you give, but how. A person who gives a great deal with a sour face and downcast eyes loses the merit of the gift, even if the gift is large. Give with a pleasant face and with joy, he writes, and speak to the poor with words of comfort (Laws of Gifts to the Poor 10:4 to 5). And if you truly have nothing to give, do not scold or turn away a person who asks. Give them kind words.
The Talmud goes further still: a person who gives a coin to the poor receives six blessings, and a person who comforts the poor with words receives eleven (Bava Basra 9b). Money meets the need. Kind words meet the person.
Giving with a boundary
Jewish tradition also sets a limit. The sages of the town of Usha ruled that a person should not give away more than a fifth of what they have, so that they do not become poor themselves and need help from others (Kesubos 50a). The common custom is to give a tenth of one’s income, maaser, as a baseline.
This is kindness with a spine, a balance the tradition returns to again and again. Giving is not meant to empty you. It is meant to flow from a life that remains steady enough to keep giving.
The tzedakah box
In Jewish homes around the world, there is often a small box on a shelf or a kitchen counter, with a slot in the top. In Yiddish it is called a pushke.
Many families put coins in it on Friday afternoon, just before lighting the Shabbos candles. Children are given coins to drop in, so that giving becomes a habit before it becomes a decision. When the box is full, the family chooses where to send it.
It is a small thing. It is also one of the ways a whole people has taught its children, generation after generation, that justice begins at home.
Two Tales
Both of these tales come from the same page of the Talmud (Kesubos 67b).
Hillel runs ahead
There was once a poor man from a wealthy, respected family who had lost everything. In the days of his wealth, it had been his custom to ride a horse with a servant running ahead of him to clear the way.
Hillel the Elder heard of his situation. He did not only give the man food and money. He gave him a horse to ride, and a servant to run before him, because that was what the man had lost.
One day Hillel could not find a servant to run ahead of the horse. So Hillel, the greatest sage of his generation, the leader of the Jewish people, ran ahead of the man’s horse himself, for three mil, about two miles.
The Talmud tells this story to explain the words enough for what he lacks. Hillel understood that the man’s deepest loss was not the horse. It was the dignity of his old life. And he was willing to become the servant himself to give it back.
The coins in the door
The sage Mar Ukva had a poor neighbor, and every day Mar Ukva would slip four coins through the gap in the man’s door, so that the neighbor would never know where they came from.
One day the poor man said to himself, “I will go and see who does this kindness for me.” That day Mar Ukva was late at the study hall, and his wife came with him to the door. When they saw the poor man coming out to look, they ran, so that he would not see who they were and feel ashamed.
They ran into a nearby oven whose fire had just been swept out. The floor was still hot. Mar Ukva’s feet were burned. His wife’s were not, and she told him why: she was at home, and the poor came to her door and received bread they could eat at once, while he gave coins that still had to be spent.
The sages drew a lesson from this story that is hard to forget: it is better for a person to throw themselves into a fiery furnace than to shame another person in public.
The gift was not only the coins. The gift was that the neighbor was never made to feel small.