USCJ Review - Fall 2004
The Poor Within Your Gates Take Precedence
While it has been confidently estimated that the world’s wealth is sufficient to guarantee every person the reasonable fulfillment of his or her minimal needs, distribution has ever been a problem. The Torah predicts rather bleakly that “there will never cease to be needy ones in your land” (Deuteronomy 15:11). In a country and a world in which the disparity between the haves and the have-nots is growing, the need for charitable giving has never been greater.
Judaism has always seen such giving as a religious duty. In his great law code, Maimonides called these “the Laws of Gifts for the Poor” (Hilkhot Matanot Aniyim) and Joseph Karo labeled them simply “the Laws of Charity” (Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah 247-259). Both of these great teachers and scholars find both positive and negative commandments to give charity and not to turn a blind eye to the needy within the wording of the biblical passage which treats of this theme (Deuteronomy 15:7-11) and further support elsewhere in the Torah (Leviticus 25:35-36 and Exodus 22:24-26).
Still, if the world’s needs are within reach of the world’s resources, it does not follow that those needs are within the reach of any one individual’s resources. It would be easy to empty one’s coffers altogether in trying to resolve all needs oneself. Several years ago, the philosopher Peter Singer scandalized many by publishing a call for individuals to give all their money beyond a subsistence income to charity, because their desire for luxury is outweighed by the needs of the needy (The Singer Solution to World Poverty, NYT on the web, 9/5/99).
Jewish law has not been that demanding. Indeed, the Talmud proposes that there should be a cap on charitable giving at one fifth of one’s income (Ketubot 50a). In light of Singer’s argument, we might well ask why such a cap is desirable, or even morally acceptable. Why rein in those few who might desire to be extraordinarily generous? And even this 20 percent figure is high relative to what most people give.
Maimonides suggests that 10 percent is a more moderate figure and sets the absolute minimum of charitable giving at only one third of a shekel annually. Calculating by weight of silver (see Etz Hayim, Genesis 23:9) and current market price, this would amount to less than $3. While this very low threshold was set so as to include even those receiving charity as givers, the rule allows for those who are simply stingy. Why allow some to exercise their stingy nature and not do their fair share of meeting the needs of the world’s poor?
It seems that the Sages felt called upon to balance two competing goods – the needs of the poor and what they felt was the justifiable comfort of the individual donor. They were not prepared to take a severe stance against personal comfort by demanding total sacrifice. And they were not prepared to coerce giving at the outset. They sought, at the heart of the construct of giving, to address the needs of the poor in a voluntary mode. If this failed, they were prepared to tax (Maimonides, 7:10), but they calculated that there would be enough if, indeed, everyone participated in giving, doing what their heart moved them to do.
It is in that light that I think one must interpret the rabbinic focus on Jewish and local needs. They were simply more immediate, and as such, more likely to touch the heartstrings, more likely to elicit voluntary donation. The Sages considered what would be a correct hierarchy. “‘If you lend money to My people, to the poor person who is with you’ – My people vs. a gentile, My people takes precedence; a poor person vs. a rich person, the poor person takes precedence; the poor of your household vs. other poor in town, your own poor take precedence; the poor of your town vs. those of another town, those of your town take precedence” (Bava Kama 71a, citing Exodus 22:24).
This bias toward Jewish and local needs arose naturally. It suited the basic human mentality that attended to self and family first. The British philosopher David Hume, not in any way implicated in the development of Jewish law, put it this way: “A man naturally loves his children better than his nephews, his nephews better than his cousins, his cousins better than strangers, where everything else is equal. Hence arises our common measure of duty in preferring one to the other. Our sense of duty always follows the common and natural course of our passions” (A Treatise On Human Nature).
The model was of a series of concentric circles of obligation. That model applied not only to charitable giving but to other duties as well. Of the familial obligation of sustenance, Moses Isserles writes: “One’s own sustenance takes precedence over that of any other person... After that one should preference the support of one’s parents... then one’s children, who precede one’s siblings, who precede other relatives, who precede neighbors, who precede others in town, who precede [the needy] of other towns” (Shulhan Arukh, Yoreh Deah 251:3, more than a century before Hume).
Note, especially, the way in which Isserles elides the normal obligation of sustenance and charitable giving. Our obligation to care for and love our fellows functions in this same form, reaching out from self to family to community, nation, world in concentric circles. It is all one.
In the first instance, this was not about concentric circles geographically, but about spheres of responsibility. To the Sages – and to us – all Jews are our family; less immediate than brothers or cousins, but closer to us and consequently of more immediate responsibility than the Gentiles. That is how the Sages come to regularly read the biblical “ahikha – your brother” as a reference to a fellow Israelite. Thus, care of family, read as care of all Jews, is first in precedence, and care of neighbors next in importance.
All this assumes a basic equality of need. It is true that the immediate saving of a life takes precedence over general charity (Tur, Yoreh Deah 251 and Shakh comments to Shulhan Arukh), and basic needs would have precedence over luxuries, such as supporting the opera or philharmonic. Thus does this argument appear to tilt for a moment to the other side of this debate. But Peter Singer is wrong when he assumes that all charitable giving to international aid organizations is ipso facto life saving. Would that it were so.
The fact that it is not so evens the balance between local giving – which can be monitored and its effects clearly measured – and international big-organization giving, where this is less obvious. (Even on the local level, effective charity takes precedence over ineffective.) It is also true that the rabbinic structure was created in a time that did not have the advantages of modern communications, and as such was somewhat provincial. Distant and urgent pleas for help were not a large part of the daily experience, making the rabbinic focus on ongoing communal charitable needs more sensible.
But at heart, I think, there was a calculated policy behind the ascendancy of communal giving. Thinking globally, the question of how to distribute the world’s bounty is a daunting one. The Sages recognized that one’s greatest intuitive sense of obligation was not to “them over there” but to one’s own family and community – to the tragedies right there before you, the ones that touch you. So, allowing that immediate and urgent needs should be met, they focused on establishing a world of voluntary giving and assessed that communal needs would elicit the maximal response.
Then they were willing to rely on, what I shall call, the rabbinic theory of induction, to carry the swell of those concentric circles to the furthest reaches of the world. “Havrakh, havra it leih – Your friend has a friend, and the friend of your friend has a friend,” the Talmud says on numerous occasions about the way in which news spreads. Otherwise, a huge global distribution network and administration would be necessary to assess the needs of every place and redistribute to each according to his need. The Sages never imagined such a system in place. Whereas this is now possible, they would have worried about the atrophying of the personal sense of obligation and of charitability in such a regime.
And then, handling huge amounts of money and a heady taste of power, we would worry about the management of such an enterprise, for absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Lord Acton famously said. And we might imagine that communal assessment of needs will be more responsive. It is enough that urgent needs are called to our attention and managed by multi-national charitable corporations that know no boundaries. It is still the case that, as far as daily needs are concerned, the poor within your gates should take precedence.
The author lectures on Jewish Law and Ethics. He is a member of the Conservative Movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards and the chairman of the editorial committee for Siddur Sim Shalom for Weekdays.
