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PDF FormatIn Judaism, however, the idea of charity focuses on the donor and his relationship with the poor, not on the recipient. Its aim is to cultivate a sense of responsibility, as a moral and religious obligation. For this reason, the rabbis maintained that the donor should favor his relatives over strangers: “When choosing between your own poor and the poor of the city, your own poor come first.”52 By giving to those for whom he feels a special obligation, the donor expresses his self-understanding as a unique individual who takes responsibility for those around him. This kind of giving, moreover, emphasizes the fact that we are talking not about an act of “justice,” of satisfying the just claims of the poor against the wealthy, but about an act of personal obligation stemming from his sense of responsibility for those around him.
This is borne out, moreover, in the specific place Jewish legal codes have always given the laws of charity. Charity is always placed among religious duties (isur veheter), rather than civil law (dinei mamonot).53 Although both categories are equally binding on the Jew, within Jewish law they are two separate worlds, each with its own set of rules and implications, each built on very different legal foundations—such that in the proper study of law, one is not allowed even to draw conclusions in one realm on the basis of examples from the other.54 The first category concerns the obligations man has towards God, and covers such subjects as kashrut, idolatry, and family purity; the second covers man’s obligations to his fellow man, such as in contracts and damages. Whereas laws that pertain to the latter category are what make up the system of civic life, their obligations relate to a person’s property: When someone signs a contract, he is committing his estate within the context of a social order, and as such the courts are permitted to confiscate property in order to effect payment of debts or damages, or to place a lien on his property when he cannot pay. Ritual duties, on the other hand, cover the relationship between man and God, and they fall solely on his moral conscience, not on his property.55
Despite the fact that charity relates to one’s money, it does not fall into the category of civil law governing property, but of religious laws governing moral and ritual obligations. Man is commanded by God to be sensitive to the distress of those in need: “If there be among you a poor man, one of your brethren within any of your gates in your land which the Eternal your God gives you, you shall not harden your heart, nor shut your hand from your poor brother: But your shall open your hand wide to him.”56 Thus R. Joseph Karo, author of Shulhan Aruch, included charity in the Yoreh De’a section of his work, which refers to religious obligations such as the observance of the laws of kashrut, vows, and mourning.57
None of this is meant to undermine in any way the importance of charity as a moral duty. On the contrary, Jewish tradition views the commandment to give charity as one of the most important of religious obligations. This sentiment is expressed in the words of Maimonides, who wrote in his Mishneh Tora that “We must be more diligent in obeying the commandment to give charity than any other positive commandment.”58 As Maimonides further attests, tradition has always found charity to be a staple of Jewish society: “We have never seen nor heard of a Jewish community that did not have a charity box.”59 The point here, rather, is that by enshrining it on the moral, rather than civil-legal, plane, Judaism expresses a radically different understanding of the individual’s “image of God” than that expressed in Catholicism and, subsequently, socialism: Man is encouraged to be a strong, creative, and responsible person, one who builds his wealth so that he may take responsibility both for himself and for those around him.
The essentially religious, rather than civil, nature of charitable enforcement begins with the agricultural laws from which it is derived. It is a moral-religious, rather than a civic-legal, idea which undergirds the laws of ma’aser ani (tithing one’s harvest for the poor), leket (leaving for the poor those sheaves that have fallen behind during the harvest), and pe’a (leaving a corner of the field, vineyard, or orchard unharvested for the poor). In none of these cases is there implied a limit to the accumulation of wealth, but rather a minimum of charitable giving as a portion of one’s wealth. The religious focus of these laws is underscored, moreover, by their presentation in the Bible and rabbinic literature together with the laws of teruma and ma’aser, tithes that support the priests and Levites, who are charged with conducting the worship of God in the Temple—in other words, tithes that are ritual in essence. Again, these laws have all been traditionally classified in the area of ritual law (dinei isur veheter) rather than civic law (dinei mamonot)—meaning that they do not curtail property rights or invoke a notion of civic justice, but instead establish a moral and religious duty to maintain a divine link to the land, to care for the needy, or to support a priestly class.
With the emergence of urban society in mishnaic times, poverty became more widespread among the Jews, and the rabbis looked to the old rules as a model with which to expand significantly the charitable responsibilities placed upon the community. The most important example was the custom of giving a tenth of one’s earnings to the poor, derived from the commandment to give a tenth of one’s agricultural yield to the poor in the third and sixth years of every seven-year agricultural cycle.60 In this way, the sages set a minimum for charitable giving, and also permitted those who could to give more—up to a fifth of their income—a philanthropic system that continues until our own day.
Moreover, the rabbis authorized the community to compel its members to fulfill their obligations to the poor. The office of the “charity collector” (gabai tzedaka) was established and empowered by the community to collect, distribute, and manage its charitable funds.61 The Talmud, which raises the issue on several occasions, refers to these individuals as “people in authority,” or people who are authorized to extract collateral from those who refuse to give to the poor.62 Indeed, their job is viewed as so important that they are authorized to take this collateral at any time, “even on the eve of the Sabbath.”63
It is this provision for enforcement that was taken by a number of modern writers as the basis for identifying in Judaism the origins of distributive justice.64 However, this is an incorrect reading. As we have seen earlier, the central logic of socialism begins with the Christian belief that because it is wrong to retain wealth in excess of one’s needs, individual property rights are limited; government, according to socialism, is therefore charged with the duty of redistributing excess wealth in order to limit the economic gaps between rich and poor, leading towards an ideal of economic equality. In the rabbinic sources, however, coercive authority comes from a different source altogether: Not as a means of distribution and justice, but as a way of enforcing a minimum level of moral and religious rectitude among its citizens. It is a moral corrective, not an economic one.
Unlike most modern conceptions which hold that “moral” obligations are essentially unenforceable by society, Jewish tradition holds that such laws are enforceable, and they in fact have been enforced by communities over the generations. Jewish law recognizes the need to impose moral and religious principles on individuals, in order to foster righteousness among citizens and sustain them in the community. The rabbis called this “setting the boundaries,” or migdar milta.65 In this spirit, Maimonides ruled:
He who does not want to give charity, or gives less than is proper, will be forced to do so by the rabbinical court, even to the point of striking him, until he gives his due, and the court will examine and assess his property in his presence, and take what is proper for him to give. And they may take collateral for charity, even on the eve of the Sabbath.66
It is important to note that the use of physical coercion in dealing with rebellious behavior (makat mardut) is not restricted to the enforcement of charity, but appears in many areas—always, however, as an essentially pedagogical tool, meant to bring a wayward individual back to the fold of the righteous. The intended target is not man’s property, but his character. We see this same idea in the ruling known as “enforcing to prevent the vice of Sodom” (kofin al midat sedom), which holds that an unjustifiably spiteful person—someone who refuses to help his fellow man even though he stands to lose nothing by it—may be compelled to do the right thing. Again, enforcement is not aimed at the person’s property, but rather at his virtue, in an effort to set him on the proper moral path. A similar example concerns the vindictive husband who refuses to release his wife through a writ of divorce, despite the fact that their marriage has ended for all intents and purposes. According to Maimonides, if he does not voluntarily give the writ, the courts are authorized to “strike him until he says, ‘I am willing.’”67 Although this view is not universally held by the halachic authorities, it is nonetheless derived from a clearly ritual source: A statement in the Talmud according to which the individual may be compelled to bring sacrifices at the Temple even though he does not wish to do so; they should “force him until he says, ‘I am willing.’”68
