DEUT469 While benevolence may be as universal as humanity; the Torah made benevolence a positive religious obligation. God himself "executes justice for the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. Love ye therefore the strangers; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt" (this and preceding verse). Philanthropy must mitigate the ills that grow out of social inequality and economic distress. As a phase of justice, its practice constitutes a duty both to God and man. What God desires of man, says the author of Isaiah 58, is not a fast of self-mortification, of gestures of woe and of humiliation but a fast which quickens the sense of tzedakah in its double aspect of justice and effective beneficence.