DEUT753 While charitable giving in today's world is associated with many causes, including donations to museums, orchestras, and universities, tzedaka in the Bible refers exclusively to help extended to the poor. The Torah ordains both a positive and negative command: When confronted by a person in need, "You shall open, yes, open your hand to him" and not "harden your heart nor shut your hand against your needy brother" [this verse and previous].

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DEUT751 This tells me only of the poor men of your city. Whence do I derive [for inclusion in the halachah] the poor men of another city? From: "open shall you open" -- wherever they be (Bava Metzia 31b)

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DEUT754 How much economic help is one obligated to give to his fellow man? Commenting on the passage "Thou shalt surely open thy hand," the Rabbi say, Open Thy hand even a hundred times. They interpret the words "sufficient for his needs" to mean that a man's needs are relative to his station in life. Hillel is said to have provided an impoverished descendent of a once prosperous family with a horse on which to take his exercise and a servant to attend him. Sifre, Deut. ad locum. Also Tosefta Pe'ah chap. 4:10. When Hillel could provide no servant for him, he himself "ran in front of him for three miles." Ketubot 67b. Sharing one's possessions with others is not associated in Judaism, as it is in other religions and philosophies, with any denigration of the possession of wealth. Sin does not inhere in affluence, nor virtue in poverty. The Rabbis, however, do not recommend the accumulation of wealth as a goal of life and frequently stress the pitfalls which surround the affluent. Hillel warned his students that "the more property, the more anxiety." Avot, chap. 2:8 ... However, the Jewish tradition does not commend such generosity as would reduce one to indigence and mendicancy, as is apparently urged by Jesus (numerous citations omitted) and is practiced by religious orders both in the west and the East. On the contrary, the Rabbis taught that one should not distribute in charitable gifts more than twenty percent of his resources at any one time. Ketubot 50a, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Arakhin veHaramin, ch. 8:13. The Rabbis do not permit one to dedicate all of his possessions even to God, and if he has done so, it is not to be accepted. Arakhin 28a.

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DEUT755 The Rabbis taught: When an orphan is ready to take a wife, first there is secured for him a house, a bed, and all the necessary utensils, and only then, a wife, as it is written: "sufficient for his lack, which is lacking to him": "Sufficient for his lack" -- this is a house; "which is lacking" -- this is a bed and table; "To him" -- this is a wife, as it is written (Genesis 2:18):"I shall make to him a help" (Ketuvoth 67b)

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DEUT756 This teaches us that you are commanded to sustain him, but you are not commanded to enrich him (Ketuvoth 67b)

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DEUT757 The Torah commands us to give a poor person "sufficient for his needs" [this verse]. Jewish law understands this to mean that we should try to provide precisely what that person lacks: "If he is hungry, he should be fed. If he needs clothes, he should be provided with clothes. If he has no household furniture or utensils, furniture and utensils should be provided… if he needs to be spoon-fed, then we must spoon-feed him" (Shulchan Arukh, Yoreh Deah 250:1).

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DEUT758 [] how deficient is the person lacking the virtues of mercy and chesed. He removes himself from the presence of the Holy One, blessed be He, the Source of compassion and grace, and the Torah accordingly designates him as belia'al, base. See what Chazal have commented (Yalkut Shim'oni) on [this] verse. "Lest there be a base (belia'al) thought in your heart, saying: The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand." Beware lest you withhold compassion, for anyone who does is linked to idolatry and removes from himself the Yoke of Heaven, since the term belia'al implies beli'ol, without the Yolk [of Heaven]. Now this verse does not refer only to the withholding of charity, but to refusing to grant free loans as well (as I have found the Gemara [Gittin 37a] to indicate; and the same is borne out by the Sha'are Teshuvah [The Gates of Repentance, Feldheim, Jerusalem] of R. Yonah, and the Sefer Hachinuch, Mitzvah 480. Yet because of our many sins, many people are remiss in this virtue. I therefore sought after the reasons for this neglect and found them to be two. First, people are ignorant of the subject as such; they are unfamiliar with its details, of the instances to which it applies, since the trait of chesed is involved in a variety of activities: in acts towards rich as well as towards poor, towards the living and the dead, in kindnesses performed with one's person as well as with one's material resources, as Chazal have taught (Sukkah 49b). ... The second cause is that people fail to realize the inherent greatness of this virtue, how mighty is the power it exerts on its exponents, how much good it bestows on them and all their affairs, both in this world and in the world to come, and in saving them on a great day of judgment.

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DEUT759 Parsimony. Some people avoid this mitzvah [i.e. charity - AJL] out of niggardliness (they begrudge others the use of their money). Chazal have already declared (Sotah 47b): "When the niggardly and plunderers of the poor multiplied, those who hardened their hearts and closed their hands against lending to the poor also increased, and they transgressed what is written in the Torah [this verse]: 'Beware that there be not a base thought in your heart…'" This is a very ugly trait. It leads one to refrain from giving charity and performing acts of chesed. It causes one to repress all feelings of pity and compassion--to stop up one's ears and to be deaf to the cry of the poor. Sometimes such conduct can even lead to bloodshed. So we find (Sotah 38b): "R. Yehoshua b. Levi said: The heifer whose neck has to be broken is only brought on account of niggardliness of spirit, as it is said (Deuteronomy 21:7): 'Our hands have not shed this blood.' Now, can it enter our minds that the elders of a Court of Justice are shedders of blood! The meaning is that the man found dead did not come to us for help and we dismissed him; we did not see him and let him go, i.e., he did not come to us for help and we dismissed him without supplying him with food; we did not see him and let him go without support (i.e. he needed food and could not obtain any. Seeing someone carrying food, he was driven by his hunger to snatch it from him. Thereupon, the other retaliated and killed him. [Rashi])." So if we see that a person approached his neighbor for some help and, because of this wicked trait of parsimony, the latter paid no attention to him, and the needy one died as a result, the Torah proclaims the refuser a shedder of blood.

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DEUT760 Some of the Torah's severest condemnations were reserved for acts of omission--for that insidious moral paralysis which seems to infect people and stops them from stretching forth a helping hand or seeing a kind word or picking up the lost object. "Beware that there be not a base thought in thy heart" [this verse]. "Do not shut thy hand" [Deuteronomy 15:7]. "Thou shalt not see thy brother's ox driven away and hide thyself from them. … Thou mayest not hide thyself" [Deuteronomy 22:1-3]. Thus the individual who refuses a loan to a needy person is guilty of violating two commandments: (1) the transgression of omission, of not lending, and (2) the transgression of hardening one's heart.

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DEUT761 Because of the extreme importance of the mitzvah of gemiluth chesed, we have devoted much attention to the need for everyone to set aside a larger or smaller sum for a permanent Free Loan Fund in his own home. Yet obviously not everyone can afford the money. Others again cannot afford the time the performance of the mitzvah entails. For those unable to establish such funds privately, the best advice is to ban together to form a Free Loan Society to lend money to others in their hour of need. Indeed, it is it has been the custom throughout all the scattered Jewish communities to organize such a society in every city. To evaluate the greatness of the mitzvah performed by the members of a community in setting up such a fund is quite superfluous. Our introduction and many of the subsequent chapters have pointed out the grievous sin committed by anyone closing his fist against lending to others and a great reward earned by whoever fills this method. Naturally, then, no one with any intelligence will rest until he sees a Free Loan Society existing in his city to lend to the needy. In this way, his fellow citizens and he himself will avoid the possibility of committing a grave sin. For it could conceivably happen that a poor man would take his security pledge and approach several people for a loan. Each would offer another excuse for refusing. Then the poor man would return home crushed. He would cry out and remonstrate with God against his evil lot. And we know what Scripture has to say on the subject [this verse]. The guilt will fall on everyone's neck since, on account of the frequency of such needs, all are duty-bound to prevent such incidents.

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