Rabbinic Welfare

Rabbinic Welfare April 28, 2016

Susan Holman devotes a few pages of her The Hungry Are Dying, a study of “beggars and bishops” in Cappadocia, to a sketch of Rabbinic teaching on almsgiving, drawn from the writings of the Talmudim. The poor appear in three main contexts in rabbinic writing:

“First, they are recognized as a distinctly protected economic group by biblical legislation, which acknowledged them as active social agents” (43). This, Holman points out, stands in contrast to the Roman perspective on poverty, which did not treat “the poor” as a distinct class of people. The rules governing alms “graded the required sacrifices according to the donors’ means, restricted the time a lender could hold a poor man’s clothing as a pledge, and forbade interest on loans to ‘the poor among you.’” Rules that permitted poor people “to harvest from the fallen grain in any Jewish field in Israel, illustrates the detailed concern for this aspect of empowering the poor to act on their own behalf” (43).

Second, “the poor were eligible as passive recipients of alms and social assistance on the basis of their identity within this special group. This assistance took several forms but particularly included donations from community poor chests administered and distributed by community religious leaders, and by food distribution as in the example of the ‘soup kitchen’ at Aphrodisias” (43).

Finally, “the Jewish texts on the poor recognize their need for human dignity. Donations and the right to receive special protection should (ideally) always also protect recipients from experiencing public shame” (43). Holman expands this point a few pages later: “rabbinic texts about the poor often depict them as human beings worthy of dignity and protection from public shame, especially protection from the need to beg in public. Some rabbis advised that alms be deposited in secret, with even the donor (ideally) pretending not to notice. Others suggested that loans were preferable to alms because they gave the recipient the dignity of reciprocating the donation and could easily and quietly be converted into ‘gifts’ if repayment was or became impossible” (47).

The aim was not to preserve the purity of the gift, but to protect the dignity and humanity of the recipient of the gift. That the rabbis denied the notion of “pure gift”is evident from reminders that the generous could expect rewards from God: “He who lends without interest is regarded by God as if he had fulfilled all the commandments,” says one rabbinic text (quoted 47).


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