There shall be no needy among you – since the Lord your God will bless you in the land the Lord your God is giving to you as an inheritance – if only you heed the Lord your God and take care to keep all this mitzvah that I enjoin upon you this day. (Deut. 15:4-5)
What is that mitzvah that leads to a society with no poor? Some commentators understand it as referring to the entire Torah. According to them, religious observance as a whole will prevent the spread of poverty. But others, Hizkuni and Rashbam among them, read the passage in its context. They claim that there shall be no needy in the land if the Israelites keep the practice of debt forgiveness every seven years, the mitzvah described in the verses immediately preceding and following the passage claiming there shall be no needy in the land.
Along with redistribution of land every 50 years, periodic forgiveness of debt is one of the Torah’s tools for social rebalancing. These practices rebalance a distribution of wealth that has become so uneven that some people have amassed fortunes while others have been forced from their land and into indentured servitude. (For a comprehensive interpretation of tzedak as “balancing” see Lawrence Troster, “Tezedek or Triage: Restoring the Balance of Creation”, Conservative Judaism, 53:1, Fall 2000)
Reflecting an understanding of precisely how hard it is for Israel to fulfill these mitzvot of social balancing, the verses just after the ones I have cited first raise the possibility – if, however there is a needy person (15:7) – and then assume with certainty that these ideals will remain unfulfilled: For there will never cease to be needy ones in your land (15:11).
But if social rebalancing is so difficult, why are we so forcefully enjoined to pursue it?
I believe the motivation for these mitzvot is theological, that our faith – the loyalty to God that so much of Torah and especially the book of Deuteronomy is concerned with – is shaped heavily by our experience of society and, more particularly, by the way that human beings treat each other. When the poor suffer and seem trapped in their poverty, it shapes the way we think about God, whether we are the poor person experiencing the humiliations of poverty or the wealthy who see these humiliations and fail to act.
Rabbi Yehoshua ben Korkha said, “Anyone who shuts his eye against a request for tzedakah is like one who worships idols” (Bava Batra 10a). One way of understanding this teaching is that ignoring the pleas and even the presence of the poor (“shutting one’s eyes”) is tantamount to ignoring the pleas and presence of God, since every person is created in God’s image.
Indeed, we see that it works the other way around as well. Rabbi Dostai the son of Rabbi Yannai expounded: “One who gives even the smallest coin to the poor merits to see the Divine Presence” (Bava Batra 10a). When does this sighting of the Divine presence occur? I would say it is not at some later point, but right then, when the interaction between these two people occurs. They both see the divine image in each other.
This opportunity to recognize the divine image in the poor, people whose divine image is at constant risk of being obscured, constitutes an argument against the voices in our tradition that urge anonymous tzedakah giving. While this may spare the recipient some embarrassment, there are also reasons to believe that seeking out direct opportunities to support and show respect to the poor is superior to anonymous tzedakah.
Take the story of Mar ‘Ukba and his wife from Ketubbot 67b: Mar ‘Ukba had a poor man in his neighborhood into whose door-socket he used to throw four zuz every day. Once [the poor man] thought: ‘I will go and see who does me this kindness’. On that day [it happened] that Mar ‘Ukba was delayed at the house of study and his wife was coming home with him. As soon as [the poor man] saw them moving the door, he went out after them, but they fled from him and ran into a furnace from which the fire had just been swept. Mar ‘Ukba’s feet were burning and his wife said to him: Raise your feet and put them on mine. When his wife saw that he was upset, she said to him, ‘I am usually at home and my benefactions are direct’.
There’s an irony here, since the editor of the Gemara uses this story as a prooftext for the idea that “Better had a man thrown himself into a fiery furnace than publicly put his neighbor to shame.” But a simple reading of the story shows that the countervoice is the real moral here: direct interaction with the poor is superior to anonymous giving.
For the poor, poverty is suffering. To be sure, suffering can be a test of one’s faith, something one accepts with love. But tests that last for generations are seldom passed. The rabbis knew this and declared: “Three things cause a person to forget himself and to forget his Creator: idolaters, an evil spirit, and crushing poverty” (Eruvin 41b). The term used here for crushing poverty is dikdukei aniyut, literally, the finer points of poverty. Most scholars, however, assume that the phrase was originally dikhdukhei aniyut, the crushings [caused by] poverty. Poverty is so crushing, that the rabbis identify dakh/דך as one of the seven names the Bible uses to describe the poor, commenting “[the poor are called] dakh because they are crushed: He sees something [to eat] but does not eat it, sees something [to drink] but does not drink it” (Vayikra Rabbah 34:6).
What happens when someone is crushed in this way? First, they often are literally subject to others, serving human masters in ways that make it difficult to remember the master of us all. But an ever deeper problem is that the humiliations of poverty can cause people to lose sight of their own self-worth.
This does not happen necessarily – there are plenty of poor people who retain a sense of dignity and self-worth despite the challenge of their circumstances. But it is virtually superhuman to expect that someone whose life is full of crushing humiliations will retain a healthy sense of the fact that she or he too was created in the image of God. And although we are often exhorted to recognize and respect the image of God in others, the fundamental experience of humanity as being created in God’s image begins with oneself. When that image becomes obscured, God’s presence is profoundly diminished.
Perhaps that is why Scripture describes the remission of debts as a remission of debts for God (Deut. 15:2). For it is not only a matter of justice to work for an end to persistent poverty, but it is also a theological necessity: it is the way we fulfill the hope expressed in the opening lines of the kaddish: “May God’s sacred name be magnified and sanctified in the world!”
Rabbi David Rosenn is the Executive Vice President at the New Israel Fund. From 1998 to 2010, he served as the founding Executive Director at AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps.