The Psychology of Dignity
Listen to these stories. Behind them lies an extraordinary insight into the nature of Jewish ethics.
When R. Yona saw a man of good family who had lost his money and was ashamed to accept charity, he would go and say to him, “I have heard that an inheritance has come your way in a city across the sea. So here is an article of some value. Sell it and use the proceeds. When you are more affluent, you will repay me.” As soon as the man took it, R. Yona would say, “It’s yours as a gift.”1Leviticus Rabba 34:1.
Mar Ukba had a poor man in his neighbourhood into whose door socket he used to throw four coins every day. Once the poor man thought, “I will go and see who does me this kindness.” That day Mar Ukba stayed late at the house of study and his wife was coming home with him. As soon as the poor man saw them moving the door (to leave the coins) he ran out after them, but they fled from him and hid. Why did they do this? Because it was taught: One should throw himself into a fiery furnace rather than publicly put his neighbour to shame (Ketubbot 67b).
When R. Yannai saw a certain man giving a coin to a poor person in front of everyone, he said: It would have been better not to have given it to him than to have given it and put him to shame (Ḥagiga 5b).
These stories all have to do with the mitzva of tzedaka, whose source, as we saw in the previous essay, is in Parashat Re’eh. What they tell us is something radical and of the highest importance. Judaism conceives poverty not only in material terms, that the poor lack the means of sustenance. It also sees it in psychological terms. Poverty humiliates. It robs people of dignity. It makes them dependent on others. It deprives them of self-respect.
So tzedaka is addressed not only to people’s physical needs but also to their psychological ones. The rabbis based their approach on a finely nuanced understanding of the key verse in the parasha, “Be open-handed and freely lend him sufficient for his need in that which he lacks” (Deut. 15:8):
Sufficient for his need: This means that you are commanded to maintain him, but you are not commanded to make him rich. That which he lacks: This means even a horse to ride on and a slave to run before him. It is told of Hillel the Elder that he bought for a certain poor man of good family a horse to ride on and a slave to run before him. On one occasion he could not find a slave to run before him, so he himself ran before him for three miles. (Ketubbot 67b)
The first provision (“sufficient for his need”) refers to an absolute subsistence level. In Jewish law this was taken to include food, housing, basic furniture, and, if necessary, funds to pay for a wedding. The second (“that which he lacks”) means relative poverty – relative, however, not to others but to the individual’s own previous standard of living. Someone who was once rich and is now poor has received a devastating psychological blow. Hence the story of Hillel, whose power lies in the fact that he himself was notoriously poor, yet he gave of his money and time to help a rich man who had lost all his wealth regain his self-respect.
This duality is evident throughout the laws of tzedaka. They are directed to the brute fact of poverty, but they also address with great sensitivity the psychology of poverty. It demeans, shames, and humiliates, and a good society will not allow humiliation.2See Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
Protecting dignity and avoiding humiliation was a systematic element of rabbinical law. So, for example, the rabbis ruled that even the richest should be buried plainly so as not to shame the poor (Moed Katan 27b). On certain festive days, girls, especially those from wealthy families, had to wear borrowed clothes, “so as not to shame those who do not have” (Mishna Taanit 4:8). The rabbis intervened to lower the prices of religious necessities so that no one would be excluded from communal celebrations (Pesaḥim 30a). Work conditions had to be humane. Freedom presupposes self-respect, and a free society will therefore be one that robs no one of that basic human entitlement.
Many of the world’s religions have praised poverty, even embraced it as a virtue. They tell stories of saints who give away all they have and spend their lives with next to nothing. Judaism rejects this absolutely. The sages refused to romanticise poverty or anaesthetise its pain. They had no inclination to turn religion into what Marx called the opium of the people. Poverty is not, in Judaism, a blessed condition. It is, the rabbis said, “a kind of death”3Nedarim 7b; Y. Bava Batra 116a; Exodus Rabba 31:14. and “worse than fifty plagues” (Bava Batra 116a). They said, “Nothing is harder to bear than poverty, because he who is crushed by poverty is like one to whom all the troubles of the world cling and upon whom all the curses of Deuteronomy have descended. If all other troubles were placed on one side and poverty on the other, poverty would outweigh them all.”4Exodus Rabba 31:14.
This psychological insight is eloquently expressed in the third paragraph of the Grace after Meals: “Please, O Lord our God, do not make us dependent on the gifts or loans of other people, but only on Your full, open, holy, and generous hand so that we may suffer neither shame nor humiliation for ever and all time.”
As a result, Jewish law focuses not only on how much we must give but also on the manner in which we do so. Hence the stories at the beginning of this essay, and others like them. From them Maimonides inferred a series of general principles. Ideally the donor should not know to whom he or she is giving, nor the recipient know from whom he or she is receiving. If a poor person does not want to accept tzedaka, we should practise a form of benign deception and give it to him under the guise of a loan.5Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Matenot Aniyim 7:9.
Maimonides sums up the general principle thus:
Whoever gives charity to the poor with bad grace and averted eyes has lost all the merit of his action even though he gives him a thousand gold pieces. He should give with good grace and with joy and should sympathise with him in his plight, as it is said, “Have I not wept for those in trouble? Has not my soul grieved for the poor?” (Job 30:25).6Ibid. 10:4.
This is the logic behind two laws that are otherwise inexplicable. The first is “even a poor person who is dependent on tzedaka is obliged to give tzedaka.”7Ibid. 7:5.
The law seems absurd. Why should we give money to the poor so that they may give to the poor? It makes sense only on this assumption, that giving is essential to human dignity and tzedaka is the obligation to ensure that everyone has that dignity.
The second is the famous ruling of Maimonides that
the highest degree of charity, exceeded by none, is when a person assists a poor Jew by providing him with a gift or a loan or by accepting him into a business partnership or by helping him find employment – in a word, by putting him in a situation where he can dispense with other people’s aid.8Ibid. 10:7.
Giving someone a job or making him your partner would not normally be considered charity at all. It costs you nothing. But this further serves to show that tzedaka does not mean charity. It means giving people the means to live a dignified life, and any form of employment is more dignified, within the Jewish value system, than dependence.
This ruling of Maimonides in the twelfth century precisely articulates a practice rediscovered in our time: microloans enabling poor people to start small businesses. For this, Muhammad Yunus was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Explaining their decision, the Nobel Committee said that “lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty” and that Yunus had shown that “even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development.”9See “The Nobel Peace Prize for 2006,” The Nobel Prize, October 13, 2006, https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/2006/press-release/.
Maimonides went to the heart of the matter when he said, “The well-being of the soul can only be obtained after that of the body has been secured.”10Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, III:27.
Poverty is not a noble state. You cannot reach spiritual heights if you have no food to eat or roof for your head, if you lack access to medical attention or are beset by financial worries.
Jewry has had many distinguished economists, from David Ricardo (whom Keynes called the greatest mind that ever addressed itself to economics), to John von Neumann (a physicist who invented Game Theory), to Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman, and Alan Greenspan. They have won an astonishing 38 per cent of Nobel Prizes in the field. Why so? Because Jews have long known that economics is one of the fundamental determinants of a society; that economic systems are not written into the structure of the universe, but are constructed by human beings and can be changed by human beings; and that poverty is not a fact of nature but can be alleviated, minimised, reduced.
Economics is not a religious discipline. Yet underlying the Jewish passion for economics is a religious imperative: “There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be open-handed towards your brothers and towards the poor and needy in your land” (Deut. 15:11).