“HaShem
spoke to Moses, saying: ‘When you will take a census of the Children of Israel
according to their counts, every man shall give HaShem an atonement for his
soul when counting them, and there will be no plague among them when counting
them. This is what they shall give-
everyone who passes among the counted- the half of the shekl,…..as a portion to HaShem. …..The wealthy shall not increase and the
destitute shall not decrease from the half of the shekel – to give the portion
of HaShem, to atone for your souls.
This section
of KiTissa is a bit confusing. I know
that when I was growing up I was taught not to count individuals sitting in a
room trying to form a minyan. Instead of
saying one, two, three….we would count not one, not two, not three… I never
thought of this strange way of counting to be related to a Torah portion
somehow. So I decided to look at a
classical source of commentary on the Torah, Tzena Urenah, for a midrash to
explain why the counting of individuals happens in such a convoluted way.
Here’s what
I found from Tzenah Ur’ena:
“Why have our Sages told us that there is no
blessing on something unless it remains uncounted? Because G-d conceals his miracles. For this reason, our Sages have said that when one counts or measures something
and then begs G-d to bless it, it is a vain prayer. An evil eye lurks over a thing which has been
counted or measured.”
“For this
reason G-d commanded that Israel not be counted, except by means of the coins
called shekalim. Each person was told to
give a one half-shekel coin, and then the coins were counted so that the number
of the population was then known.
“The verse
thus says that each man shall redeem his soul with a half shekel coin and there
will be no plague and no death. If they
would have actually counted the people then as each person was counted
individually, G-d would have seen his sins and evil deeds and would have killed
him. But when the community is united
there are many good deeds between them, then one man protects the other.”
Wow! The idea that the community has such an
ability to bring good to the life of all who are involved in it is a powerful
statement. This was further elucidated
upon by the fact that the half-shekel was a required amount of tzedakah for
rich and poor alike. It was this small
act of tzedakah that was to protect the people from plague. Perhaps that is why in the Book of Proverbs
10:2 it was written that Tzedakah tatzil mimavet…Charity saves from death.
Here we are
on the cusp of our Federation’s annual meeting, and we are reading a Torah
portion that talks about the power of tzedakah…about the power of each
individual contributing for the good of the whole. I think it obvious what happens when this
message is lost. As a community, many of the beloved causes to which we
subscribe can no longer be supported in the way in which we would like to do so,
when each individual who is part of the community does not contribute in some
fashion. Is that another way that
tzedakah saves us from death?
When I was
at the Pardes Institute several years ago learning about Rabbi Akiva, I studied
a portion in the Babylonian Talmud Shabbat
156 b. It too was related to the idea that Tzedaka
Saves from Death!
“Rabbi Akiva
had a daughter. Chaldean astrologers
said to him: ‘ On the day your daughter enters the bridal chamber, a snake will
bite her and she will die.’
Rabbi Akiva
became terribly distressed.
On the night
of her marriage, she removed a long hair pin and stuck it into a crevice in the
wall. It penetrated the eye of a snake and remained there. In the morning, when she pulled her hair pin
out of the crevice, a poisonous snake came trailing after it.
Her father
asked her ‘What did you do?’ Was there anything special that you did yesterday?
“A poor man
came to the door in the evening,” she replied.
“Every person was busy at the banquet, and therefore no one heard. When I noticed, I stood up and took the
portion you gave me and I gave it to him.”
“You did a
mitzvah” he responded.
Thereupon
Rabbi Akiva went out and declared: “Tzedakah saves a person from death.” “And
not just from an unnatural death, he added, “but from death itself!”
What do you think
Rabbi Akiva meant when he claimed “Tzedakah saves a person from death
itself?” To what was he possibly
referring beyond the miracle of his daughter being saved from death on her
wedding night?
There are
varoius motivations for giving tzedakah that you may or may not have thought
about prior to this time. One reason might be called
Nature/Intuitive giving…You see a cause that moves you and you contribute to
it. Such giving is about doing so when
one feels moved to do so. The phone
rings and you hear a pitch that means something to you, so you give.
A second
motivation could be called Learned giving…You have read in the Torah that we are not to
harden our heart or shut our hand against our needy brother. We are to open our hand and give him as much
as he is lacking and whatever he is lacking. (Deut. 15:7-8) Such giving is learned through the
transmission of our “duty” via Torah learning from one generation to the next.
A third
motivation would be called Ideological giving…Giving tzedakah is seen to bolster the Jewish
people. In Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah ,
Laws of Giving to the Needy, Chapter 10, he comments: It is only by these actions that the
sovereign future of the Jewish people will be secured, as it says, (in the book
of Isaiah 54:14) “through giving tzedakah will you, Jerusalem be permanently
established.”
As we
hopefully gather tomorrow morning to discuss our Federation and its role in our
community, let’s think about why we give.
Is it because of Nature, nurture, or nation? Can Tzedakah really save us from death? Is it still important to be counted by giving
a portion of what we have for the benefit of the protection it brings to us
all?
Shabbat Shalom.
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