Tzedakah box, Charleston, 1820, silver, National Museum of American Jewish History.

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Tzedakah or Ṣ'daqah in Classical Hebrew (Hebrew: צדקה‎; Arabic: صدقة‎) is a Hebrew word literally meaning righteousness but commonly used to signify charity.^[1] It is based on the Hebrew word (צדק, Tzedek) meaning righteousness, fairness or justice, and it is related to the Hebrew word Tzadik meaning righteous as an adjective (or righteous individual as a noun in the form of a substantive). In Judaism, tzedakah refers to the religious obligation to do what is right and just, which Judaism emphasises are important parts of living a spiritual life. Maimonides says that, while the second highest form of tzedakah is to anonymously give donations to unknown recipients, the highest form is to give a gift, loan, or partnership that will result in the recipient supporting himself instead of living upon others. Unlike philanthropy or charity, which are completely voluntary, tzedakah is seen as a religious obligation, which must be performed regardless of financial standing, and must even be performed by poor people. Tzedakah is considered to be one of the three main acts that can annul a less than favorable heavenly decree.

Precedents in ancient Israel[link]

The Hebrew Bible teaches the obligation to aid those in need, but does not employ one single term for this obligation.^[2] The term tzedekah occurs 157 times in the Masoretic Text, typically in relation to "righteousness" per se, usually in the singular, but sometimes in the plural tzedekot, in relation to acts of charity.^[3] In the Septuagint this was sometimes translated eleemosyne, "almsgiving."^[4][5]

In rabbinical literature of the classical and Middle Ages[link]

In classical rabbinical literature, it was argued that the Biblical regulations concerning left-overs only applied to corn fields, orchards, and vineyards, and not to vegetable gardens; the classical rabbinical writers were much stricter in regard to who could receive the remains. It was stated that the farmer was not permitted to benefit from the gleanings, and was not permitted to discriminate among the poor, nor try to frighten them away with dogs or lions (Hullin 131a, Pe'ah 5:6)^[6] the farmer was not even allowed to help one of the poor to gather the left-overs. However, it was also argued that the law was only applicable in Canaan, (Jerusalem Talmud. Pe'ah 2:5) although many classical rabbinical writers who were based in Babylon observed the laws there (Hullin 134b)^[7] it was also seen as only applying to Jewish paupers, but poor non-Jews were allowed to benefit for the sake of civil peace (Gittin 59b).

Maimonides lists his Eight Levels of Giving, as written in the Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot matanot aniyim ("Laws about Giving to Poor People"), Chapter 10:7-14:

1. Giving an interest-free loan to a person in need; forming a partnership with a person in need; giving a grant to a person in need; finding a job for a person in need; so long as that loan, grant, partnership, or job results in the person no longer living by relying upon others.
2. Giving tzedakah anonymously to an unknown recipient via a person (or public fund) which is trustworthy, wise, and can perform acts of tzedakah with your money in a most impeccable fashion.
3. Giving tzedakah anonymously to a known recipient.
4. Giving tzedakah publicly to an unknown recipient.
5. Giving tzedakah before being asked.
6. Giving adequately after being asked.
7. Giving willingly, but inadequately.
8. Giving "in sadness" (giving out of pity): It is thought that Maimonides was referring to giving because of the sad feelings one might have in seeing people in need (as opposed to giving because it is a religious obligation). Other translations say "Giving unwillingly."

In practice[link]

Tzedakah motif on a Jewish gravestone. Jewish cemetery in Otwock (Karczew-Anielin)

In practice, most Jews carry out tzedakah by donating a portion of their income to charitable institutions, or to needy people that they may encounter; the perception among many modern day Jews is that if donation of this form is not possible, the obligation of tzedakah still requires that something be given. Traditional Jews commonly practice "ma'aser kesafim," tithing 10% of their income to support those in need.

Special acts of tzedakah are performed on significant days; at weddings, Jewish brides and bridegrooms would traditionally give to charity, to symbolise the sacred character of the marriage; at Passover, a major holiday in Jewish tradition, it is traditional to be welcoming towards hungry strangers, and feed them at the table; at Purim it is considered obligatory for every Jew to give food to two other people^{[citation needed]}, in an amount that would equate to a meal each, for the purpose of increasing the total happiness during the month.

As for the more limited form of tzedakah expressed in the biblical laws, namely the leaving of gleanings from certain crops, the Shulchan Aruch argues that during the exile Jewish farmers are not obliged to obey it.^[8] Nevertheless, in modern Israel, rabbis of Orthodox Judaism insist that Jews allow gleanings to be consumed by the poor and by strangers, and all crops (not just gleanings) by anyone and everyone (free, not bought nor sold) during sabbatical years.^[9]

In addition, one must be very careful about how one gives out tzedakah money. It is not sufficient to just give to anyone or any organization, rather, one must check the credentials and finances to be sure that your Tzedakah money will be used wisely, efficiently and effectively "Do not steal from a poor person, for (s)he is poor," (Proverbs 22:22) and from Talmudic-era commentaries including Numbers Rabba 5:2. It is taught that Tzedakah money was never yours to begin with, rather, it always belongs to the recipient, and hence you have an obligation to give it AND to give it away to places that use it efficiently and effectively.

There are many examples of Tzedakah funds that operate according to Maimonides' principles above (particularly #2), including Hands on Tzedakah (working with non-profits in the USA and in Israel), and Mitzvah Heroes Fund (working mainly with non-profits in Israel). Paamonim is a non-profit organization in Israel that operates according to Maimonides' first principle.

Gallery[link]

• 

  Tzedakah pouch and coins on fur-like padding.

• 

  Tzedakah box on jewish grave stone. Jewish cemetery in Otwock (Eliezer Ari).

• 

  Tzedakah box on jewish grave stone. Jewish cemetery in Pappenheim.

• 

  JNF collection box (pushke). The blue box of the Jewish National Fund, was collecting donations for the establishment of the state in the early years.

See also[link]

• Sadaqah and Zakat (Islam)
• Charity (Christianity, Western World)
• Social justice
• gleaning

References[link]

1. ^ Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin; 'To Be A Jew.' Basic Books, New York; 1972, pp. 48.
2. ^ Ronald L. Eisenberg The JPS guide to Jewish traditions Jewish Publication Society - 2004 p531 "Tzedakah (hqdx) The Bible repeatedly stresses the obligation to aid those in need, but never designates a special term for this requirement. The Rabbis adopted the word “tzedakah” to apply to charity, primarily in the form ..."
3. ^ "The word "almsgiving," however, is far from expressing the full meaning of the Hebrew ẓedaḳah, which is, charity in the spirit of uprightness or justice. According to the Mosaic conception, wealth is a loan from God, and the poor have a certain claim on the possessions of the rich; while the rich are positively enjoined to share God's bounties with the poor."Kohler, Kaufmann. "Alms". 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia. JewishEncyclopedia.com. http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/1295-alms. Retrieved 12 January 2012. 
4. ^ As per Gesenius Lexicon; "Deuterony 6:25 καὶ ἐλεημοσύνη ἔσται..."
5. ^ "... derived from the Greek ἐλεημοσύνη (mercifulness), used by Greek-speaking Jews to denote almost exclusively the offering of charity to the needy, from a feeling of both compassion and righteousness (ẓedaḳah). (See LXX. (note: Septuagint) on Prov. xxi. 21, and Dan. iv. 24.)"Kohler, Kaufmann. "Alms". 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia. JewishEncyclopedia.com. http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/1295-alms. Retrieved 12 January 2012. 
6. ^ Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, 4:11
7. ^ Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, 1:14
8. ^ Shulchan Aruch, Yoreh De'ah 332:1
9. ^ Brackman, Rabbi Levi; Rivkah Lubitch. "Shmita". http://www.ynetnews.com/home/0,7340,L-3443,00.html. Yedioth Internet. http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3445115,00.html. Retrieved 10 February 2012. 

Bibliography[link]

• Rabbi Wayne Dossick, Living Judaism: The Complete Guide to Jewish Belief, Tradition, and Practice., pages 249-251.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Tzedakah boxes

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Tzedakah boxes on Jewish gravestones

External links[link]

• Tzedakah at Judaism 101
• Examples of a Tzedakah Fund - Mitzvah Heroes Fund - Israel
• Tzedakah - Charity in Judaism
• Examples of a Tzedakah Fund - Hands on Tzedakah - USA and Israel
• Paamonim

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Chief Rabbi the Right Honourable  The Lord Sacks  Kt
Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth
Position	Chief Rabbi
Organisation	United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth
Began	1991
Ended	Incumbent
Predecessor	The Lord Jakobovits
Personal details
Born	(1948-03-08) March 8, 1948 (age 64) London, England
Nationality	British
Denomination	Orthodox
Spouse	Elaine Taylor Sacks
Children	Joshua, Dina and Gila
Alma mater	Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge New College, Oxford King's College London
Semicha	Jews' College and Etz Chaim Yeshiva (London)

Jonathan Henry Sacks, Baron Sacks, Kt (born 8 March 1948, London) is the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. His Hebrew name is Yaakov Zvi. As the spiritual head of the United Synagogue, the largest synagogue body in the UK, he is the Chief Rabbi of the British Orthodox synagogues, but he is not a religious authority for the Federation of Synagogues or the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations or the other movements, Masorti, Reform and Liberal Judaism.^[1][2]

Family[link]

He is married with three children.^[3] One of his daughters, Gila Sacks, is a former Special Adviser to Gordon Brown.

Education[link]

Sacks was educated at St Mary's Primary School and Christ's College Finchley, Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge (MA), New College, Oxford, King's College London (PhD), Jews' College London and Etz Chaim Yeshiva (London).^[4]

In addition to the PhD he earned at King's College,^[5] he has also been awarded honorary doctorates from the universities of: Cambridge; Glasgow; Haifa; Middlesex; Yeshiva University; Liverpool and St. Andrews, Roehampton University and is an honorary fellow of Gonville and Caius and King's College London.

Career[link]

In September 1991 Sacks succeeded Lord Jakobovits as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. Prior to taking up his current post, Rabbi Sacks was Principal of Jews' College, as well as rabbi of the Golders Green and Marble Arch synagogues.^[6]

Sacks heads the Chief Rabbi's Cabinet^[4] consisting of fourteen other rabbis who advise him on a number of areas, such as Jewish education, Israel, Jewish-Christian relations, matters relating to the Beit Din (Jewish court), and several other areas of concern to the Jewish community. The Chief Rabbi's Cabinet meets on a quarterly basis and its members are entitled to represent the Chief Rabbi at public events.

Sacks had been Principal of Jews' College, London, the world's oldest rabbinical seminary, as well as rabbi of the Golders Green (1978–1982) and Marble Arch (1983–1990) Synagogues in London. He gained rabbinic ordination from Jews' College as well as from London's Etz Chaim Yeshiva (London).

Praise and recognition[link]

In September 2001 the Archbishop of Canterbury conferred on him a doctorate of divinity in recognition of his first ten years in the Chief Rabbinate of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth.

In 2004, his book The Dignity of Difference was awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Religion.

Sacks was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours in 2005 "For services to the Community and to Inter-faith Relations."^[7]

He was made an Honorary Freeman of the London Borough of Barnet in September 2006.^[8]

On 13 July 2009 it was announced that Sacks was recommended for a life peerage with a seat in the House of Lords by the House of Lords Appointments Commission.^[9][10] He took the style Baron Sacks of Aldgate in the City of London.^[11]

He was invited to the wedding of Prince William of Wales and Kate Middleton as a representative for the Jewish community.^[12]

Views[link]

Some Orthodox opposition[link]

After the publication of his book The Dignity of Difference, a group of Haredi rabbis, most notably Rabbis Yosef Shalom Elyashiv and Bezalel Rakow, accused Sacks of heresy against what they consider the traditional Orthodox viewpoint (although many Orthodox Jews and others as well consider the Haredi'im sector "ultra-Orthodox" rather than merely "Orthodox," see Haredi article). According to them, some words seemed to imply an endorsement of pure relativism between religions, and that Judaism is not the sole true religion, e.g. "No one creed has a monopoly on spiritual truth." This led him to rephrase more clearly some sentences in the book for its second edition, though he refused to recall books already in the stores.^[13]

In his "Preface to the Second Edition" of the book, Sacks wrote that certain passages in the book had been misconstrued: he had already explicitly criticised cultural and religious relativism in his book, and he did not deny Judaism's uniqueness. He also stressed however that mainstream rabbinic teachings teach that wisdom, righteousness and the possibility of a true relationship with God are all available in non-Jewish cultures and religions as an on-going heritage from the covenant that God made with Noah and all his descendants, so the tradition teaches that one does not need to be Jewish to know God or truth or to attain salvation.^[14][15] As this diversity of covenantal bonds implies, however, traditional Jewish sources do clearly deny that any one creed has a monopoly on spiritual truth. Monopolistic and simplistic claims of universal truth he has characterized as imperialistic, pagan and Platonic, and not Jewish at all.^[16]

Efforts to accommodate Haredi Jews[link]

A book by the British historian and journalist Meir Persoff, Another Way, Another Time, has argued that "Sacks’s top priority has been staying in the good graces of the Haredi, or strictly Orthodox, faction, whose high birthrate has made it the fastest-growing component of British Jewry." But, Persoff has argued, "the Orthodox circles Sacks strives to placate will never consider him Orthodox enough no matter what he does."^[17]

Rabbi Gryn and Rabbi Jacobs[link]

Sacks provoked considerable controversy in the Anglo-Jewish community in 1996 when he refused to attend the funeral service of the late Reform Rabbi Hugo Gryn and a private letter he had written in Hebrew, which (in translation) asserted that Gryn was "among those who destroy the faith," was leaked and published. He wrote further that he was an "enemy" of the Reform, Liberal and Masorti movements, leading some to reject the notion that he is "Chief Rabbi" for all Jews in Britain. He attended a memorial meeting for Gryn, a move that brought the wrath of some in the ultra-Orthodox community.^[18][19] Rabbi Dow Marmur argued that after attending the memorial service, Sacks then attempted to placate the ultra-Orthodox community, an attempt which Marmur has described as “neurotic and cowardly."^[20]

A similar stance was taken by Sacks and his Beth Din when they prevented the retired Rabbi Louis Jacobs, who had helped establish the British branch of the Masorti movement, from being called up for the Reading of the Torah on the Saturday before his grand-daughter's wedding.^[21]

Secularism and Europe's changing demographics[link]

Sacks has expressed concern at what he regards as the negative effects of materialism and secularism in European society, arguing that they undermine the basic values of family life and lead to selfishness. In 2009 Sacks gave an address claiming that Europeans have chosen consumerism over the self-sacrifice of parenting children, and that "the major assault on religion today comes from the neo-Darwinians." He argued that Europe is in population decline "because non-believers lack shared values of family and community that religion has."^{[22][23][24][25]}

Consumerism and Steve Jobs[link]

Rabbi Sacks made remarks at an inter-faith reception attended by the Queen, in November 2011, in which he criticised what he believed to be the selfish consumer culture that has only brought unhappiness. "The consumer society was laid down by the late Steve Jobs coming down the mountain with two tablets, iPad one and iPad two, and the result is that we now have a culture of iPod, iPhone, iTune, i, i, i. When you're an individualist, egocentric culture and you only care about 'I,’ you don’t do terribly well." ^{[26][27][28][29]} In a later statement, the Chief Rabbi's office said "The Chief Rabbi meant no criticism of either Steve Jobs personally or the contribution Apple has made to the development of technology in the 21st century."^[26]

Current positions[link]

• Rabbi and Spiritual Leader, Western Marble Arch Synagogue, London (since May 1, 2004).
• Jakobovits Professor in modern Jewish thought, Jews' College London, 1982.
• Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth (since September 1, 1991).
• Visiting professor of theology at King's College London.
• Honorary fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, 1993.
• Presentation (Honorary) fellow, King's College London, 1993.
• Member of the Board of World Religious Leaders, The Elijah Interfaith Institute.^[30]

Previous positions held[link]

• Lecturer in moral philosophy, Middlesex Polytechnic, 1971–1973.
• Lecturer, Jews' College London, 1973–82; director of its rabbinic facility, 1983–1990; Principal, 1984–1990.
• Visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Essex, 1989–1990.
• Sherman lecturer at the University of Manchester, 1989.
• Riddell lecturer at the University of Newcastle.
• Cook lecturer at the University of Oxford, University of Edinburgh and the University of St Andrews.
• Visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Sacks is also a frequent guest on both television and radio, and regularly contributes to the national press. He delivered the 1990 [[BBC]] [[Reith Lectures]] on The Persistence of Faith].

Works by Jonathan Sacks[link]

• Traditional alternatives: Orthodoxy and the future of the Jewish people (1989)
• Tradition in an Untraditional Age (1990)
• BBC Reith Lectures: The Persistence of Faith (1990)
• Persistence of Faith (1991)
• Arguments for the Sake of Heaven (1991)
• Crisis and Covenant (1992)
• One People? (1993)
• Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren? (1994)
• Community of Faith (1995)
• Torah Studies: Discourses by Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson (1996)
• The Politics of Hope (1997 revised 2nd edition 2000)
• Morals and Markets (1999)
• Celebrating Life (2000)
• Radical Then, Radical Now (published in America as A Letter in the Scroll) (2001)
• Dignity of Difference (2002) (Grawemeyer Award winner)
• The Chief Rabbi's Haggadah (2003)
• To Heal a Fractured World – The Ethics of Responsibility (2005)
• The Authorised Daily Prayer Book of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, Fourth Edition (2006)
• The Home We Build Together – Recreating Society (2007)
• The Koren Sacks Siddur (2009)
• Covenant & Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible (2009)
• Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-first Century (2009)
• The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search For Meaning (2011)
• The Koren Sacks Rosh HaShana Mahzor (2011)

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jonathan Sacks

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Jonathan Sacks

• Office of the Chief Rabbi
• Koren Publishers Jerusalem website
• Amazon Author Page
• The 1990 BBC Reith Lectures 1990: The Persistence of Faith