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Judaism

It’s our duty to give to non-Jewish causes

Charity may begin but should not end at home, says Rabbi Natan Levy

January 21, 2010 12:44
A  rescuer carries a child from his ruined home after the Haiti earthquake

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Last year, in a hotel outside Jerusalem, the movers and shakers in the Jewish world of development aid met for the inaugural conference on Jewish action for the world’s poorest inhabitants. On the first day I encountered a problem: we could not get a minyan together for prayer.

I turned to Abraham Burg, the former Knesset Speaker, and asked him in frustration, “Where are all the Orthodox aid workers?” “Aniye ircha kodmim,” he answered in sonorous Hebrew. “And the goyim (sic) come last of all!”

Aniye ircha kodmim, a talmudic phrase meaning “the poor of one’s own town come first”, refers to a defined system of priority in giving, where relatives come before poor neighbours, poor neighbours before poor from the next town, and so on until the final rung, the non-Jews. For Mr Burg, it was the direct reason why so few traditional Jews were present in that aid conference. Jewish law seems to place gentiles at the bottom of the charity chain and at the fringes of Jewish consciousness.

Giving tzedakah to non-Jews unveils a complex web of old wounds and ancient divides. In Christianity and Islam, giving to the poor has historically been bound up with missionary work. For Judaism, where potential converts are discouraged, we have kept our largesse primarily turned inward. But now that we are willing participants in globalisation, the question of giving tzedakah beyond the shtetl gates has become critical. Are we obligated to support the poorest on the planet, even if they are not Jewish? The talmudic sages answer yes (Gittin 61a): “Support the non-Jewish poor with the Jewish poor... visit the non-Jewish sick with the Jewish sick, and bury the non-Jewish dead with the Jewish dead all because of darchei shalom, ways of peace.”