Chapter 1
his is a success story with an unpromising beginning. The
Torah stated:“There shall be no needy among you....”(Deut. 15.4) and a few verses later“There shall never cease to be needy ones among you....”(Deut . 15.11), even while appealing for help, it appeared to give up on a solution for poverty. Despite this unusual pessimism, we have made the elimination of poverty a major aspect of Judaism . How did tzedakah become such an important element of Judaism ? After all, it is not among the demands of the Decalogue, nor is an unusual amount of space devoted to it in the Bible or the later rabbinic literature.
Poverty has haunted us through the millennia. The threat of poverty and starvation was ever present in the stories of the patriarchs Abraham , Isaac, and Jacob. Only utter despair could have forced such herdsmen to seek refuge in strange lands. The specter of hard work lost through drought or natural disaster was ever present to the biblical peasant as shown throughout the historical and prophetic books of the Bible . Meager harvests occurred at four-or-five-year intervals until the eighteenth century.' They, of course, intensified the danger of diseases and epedemics that struck the poor especially hard.
The attitude toward poverty in the ancient world is hard to establish. It was taken for granted that a high percentage of the population was poor and hungry. In Greek and Roman times it was seen as largely their fault; sufficent food was to be provided for public safety and to prevent social unrest. There was no religious obligation to care for the poor.> Judaism and later Christianity had a different view and sought to alleviate poverty. Our task is to investigate the Jewish view.