Alleviating Poverty 53

Indeed. Dr. Meir Tamari and Rabbi Yedidya Sinclair, both scholars in this area, have made the point that the very term“welfare” was designed to make what ought to be an unpalatable notion of relying on public assistance into a socially acceptable phenomenon:

In our own day, liberal and socialist thinkers have

objected to the use of the word“charity” to describe

the assistance given to the poor and the weak.

“Welfare,” to their mind, was a more correct term,

since it preserved the dignity of the recipient. Almost

all of the policies of the welfare state are based on this

distinction....

Furthermore, when“welfare” rather than charity is the normative system, many of the same people who would not wish to draw on charitable funds, with their resultant stigma, see nothing wrong with“living off welfare”— since it is theirs, so to speak, as a right. This leads to a certain moral disease that encourages abusing the system or, at best, discourages efforts by individuals to break the poverty cycle....

Judaism ’s view of charity, while ensuring both individual and communal care of the weak and unfortunate, militates against welfare as a way of life.

21 The philosophical divide can, then, be characterized in this way: many contemporary states provide a range of“welfare” structures that are delivered as universal benefits, in a fashion that has effectively established the perception that these provisions are the“rights” of all citizens. Within the halakhic worldview, however, since becoming a recipient of public funds is to be avoided, it cannot be viewed as a right. Taken as a whole, after all, the Jewish legal system is not concerned with rights so much as with obligations: responsibilities that are articulated through commandments. These responsibilities dictate