Tzedakah: Aspiring to a Higher Ethic

These are important questions, and the answers to them are not trivial— indeed, it is no exaggeration to state that they speak to the nature of the mission of the Jewish people itself. When God chose Abraham for a special task in the world, God described the role of Abraham and his descendents in this way:“I have singled him out, that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is just and right... 72 1p other words, the Jewish people became the Jewish people charged with one preeminent divine purpose: the shaping of Jewish conduct to represent the finest model possible for what is“just” and“right” in the world so as to further divine aims ahead of human ones. The Hebrew that the Torah employs for“just” and“right” is“izedakah u'mishpat.” Jews are singled out, God declares, in order that their every act—to the extent that it is possible— should be characterized by the most refined manifestations of fzedakah— active justice— and mishpat— true Judgment— imaginable. When inquiring, then, about which path a Jew or a Jewish organization should select, there is simply no competition: a Jew can only be fully faithful to the Jewish mission, and a Jewish institution can only be true to its ultimate raison d’etre, when behaving according to the best standards of justice and the fairest judgments available. As Abraham swiftly discovered, and as Jews have known through centuries of experience, commitment to these standards does have a cost, and sometimes the price is high. It is, however, a price worth paying in order to contribute to the significance of the Jewish odyssey through history. The JCC, then, has its answer: what a salutary lesson it would be to a world that is consumed by monetary pursuits for an institution to forgo income because of a commitment to an elevated pursuit of justice.

Lifnim mishurat hadin puts Jews on notice that there are times when seeking the finest ethical standards will demand an enhanced behavior that goes beyond the current stipulated requirements of the law, Perhaps, then, it is time for Jewish authorities to call for a zedakah environment that transcends the law as written and ventures