Parshas Shoftim: Hashem's Accountants

This week's shiur fell on Rosh Chodesh Elul, the first day of the month of Elul. Elul is the month that leads us to Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and all the Yamim Noraim, and it is the month of preparation. So Rabbi Adi wanted to tie the parsha into preparing ourselves, so that when we stand in shul on Rosh Hashanah and say the tefillos, the words will mean more to us.

He started with his own family. His grandfather was a chazan on the Lower East Side of New York, part of the famous choirs of the early 1900s, and later became the rabbi and chazan in Bangor, Maine, where he did everything himself: he led the davening, blew the shofar, leined the Torah. His father was a chazan in Los Angeles for many, many years. And Rabbi Adi himself has been a chazan since he got married; for his first six years living in Israel, a shul in Los Angeles flew him out every year for the high holidays, and today he is the chazan of the small minyan he started with friends in his neighborhood.

For him, the highlight of the Yamim Noraim every year is the tefillah of Unesaneh Tokef, where the whole shul says out loud:

וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה

And teshuvah (repentance), and tefillah (prayer), and tzedakah (charity) remove the evil of the decree.

Three things. And as we enter Elul, Rabbi Adi wanted to spend time on the third one, tzedakah, so that when we say those words on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we feel them.

Here is the connection to this week's parsha. Parshas Shoftim commands:

צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף

Tzedek, tzedek tirdof. Righteousness, righteousness you shall pursue.

The common understanding in the Gemara is that this is about judgment: when you need something decided, run after a truly righteous judge, one who will not be swayed by any ulterior motive, but will rule only by what the Torah says is right. That is the plain meaning. But there is another explanation among the commentators: from here you learn that you must run after tzedakah, after the mitzvah of giving. And the Navi (prophet) says that in the end, the geulah (redemption) will come in the merit of tzedakah: “Tzion will be redeemed with justice, and those who return to her with tzedakah” (Yeshayahu 1:27).

In fact, last week's parsha was full of this. Five times, the Torah doubled its language about giving: “pasoach tiftach,” open, open your hand; “nason titein,” give, and give again. There is no other mitzvah in the whole Torah that gets doubled language over and over like this. And the Rambam, in his laws of tzedakah, writes at length that of all 248 positive mitzvos, tzedakah is the most important one, so important that giving is embedded in the DNA of the Jewish people. He promises that no one ever becomes poor from giving tzedakah, and he adds that tzedakah pushes away harsh decrees, the exact words we say in Unesaneh Tokef.

But the Rambam also says something surprising, and it is brought as actual halacha in the Shulchan Aruch: if you give tzedakah begrudgingly, with a sour face, you have not just done the mitzvah imperfectly. You have lost the mitzvah entirely. This is strange. With every other mitzvah, doing it in a less than ideal way still counts. Only by tzedakah do you lose everything.

And it gets harder. The Talmud teaches “lefum tza'ara agra,” according to the difficulty is the reward. You had a late night and you still drag yourself up in the morning to daven? Extra reward. The harder something is, the greater the mitzvah when you overcome it and do it anyway. So giving away your money is genuinely hard; by that rule, the person who finds it painful to give and gives anyway should get more reward, not zero. Why does begrudging tzedakah count for nothing? Hold that question.

The Abarbanel's accounting

Tzedakah is hard for a good reason. You wake up early, you work, you leave your family for hours every day, you sweat for years of school and internships, and you walk away with a paycheck. That money is yours; you earned it. Giving it away hurts. But the whole idea of tzedakah is that the money you give was never yours to begin with. It is money Hashem entrusted to you in order to pass on.

There is a famous story about the Abarbanel, Don Yitzchak Abarbanel, who was second in command to the King of Portugal. The other ministers were jealous of him and accused him of stealing. The king did not believe it, because the Abarbanel was his most trusted minister, but to settle the matter he asked him to produce an accounting of all his money. The Abarbanel went home and handed the king an accounting of only one thing: all the money he had ever given away to tzedakah. The king was furious. I asked for everything you have, and you give me a list of donations? You are mocking me, and I will seize it all. But first, tell me: why did you do this? The Abarbanel answered: because the only money I truly own is the money I gave away. Everything else can be seized, lost, or burned. What I gave to tzedakah is mine forever.

The Chofetz Chaim's fundraiser

The Chofetz Chaim once traveled to raise money for his yeshiva in Radin. In those days, most buildings in Europe were built of wood, and between the wooden walls and the log fires used for heat, the yeshiva had burned down more than once. He wanted to rebuild it in brick. On his trip he sat with a wealthy man and explained the whole situation. The man said he truly wished he could help, but right now he simply was not liquid; he did not have the money available.

A few months later, war broke out. Both the wealthy man and the Chofetz Chaim fled to the same city, and like Jewish refugees everywhere, they ended up in the local beis knesses (synagogue), where benches had been set out for people to sleep on. The Chofetz Chaim spotted the man, now stripped of everything, and out of sensitivity tried to avoid him; he did not want to embarrass him. But the man saw the Chofetz Chaim, ran over, and started yelling at him: why did you not force me to give you the money?! Now I have nothing. Had I given it to you then, at least the merit of that tzedakah would still be mine. Now I do not even have that.

The same lesson from both directions. What you keep, you can lose. What you give, you keep forever.

Why tzedakah is number one

So why is tzedakah the greatest of the mitzvos, the one that brings the geulah, one of the big three of Unesaneh Tokef? Rabbi Adi gave two reasons.

First, tzedakah is emunah (faith) in action. Hashem gives each of us our parnassah, our salary. But when He gives it, He is appointing us as His accountants: a certain portion of what lands in your hands, whether ten percent or five percent, was never deposited for you. You are holding it in trust, and your job is to disperse it. The Gemara asks: why did Hashem create a world with poor people at all? He could have created unlimited resources so that no one needed anyone. The answer is that Hashem wanted us to have the ability to give, to participate in His work. So when you set money aside from every paycheck, some people literally keep a separate account for it, you are declaring with your actions: this is not my money, it is His, and I am the trustee. That declaration of emunah is what brings the geulah.

Rabbi Adi shared that last week his 13-year-old daughter Miri came home from babysitting and immediately handed him four dollars: “Abba, please take this and give it to tzedakah.” And he said one of his favorite things to do as a parent is right after a child's bar or bat mitzvah: to sit with them, make an accounting of their gift money, set a portion aside, and discuss together where they personally want to give it.

Second, tzedakah teaches us to be like Hashem. There is a mitzvah to emulate Hashem, and what does Hashem do all day? He gives, constantly, to everyone. Here is a famous question: if you have one hundred dollars for tzedakah, is it better to give the whole hundred to one person or organization, or to give one dollar each to a hundred different people? Many say, and the Rambam among them, that it is better to give one dollar to a hundred people. Why? Because tzedakah is not only about the money arriving; it is about training the muscle of giving. A hundred separate acts of giving turn you into a giver, someone who gives and gives and gives, like Hashem. That is why the Torah doubles its language, pasoach tiftach, nason titein: open your hand, and open it again. Give, and give again.

And now our question answers itself. Why does begrudging tzedakah lose the mitzvah entirely, against the rule of lefum tza'ara agra? Because the whole point of tzedakah is the belief that this money is not mine; I am only Hashem's conduit for it. A person who gives with a sour face is announcing that he believes the opposite, that it is his money being torn away from him. He has handed over the coins but missed the entire mitzvah, because the mitzvah was never the coins. It was the emunah.

Three ways to give

There is more than one way to give tzedakah. The first is with your money. The second is with your body: Avraham Avinu, when his nephew Lot was captured, went out to war and put his own body on the line to save him. And the third is with your mind and your profession. A lawyer who takes calls from people in the community who need advice is giving tzedakah with his expertise. Rabbi Adi told about a friend of his, a doctor, who had three different people come over to him in shul on Shabbos with medical questions. Rabbi Adi asked him: is that hard for you? You are davening, you are with your kids at the kiddush, and people keep coming at you with questions. The doctor answered: it is not hard, it is a gift. Helping someone in the community who is not feeling well, or who just needs someone to talk to, is a tremendous zechus (merit). Everyone has something to give with.

Yehuda from Lakewood

Rabbi Adi closed with a story he heard from Yoel Gold, a famous Jewish storyteller who learned in yeshiva with him years ago. A man made his living buying iPads and reselling them on Amazon. One night he listed a few hundred iPads at $400 each, set everything up, and went to sleep. In the morning he woke up to find every single iPad sold out overnight, and for a moment he was overjoyed, until he looked closer. He had left off a zero. He had sold hundreds of iPads at $40 each, not $400. In one typo he had lost tens of thousands of dollars.

Then he noticed something. Every single iPad had been bought by one user: “Yehuda from Lakewood,” who was himself a reseller. He reached out. Yehuda explained: I saw the listing late at night, hundreds of iPads at $40, and then I saw the seller's name, “L.Y. Bardichev.” I realized this had to be a Jew, and that the price had to be a mistake. I did not want another Jew to lose tens of thousands of dollars, or to get hit with Amazon's penalties for canceling orders. So I bought all of them myself, so no one else could, and figured we would sort it out between us afterward. And that is exactly what they did.

That is tzedakah too: not only giving your money or your time, but keeping your eyes open, and when you see the chance to jump in and save another person, jumping.

The takeaway

Why is tzedakah bound up with the Yamim Noraim? Because when we commit to giving, we are saying two things at once: that we trust Hashem, because the money was His all along and we are only His accountants, and that we want to be like Him, givers who give again and again. That is why teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah are the three that remove the evil of the decree. As Elul begins, this is the one to start practicing now, so that when we say Unesaneh Tokef this year, we will not just be reading the words. We will be describing ourselves.

Rabbi Adi ended by saying there is no greater example of this than the Seven Schwartz Brothers itself, where it is built into the fabric of the company that a percentage of everything is set aside to make a difference for Israel and the Jewish people, and in that merit, may this coming year be a year of success and growth for every one of us, and for all of Israel and the Jewish people around the world.