The Birth of the Rabbinic City of Social Welfare
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The Birth of the Rabbinic City of Social Welfare Noam Zion Hartman Institute, Jerusalem excerpted from: Jewish Giving in Comparative Perspectives: History and Story, Law and Theology, Anthropology and Psychology Book One: From Each According to One’s Ability: Duties to Poor People from the Bible to the Welfare State and Tikkun Olam Previous Books: A DIFFERENT NIGHT: The Family Participation Haggadah By Noam Zion and David Dishon LEADER'S GUIDE to "A DIFFERENT NIGHT" By Noam Zion and David Dishon A DIFFERENT LIGHT: Hanukkah Seder and Anthology including Profiles in Contemporary Jewish Courage By Noam Zion A Day Apart: Shabbat at Home By Noam Zion and Shawn Fields-Meyer A Night to Remember: Haggadah of Contemporary Voices Mishael and Noam Zion [email protected] – www.haggadahsrus.com The Birth of the Rabbinic City of Social Welfare The Invention of the Tzedakah Fund The Synagogue as the Home of Social Welfare The Rabbinic Gabbai compared with the British Overseer of the Poor (17th C. English Poor Laws) From Tithes to Tzedakah, From Individual to Community, From Agriculture to an Urban Money Economy Tzedakah: A Free Gift of Charity, a Property Right, a Moral Duty, or a Tax? Conditional and Unconditional Property Rights: A Biblical and Continental Ethos versus a British Narrative In Summary: Justice in the City Appendices: The Ancient Jewish Socialist Welfare State Tzedakah’s Vocation: Justice or Life? 1 Introduction “Every ‘renaissance,’ every ‘reformation,’ reaches back into an often distant past to recover forgotten or neglected elements with which there is a sudden sympathetic vibration, a sense of empathy, of recognition.” - Yosef Yerushalmi (Zakhor, 113) "Budgets are moral documents. They reveal the priorities, the values of a family, a church, a synagogue, a city, a state, or a nation. What is important? What is not? Who is important? Who is not? This is a moral conversation, also a very practical one." - Jim Wallis, Brookings Institution Paneli The birth place of the welfare state is to be found in the literary record of the Mishna and Tosefta Peah.ii It appears there not only as an idea or a legal utopia, but as a functioning institution in the 2nd - 3rd C. The rabbinic welfare “state” offers many more services to the needy citizen and noncitizen than in most European welfare societies before World War II. However the concept of the welfare state has grown and been transformed in the 20th C. to provide, in principle, a “social citizenship” for all citizens designed to provide many new services not imagined by the Rabbis. The modern French philosopher Montesquieu advocated for state welfarism involving a notion of basic rights: “The early eighteenth-century philosophe Montesquieu declared that "the state owes all citizens an assured subsistence." ... To be secure from want was a basic human right, "where there exists a class of men without subsistence, there exists a violation of the rights of humanity."1 1 "Armand de la Meuse, speaking before the French National Convention on April 17, 1793, declared that there cannot be ... a more dangerous, absurd, and immoral contradiction than political equality without social and economic equality. To enjoy equality in law but to be deprived of it in life is an odious injustice.... There is no need to raise the question here as to whether ... under [natural law] all men possess an equal right to the fruits of the earth. This is a truth about which we can entertain no doubts at all. The real issue is this: granted that in society the public convenience admits of a right to private property, is there not also an obligation to limit those rights and not to abandon their use to the caprice of the property owner?" (Defense of Babeuf, 83) “Gracchus Babeuf, the leader of an abortive coup attempt in the French Revolution in 1796, is the first explicitly to proclaim that justice requires the state to redistribute goods to the poor. He attributed to everyone a full-fledged right - a perfect, strict, enforceable right - to an equal share in all wealth. Written during his trial... Babeuf draws a direct line from the natural right of equal wealth to the demand that society equalize wealth. That nature gives everyone "an equal right to the enjoyment of all wealth" was the first principle in his twelve-point summary, and the second was that "[t]he aim of society is to defend this equality, often attacked by the strong and the wicked in the state of nature, and to increase, by the co-operation of all, this enjoyment."... So Locke's basic argument for the purpose of all states - that the state can enhance and better preserve the rights we have in the state of nature is here applied to one right that Locke himself never considered as such: the right to equal economic status. Given the Lockean view of legitimate government, it would follow that only communist states can be legitimate. One cannot find an argument like this anywhere in the earlier writings of the Western political tradition.” (Samuel Fleischacker, A Short History of Distributive Justice, 77- 78) 2 The notion of human economic rights now promulgated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948) follows Montesquieu’s language of universal human rights applied to economic destitution. Although these rights are not universally enforceable, the social welfare state offers a solution which allows each state to provide economic rights to its own citizens. Francois Rochefoulcauld Liancourt, a leading member of the French Revolutionary Assembly, went beyond Montesquieu’s conception of the social welfare state in several ways. First, economic rights are not just the right to receive support but also the right and the duty to work towards one’s own support. Second, economic policy must go beyond subsistence to prevention. Society seeks to protect the citizens not only from poverty but from all misfortune. He declared in 1790: "Every man has a right to subsistence. The duty of society therefore is to seek to prevent misfortune, to relieve it, to offer work to those who need it in order to live, to force them if they refuse to work, and finally to assist without work those whose age or infirmity deprive them of the ability to work."iii Now the Mishna does not propound a theory of universal human rights nor does its municipal government include a full-service department of health, education and welfare with social security pension funds and Medicare or Medicaid nor does it stimulate the economy in time of recession to raise employment levels. For the Rabbis most human needs are to be handled by the family, however for the Jewish poor – local resident or not – every fellow Jew has an obligation to take care of all their needs, as we will see in book two of this trilogy, The Dignity of the Needy: From Talmudic Tzedakah to Human Rights: “To Each according to their Social Needs.” The moral obligation incumbent on the individual is institutionalized collectively in the tzedakah system of every Jewish municipality, at least for subsistence support of basic needs. In theory Jewish tzedakah organizations also cared for non-Jews. However, up until the modern era there were no Jewish cities without something akin to a guild in which Jews cared for their own, as did other social and religious associations.2 What is important to note regarding the Jewish municipal kuppah is that it is granted legal power by the Jewish community3 to tax and distribute aid to the 2 The Jewish communities in Ottoman Empire (16th-18th C.) aided the poor in three main ways: a) Allowing for exemptions from taxes of the Jewish community and pay off the Muslim head tax, the jizye, for the poor. “Had the community not paid the head tax on behalf of its poor, the latter would have been imprisoned.” b) Providing food and money to the needy poor such as the soleth contribution, (literally, "flour meal") apparently distributed according to a list of names that was updated from time to time by the charitable fund collectors (gabbaim). c) Setting up institutions and services for the benefit of the Jewish masses (Talmud Torah), providing elementary Jewish education, aid to the sick and the needy, aid in marrying off poor orphan girls, burying the dead paupers, and more. The hospitals apparently served as lodging places for poor travelers, as was the custom in Europe. Most of the services were provided through societies founded for a specific purpose, such as biqqur holim - society for visiting the sick. d) During the 18th century, an additional method of aid developed - the overall leadership (koleluth) of each community became sorts of banks, and provided yearly interest on deposits that poor people, widows, and orphans, and scholars deposited with them. Often, this legalized interest (hekhsher) was the only means of livelihood for those who were unable to work to support themselves (Constantinople, 1774).” (Yaron Ben Naeh, “Poverty,” 186) 3 The community was governed by majority rule of an elected body but often “a few wealthy people found themselves pitted against numerically greater opponents.” Voters only constitute those who can 3 poor. Often this coercive authority was confirmed by the non-Jewish monarch in a charter. After the Emancipation, when Jews won citizenship in the 19th, their communities lost their judicial, legislative and civil-economic governmental functions, and therefore the tzedakah traditions to be studied in this book lost their legal force after almost 1800 years and maintain only their rhetorical moral power. The basic form of Rabbinic tzedakah, however, is an obligatory contribution to the poor whether in in food or funds.