The Joy Of Charity
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JOY

The experience beyond the busy-ness of charity

The primary teaching of the Torah

What is the primary teaching of the Torah?
Is it to love your neighbor as yourself - the principle of gracious giving that permeates every portion of the Torah, as emphasized by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Hacohen Kagan (known as the Chafetz Chaim)?

Is it to see each event in life as a miracle, as declared strongly and unequivocally by Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman (known as Ramban or Nachmanides)?

I want to claim that it is both of the above - the essential oneness of the Teaching being expressed in both.

We could get side-tracked here - asking whether indeed there must be (can be/is) one primary Teaching; and asking in what sense it is primary. I prefer to let the answers to these questions bubble from beneath the surface than to attack them squarely. The straightforward approach would preclude the opening of heart that I need to express my point. If philosophical meditation is to be applied, then let it focus on giving and on the miraculous.

Giving is very rich with association; it is the basis of relationship, and so to be found in all the forms of relationships that occupy us so very much: family, work and friends. It is also the very reason for Creation, as God's giving nature "required" the creation of a receiver. Our myriad and detailed forms and modes of relationships express our detailed relationship to God. "Tuning in" to others can bring one to "tune in" to God, and vice versa. Also the degree of "tuning in" is often in parallel on these two tracks.

With regard to the second principle above, it is often not noted that the miraculous is a scale on which to measure each of our experiences. It is parallel in measure to the degree to which each experience is an existential adventure, in the character of adventure as laid out in Georg Simmel's classic analysis. There he expounds quite beautifully on the accidental, dreamlike quality of the adventure which eventually takes on meaning and redefines the life around it.

I don't know whether giving - according to some Divine calculation - must necessarily bring entrance to the miraculous in experience. However, it seems that the art of giving (especially in its more refined forms) is similar to the art of living in the miraculous. The art of giving requires a clarity in the definition of self - a solid sense of both self-respect and humility - in order to make choices about the proper distribution of resources. When does my giving cause harm to my self-respect? Only when I suffer from pride in my humility. This clarity of self is in part obtained by way of engaging in actions of giving, and these actions also constitute a natural expression of this clarity. So the perfecting of giving is the perfecting of self-definition.

To see a miracle requires an acknowledgement of lack of control. This is the adventure, and absolutely anything is possible. My area of control defines the outer limits of my self. The acknowledgement of loss of control is essentially a giving - a subordination of self to other. It is ultimately a giving of one's self with all one's heart, and yet the self remains preserved.

It must also be mentioned that giving and the miraculous are both accompanied by subtle joy. A poet might compare it to the joy of suddenly noticing that your apple tree is blooming at the end of a hot spring day during Pesach just a moment after your heart was already feeling the flow of rejunevation springing from the holiday activities (or I suppose he might come up with something better).

In The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm writes: "Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness."

In short, whether the path be focused on giving or on the miraculous, the answer to "Who am I?" that pervades our being and even enters our bones - that is the primary Teaching.

It is eternal joy.

The inseparability of charity and joy

Rabbi Soloveitchik zt"l claimed that, while the act that tzedaka (charity) involves is certainly giving money to a poor person, the fulfillment of the mitzva (God's command) to give tzedaka takes place in the giver's heart.

Fulfilling God's command means relating to the poor in a certain inner way.

This explains why the Rambam (Hilkhot Matnot Aniyim 7:10) rules that one who is forced by the court to give tzedaka must be present when his property is being confiscated. He must see this to be able to have the inner fulfillment of the mitzva.

In its classic list of God's commandments, the Sefer HaChinukh thus begins the description of the commandment of charity:

"To do tzedaka to the one who needs it with joy."
(commandment #479)

The kinds of joy

Although this is where I want to speak from the heart with joy,
it still is good to put some structure on it.
So I'll break up my heart-talk into three sections dealing with three different kinds of joy. The joy of charity is really a symphony of these joys of different kinds. Each giver creates an individual pattern of emphasis and quality of these general kinds of joy.

1. The joy in the "natural " response to giving	or the response to action;
2. The joy in the experience of choosing good	or the response to intention;
3. The joy in "seeing" the miracles	or the response to non-being.

The American Heritage dictionary seems to provide some support for my threefold distinction of joy. In contrasting between delight and joy, it states that although both delight and joy are states of happiness, "‘delight' suggests, keen, intense, often transitory emotion"; whereas "‘joy', also a strong term, implies a more sustained state, and is often associated with sharing, self-realization, and high-mindedness in general."

"Sharing, self-realization, and high-mindedness" seem to correspond well to action, intention and non-being.

The response to action

There's a naturally good feeling in being able to fulfill someone else's need. It feels good: when you just happen to have the book, the tool or the salad dressing that your good friend needs; when you somehow manage to say the right thing to someone who's down in spirits; when you've set aside money to give to charity and you see that your financially troubled neighbor needs to fix up his home -
so you give him a loan, on any terms, without a moment's thought.

Wealth is experienced not only in acquiring what you want, but also in being able to give to others what they want. There is always somebody who needs money. So when you've got some money lying around that isn't yours (since it's designated to give away), in effect you have a stock of potential joy that can be realized by the mere act of handing it out. Your joy in giving increases their happiness in receiving, and their happiness in receiving increases your joy in giving. It's almost too good to be true, yet very easy to do.

The response to intention

There is clarity in commitment. The focus quiets distracting voices and frees energy for aliveness and joy. Once you've discovered how good it is to do the good - how pleasant to please one's conscience - it still remains to acquire the habit of doing good. Commitment facilitates this.

And as is known, there's no clearer statement of intention than "putting your money where your mouth is." The Jew's twice daily declaration of faith begins with the duty of loving God with our whole being - heart, soul, and might. So you want to love God with all your heart (various motivations) and all your soul (energy and life itself), but it's rare that you can know that you are doing this (or even approaching it). However, when it comes to loving God with all your might (traditionally understood as money), your love can even be measured. The periodic computation of maaser facilitates a reawakening to the commitment to giving one's all at every moment. As the verse in Psalms (41,2) makes clear: "Blissful is the one who contemplates the poor."

As a man with a family to support, I momentarily freak out when I Iook at how much I give away each year. What a sucker I am! All that money could be mine. Then I reflect on how the money isn't really mine anyway, and who knows how much money God would give me if I didn't take maaser. And I reflect on how, even without it, we still manage to waste a good deal on non-necessities; so I guess we can' t need it so much. I recommit, let go, and find joy in whatever measure of good I can add to our world.

The response to non-being

Miracles are experienced by the adventurers of spirit.
(Click and save Georg Simmel's "The Adventure" for reading offline.
It's one of the best essays I've ever encountered.)

There is a risk in suspending the accepted explanations of events. Training in skeptical thinking can assist in letting go of the normative understanding of things, and study of wisdom literature can enrich the stock of meaning relationships in one's repertoire. Then stepping out of the "everyday" world reveals those incredible "coincidences" that the trained eye sees as coming from God.

Tithing income provides a quick course in miracle-sighting. Everybody "knows" that getting rich requires lots of effort (and/or a bit of "luck"). But the explicit promise of material wealth as a result of tithing income provides a simple framework for shattering that conception.

The lessons don't stop there, of course. Having discovered the trick of stepping out of the way, rather than more efforting, the path is paved for stripping away more layers of self, exposing the divine within. As I mentioned above, we are commanded to love God with all our money - or our very-ness, as one might translate the verse from which this is learned. We do this by tithing income, and thus acknowledging that our money really belongs to God. This gets transformed on a higher level to be a requirement to give one-tenth of my soul. The soul is traditionally conceived as having ten "parts", where the giving of the highest part (the Unity, corresponding to the Crown) amounts to truly acknowledging that it belongs to God even if it is part of your individual soul. By extension one sees that indeed all my soul belongs to God. Ineffable joy awaits us on this path. How can we resist to walk it? Along the way we are greeted by creativity and play (not frivolous but lofty).

I planned this website as an expression of such creativity. If I have succeeded in turning you on to tithing, then that just turns me on even more. Take a look at how it's done, and start reaping reward in every way. If you'd like to turn others onto tithing, then take a look at a different way to give a loan. I've also appended an essay I once wrote that expresses some of the metaphysics behind the concept of miracles, but from the angle of the problem of evil.

HOW SHARING CAUSES INCREASE - DANTE'S THE PURGATORIO

		The Joy Of Charity
new material		www.joyoflife.org.il	about this site