Erev Pinchas, Pirkei Avot
July 18, 2008
Pirkei Avot Chapter 3, Mishna 8
Rebbe Elazar of Bertota said: Give Him (God) of His own, for both you and whatever is yours are entirely His. And so also in his prayers did David say, ‘For all things are from You, and from the bounty of Your hand we have given to You.’
Everything we receive, Rebbe Elazar is saying comes directly from God and is to be given back to God. He took this quite literally even at the expense of his family’s well being.
The Talmud tells us that whenever the charity officials, those in charge of collecting and distributing money for the poor, saw Rebbe Elazar, they would hide from him because they knew that he would give them every bit of money he was carrying.
One day he was in the market to get a dowry for his daughter when he saw the charity officials. Even though they hurried to hide from him, he chased them down and demanded to know what they were collecting money for. They needed money for the dowry of a man and woman with no families who were marrying each other. They wanted the couple to have enough to begin their married life with. Rebbe Elazar declared that they came before his daughter and gave them everything he had except for one zuz, about 10 cents. With that zuz he bought wheat and put it in his store room.
When later that day, his wife tried to open the door to the store room, she couldn’t budge it but saw wheat poking out of the edges around the door. She excitedly went to her husband and told him that the whole store room was filled with wheat. He was clear that the wheat was holy because it clearly came from God and he would let his family use only 10% of it, the part that any poor person would be allowed to take from it.
Certainly Rebbe Elazar is a model of what he believes: that everything comes from God and is owed back to God. But how does this kind of stringency apply to us? We certainly do not agree that we have to live as close to poverty as possible to acknowledge that all we have truly belongs to the Holy One.
The concept of charity in our religion is so strong exactly because of this belief that all things come from God and go back to God. We find this in Exodus chapter 30, verse 12: ‘When you take the census of the people Israel, then they shall give each person, a half a shekel.’ The word for give is ‘v’natnu which is spelled in Hebrew—vav, nun, tav, nun, vav. It is a palindrome, spelled exactly the same forward and backward. The rabbis interpret this as meaning that our money flows in both directions—to us from God and from us back to God.
So we know we have to give to the poor, the poor of Israel as well as other poor people. I suspect that each of us here today knows that quite well and follows that precept. We give the money that God has graciously given to us back to God by way of the poor and needy, as our Torah reminds us in many places ‘to the widow, the orphan and the stranger.’
It could be easy to think, ‘I earned that money myself with my talents and my time; why do I have to give it to anyone?’ There is another way of understanding wealth. God gave us our talents, our creativity, our compassion, our ability to love. We were endowed with what we have from the moment of conception. We were given—v’natnu—those skills and qualities to create our lives in the best way we can. They came to us from God and they are to be given from us back to God.
How do we give those skills and talents back to God? It’s easy to see how the money we earn from these talents and skills is given to those who are in need. But our skills and talents themselves can also serve God. It is not just money that people need. They also need a listening ear, they need homes built and repaired, they need legal, business, parenting advice. Those of us with these skills have as much of a moral obligation to give them to the needy as we do to give money.
Let’s take some time and look at the talents and skills we have been blessed with and see where they are needed most. In Middle Georgia we have organizations providing food, clothing, medical care to people in need. We have centers that help teen parents learn how to care for their children. We have organizations that help people learn interview skills as well as how to write resumes so they can get jobs. We have places that teach adults to learn to read.
Perhaps we can give some of our time and talent to them. When we do, we are simply giving back to God what’s actually His.