7 Hebrew Words and Phrases Every Activist Should Know

Dei machsoro
How much tzedakah is one required to give a poor person? The Torah says dei machsoro-"enough for his lack." The rabbis of the Talmud emphasize the possessive pronoun: his lack. There is no way to meet all of someone else's needs without knowing them, which requires taking on his or her perspective. Thus Maimonides explains that if a rich person had been accustomed to riding a horse led by a slave, you are obligated to purchase a horse and slave for him!

This is the rabbis' way of noting that every person in poverty has a unique history, suffers a unique set of humiliations. Some needs are common, to be sure, but others are individual and even surprising. A person who lives in comfort, or a society governed by the comfortable, must be careful not to compound the suffering and indigity of "the poor" by assuming paternalistically that we know all "their" needs. This principle should guide not only individual action but public policy as well.

V'hechezakta bo
The Torah teaches that when your brother becomes low, v'hechezakta bo-"you shall strengthen him." This is the source for the well-known idea that the highest form of tzedakah is to make someone strong, by providing a job, a business loan, or a partnership. We could also translate this phrase as "you shall hold onto him." Tzedakah is not to be done, so to speak, at arm's length, but with hands gripped together in fellowship. Holding on to one another creates an intimate bond, and strength is soon flowing in two directions. The same verse of Torah continues, "and he shall live with you." Social action may begin as an "outside job" of seeing someone else's need, but in the end there should be not only equality but fellowship.

Peah
One of the biblical obligations imposed on Israelite farmers was to leave each peah, or corner, of a field unharvested, left for the poor. This mitzvah is developed by the rabbis of the Mishnah, the earliest Jewish legal code, in a series of rulings which declare that a field divided by a wide stream should be treated as two fields, and that a field planted half in one species and half in another also be treated as two fields-meaning not four corners, but eight, or even twelve or sixteen!

These elaborations of the original peah law lead to two ethical disciplines. First, the farmer had to be conscious of his responsibilities to the poor with every change in landscape or crop. Second, as my student Nicole Simon pointed out, in practice the poor were not relegated to the unseen margins, but invited throughout the farmer's property.

We might think in our day about the applications of these disciplines. Giving tzedakah not just all at once but with each paycheck seems to be an obvious one. And what if factories paused at the end of each run of Gap T-shirts to take the first and last bunch to give away? It's easy to multiply these ideas, all of which show that the principle behind the biblical peah was not just the amount left for the poor, but the consciousness of the giver as well.

Ki Gerim Heyitem B'Eretz Mitzrayim
On more than one occasion, the Torah instructs us not to oppress the stranger, "because you were strangers in the land of Egypt." At the ro

Former slaves should be specially attuned to slavery in any of its forms in the world today.