Appendix A:

TZEDAKAH AND PHILANTHROPY

Philanthropy and tzedakah are subjects of great breadth and depth and are deserving of significant study. This appendix is intended to provide you with a brief introduction to the history of these traditions and how they apply to Tzedakah in Action. The Bibliography lists a number of resources that can provide additional background on both tzedakah and philanthropy.

In order to understand these terms, it's useful to see how they relate to each other. In its broadest sense, "philanthropy" has come to embrace the full range of human altruistic behavior. As such, it encompasses tzedakah as the specifically Jewish variation on this theme. There are at least two critical distinctions, however, that make tzedakah unique among forms of philanthropy. First, it was a formative building block that set in motion the development of philanthropy as a social norm. The Torah's collection of tzedakah guidelines was one of the first (if not the first) written articulations of a community's obligation to care for the poor. This leads to a second key distinction. Unlike philanthropy, which presupposes freedom of choice on the part of the giver, tzedakah is an obligation imposed on all Jews. With these distinctions in mind, the following two sections spell out some important basic information on both traditions.

 

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