Tzedakah First-Class
Parashat Vayera, Genesis 18:1 - 22:24
Rabbi Russ Resnik
Our Messiah warned us, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:20). Readers might think this sentence implies that the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees is somehow defective or inferior, but Messiah Yeshua is probably saying the opposite: “Unless your righteousness is even better than that of the scribes and Pharisees, you’ll never make it into the kingdom of heaven.” Such words must have filled the original hearers with despair. How can I be more righteous than a Pharisee—especially if I’m a simple Galilean farmer or fisherman, or wife and mother?
But before our imagined Galileans (or we ourselves) despair, we should ask what “righteousness” means. In the Jewish classic Heshbon ha-Nefesh, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Levin provides a simple definition: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.” This definition, in turn, is an expansion of the words of Torah, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18). Righteousness means acting according to this standard, treating others as we would want to be treated.
Righteousness in Hebrew is tzedakah, a word many of us learned at an early age when we were taught to put some money in a pushke, or little box, to share with those in need. I remember my Shabbat school teacher when I was eight or ten telling us that tzedakah didn’t mean charity, but righteousness or justice. We didn’t share just because we had some extra money or an extra kind heart, but rather because it was the right thing to do, because we should treat our needy neighbor the same way we’d want to be treated ourselves.
The first appearance of the word tzedakah in the Torah comes in the story of Abraham. (The adjective form, tzedek, is applied earlier to Noah, but the noun form, tzedakah, first appears here.) The Lord has promised Abraham the impossible; although he’s an old man already and has been childless through decades of married life with Sarah, Abraham will have offspring as great as the stars in number. “And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as tzedakah— righteousness” (Gen 15:6). Rav Shaul looks back at this verse to argue that God offers righteousness as a gift to those who trust in him (Romans 4; Galatians 3). Followers of Messiah have often emphasized that this gift of righteousness is not earned through good works, but then forgotten that it’s still supposed to issue in good works. If someone is made righteous through trusting in God, he or she will behave with righteousness and practice the teaching, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.”
This brings us to the second appearance of the word tzedakah, which is in this week’s parasha, Vayera—“and he appeared.” The Lord has appeared to Abraham, along with two angels, as he is sitting at the door of his tent. The visitors look like ordinary travelers to Abraham so he shows them warm hospitality, feeds them extravagantly, and then escorts them out to continue on their journey. He doesn’t know that they are on their way to nearby Sodom to see if it is deserving of destruction. As they are walking together, the Lord, who is one of the three, is debating with himself whether to let Abraham in on his plans. He decides not to hide his concerns about Sodom from Abraham: “No, for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice—tzedakah u’mishpat—so that the Lord may bring about for Abraham what he has promised him” (Gen 18:19).
Righteousness has already been credited to Abraham, but he is still responsible to maintain it and pass it on to his children and household. Abraham is the bearer of righteousness, who will act righteously and pass on this legacy to his heirs. True to this righteousness, when Abraham learns that God intends to destroy the wicked Sodomites, he tries to talk him out of it. “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor,” or, as Yeshua put it, “Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Matt 7:12). If you wouldn’t want your neighbor to piously shake his head and say “the Lord’s will be done,” if he learned, God forbid, that you were about to drive off the cliff of divine punishment, then don’t act that way toward your neighbor. If you hear of something bad coming his way—even if he appears to deserve it—do everything in your power to help ward it off.
Since Abraham is righteous, the Lord knows that he’ll be concerned about the fate of his neighbors in Sodom, despite their wickedness. As Abraham begins his negotiations on behalf of Sodom, he tries not to be so pushy that he aggravates the Lord, but it’s not hard to imagine that the Lord told Abraham his plans in the first place hoping that he’d try to talk him out of them . . . because that’s what a righteous person would do in such a case.
So, when Messiah tells us that our tzedakah must be even better than that of the scribes and Pharisees, he is pointing us back to the tzedakah of our father Abraham. On the one hand, Abraham’s righteousness is better than that of the Pharisees because it is a gift from God, not something that he has produced on his own. On the other hand, his righteousness is superior because it’s not expressed in theoretical or pious terms, but in the simple act of caring about his neighbors’ fate more than his own. We don’t need to despair when Yeshua tells us we need such first-class tzedakah, because the best thing about it is its accessibility. True righteousness is a gift from God, and it’s in simple and practical action on behalf of others that it will be fulfilled in our lives.