“A tithe shall you tithe [te’aser]” (Deuteronomy 14:22)? This phrase can be interpreted homiletically: Take a tithe [asser] so that you will become wealthy [titasher], in the merit of the mitzva” (Taanit, 9a).
There is a story about this teaching that appears in Pardes Yosef (a collection of the writings of Rav Moshe Yosef Rubin, published by his grandson, Moshe Yosef Rubin, page 50).
One time a poor Jew came to the Maggid of Mezritch and complained that he was not making an adequate living.
The Maggid said to him: “My advice to you is to give ten percent to charity, as it states… ‘Take a tithe [asser] so that you will become wealthy [titasher].’
The poor Jew said: “But I don’t have anything from which to give charity. The Maggid responded: “Even if you just make a few pennies, you should give the charity from those pennies.”
Indeed, the man did that. And sure enough, he became a very wealthy man. He hired an accountant who made sure to calculate all his earnings and to give exactly ten percent to charity.
After a while there was a Gentile in the town whose business started to do very well and at the same time this Jewish man’s business took a downward turn. He again went to the Maggid and asked for advice. The Maggid asked him: “When you do business with this Gentile are you completely honest with all your weights and measures?” The Jew admitted that he was not completely honest in this area. Said the Maggid: “This is the reason why your business is doing poorly. You are giving charity from the money that you made dishonestly by stealing from the Gentile. In the heavenly court this is considered to be the charity of the Gentile and not your charity. For this reason, he gets the reward of the charity. This is why the verse states that you should give charity from ‘your crops,’ and not from the crops you steal wrongfully from others.”
There is a story told about Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik, who lived in the 18th century and was the antecedent of the great rabbinic dynasty -- the Soloveitchik family. He was a very wealthy man who gave enormous amounts of money to charity. However, he had a string of business mishaps and he eventually ended up losing all of his money and becoming destitute. No one could understand how such a pious Jew and generous giver of charity could lose his money. The members of the community went to Rav Chaim Volozhiner to try and understand how this could have happened to Reb Moshe Soloveitchik.
Rav Chaim Volozhiner gathered three distinguished rabbis convened a Beit Din and instructed them to investigate the matter. This Beit Din of rabbis returned to R. Chaim Volozhiner and said, “We have investigated the matter and we have not found any apparent sin. The only thing we can imagine is that R. Moshe Soloveitchik must have sinned by giving too much money to charity, as one is not supposed to give more than one-fifth of his money to charity.”
This answer was rejected by R. Chaim Volozhiner, who said that it is not plausible to assume that that was the reason for the financial loss.
Meanwhile, while the whole city of Kovno was wondering why Rav Moshe Soloveitchik had lost all his money, he himself knew that he needed to spend his time in a productive manner. He now had no business to deal with, but he did have more time on his hands. With his extra time he devoted himself to studying Torah and to teaching his children Torah. It soon became clear that Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik’s destiny was to be a scholar and not a businessman. When R. Chaim Volozhiner heard this, he said, “Now I understand why R. Moshe lost his business.” R. Moshe was destined to be a great Torah scholar and a rabbinic leader. If he had been immersed in the business world, he never would have reached his spiritual potential as a Torah scholar and he never would have become the forebear of one of the most illustrious rabbinic families in history (as told by R. Yitzchak Zilberstein, Aleinu Leshabeach, volume 5, 225).
Abominations!
Background:
Parashat Re’eh contains a reiteration of the laws of kosher and unkosher animals. In chapter 14 pasuk 3 this topic is introduced with the following warning:
לֹ֥א תֹאכַ֖ל כׇּל־תּוֹעֵבָֽה׃
You shall not eat anything abhorrent.
The word תועבה appears multiple times in the Torah to describe a variety of objects or actions that God finds abhorrent (totally disgusting, off limits, etc.) So the question is - why introduce the list of kosher and unkosher animals with this statement? The mefarshim offer multiple interpretations:
Rashi: a תועבה does not refer to an objective category of animal, but rather to a list of circumstances that render an animal a תועבה. For example, if a person purposely made a small blemish on an animal so that it couldn’t be offered as a sacrifice then that is a תועבה, even if the animal is a kosher animal.
Seforno: Until now, Hashem had permitted the Israelites to eat all animals - which means that the concept of animals that are off-limits was not introduced until now. That is why the Torah only calls it a תועבה here - because until this point, there were no animals that were unkosher.
Ibn Ezra: The Torah uses the word תועבה to convey that any pure person should find unkosher animals, like animals that crawl on the ground, abhorrent.
Questions:
- Each of these three opinions frames unkosher animals and the practice of eating them in very different ways. According to each opinion, how are we supposed to relate to unkosher animals? Why aren’t we allowed to eat them?
- What other explanations can you think of for what תועבה means in this context?
Download a printable version here.
I'll be away this week - it'll be Tony Reynolds, super special guest!
Yoni Friedman.
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