Giving in Love: Marc Gafni: Part Fourteen
posted by Gafni assistant
in honor of the sistas K and J
Giving Saves from Death
Remember the story from Soul Prints.
It is the turn of the last century, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. A family of four live in a single-room flat on Ludlow Street. All day and into the night, mother and father work hard in a sweatshop factory. Every Friday, however, their table is set for a Sabbath meal.
Their daughter Sarah and her brother go to services with their father, and every Sabbath Papa brings home a guest to share in the Sabbath meal. Now Sarah knows that they do not have much to eat and that the presence of the guest means less food for everyone. “Why, Papa?” she asks.
“It is written– Charity saves from death,” her father answers.
One day Papa comes back from the sweatshop alone. “Mama is sick,” he says. For several long days, Papa goes every night to the two flats that serve as the makeshift hospital for the families of Ludlow Street. When Sabbath eve comes, Sarah takes her brother to services. She doesn’t know it, but at dusk, her mother breathes her last.
Sarah dutifully brings home a guest for the Sabbath meal she has prepared. Long after the guest has left and Sarah and her brother have gone to sleep, she awakens to the to see her father weeping, sitting in a corner of the room. Sarah comes and sits on his lap. “Don’t worry, Papa,” she says. “Mama will get better.”
He stares at her blankly. “What do you mean?”
“Mama will get well,” Sarah says. “I went to services, Papa, and I brought home a guest for the Sabbath meal, and you always told me that giving saves from death.”
Papa smiles sadly. “My little one, you misunderstood. Charity does not save Mama from death. Charity saves God from death.”
“Love is as powerful as death,” cries out the Song of Songs. Interpret the third century Babylonian wisdom masters, “Charity saves from death.”
“What could that mean?” ask the disciples. What is the spiritual death that results from living without loving and giving? Undoubtedly, the divine universe is not a cosmic vending machine in which you insert some coins and pull the lever for an elixir for “long life.” The original Hebrew word used for “giving” in the epigram is tzedaka. Usually mistranslated as charity, it really means justice.
The difference is enormous. Charity means that the money is mine, and if I feel magnanimous, then I can give some to you. Justice, the correct translation for tzedaka, is understood by the masters to mean that your money is not owned by you at all. In Hebrew law, a portion of your money is in reality owned by the poor in the community. According to one legal school, the Tosafists, the only right you have to the money is to determine which poor person will receive it.
Wow! What this law reminds us of is the great truth of philosophy. You are not separate from everyone else. The accumulation of property and possession in this life time is overwhelmingly due to sets of circumstances entirely beyond your control. You may have worked hard, but there are a million people who worked just as hard and the universe did not allow them to accumulate your level of wealth.
Those possessions are not essentially yours. And so, a portion of your possession, according to Hebrew mystical doctrine codified in law, belongs to those less fortunate than you, not because the government legislated taxes, but because non-separateness is the essential metaphysical truth of reality.
Not to experience the entire inter-connectivity of being is to live a non-erotic dead existence.
Charity saves from death.
marc gafni
posted on marcgafni.com
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