CBI Blogs

Tzedakah tatzel mimavet. Tzedakah delivers [a person] from death.

This phrase comes up quite a few times in our sacred texts. Twice in the book of Proverbs the phrase serves as a foil to a line about the futility of gathering wealth (10:2 and 11:4). The Talmud uses it as a seal to a list of ten things that are hard, with death being the tenth hard thing, but the assurance that tzedakah delivers from death (Baba Batra 10a). My favorite occurrence of the phrase is at the end of a story I first heard told by my classmate Rabbi Shira Epstein:

Rabbi Akiva had one daughter. She was the apple of his eye. The day of her wedding approached, and Rabbi Akiva seemed to be walking on air. As the week of the celebration arrived and he began to make preparations, he was approached by a soothsayer in the marketplace who said to him, “Your daughter will die on her wedding day, because she will be bitten by a poisonous viper on the street!”

Immediately Rabbi Akiva placed his daughter in her room. On the day of the wedding he told her she was not to leave her bedchambers, no matter what.

When the big day arrived, Akiva’s daughter was looking for a hairpin. She could not find one, no matter where she looked and so, disobeying her father’s orders, she snuck out of the house and went to the market to purchase some new ones.

A little while later, Rabbi Akiva was in the garden setting up his daughter’s chuppah when he heard a blood-curdling scream from the street. He knew it was his daughter, and ran to find her, fearing the worst. She stood in the street, very much alive, holding a hairpin with a dead viper on it, stabbed through the eye by her pin. He asked her what happened, and she told him she was on her way back from buying the hairpins, putting her hair up as she walked. A beggar had asked her for some spare coins, and since she could not fasten her hair and get money out at the same time, she stuck the hairpin in the wall to take out her purse and give the beggar a little tzedakah. When she retrieved her pin from the wall, the snake was impaled on it.

Amazed, Rabbi Akiva said, tzedakah tatzel mimavet, “Tzedakah delivers a person from death.”

While the story holds our attention and brings drama and excitement to the phrase, the Talmudic description is thoughtful and bold, and the biblical rendering is poetic, the simple truth of the phrase alone holds great weight for me as a Jewish person living in the modern world. Rather than rendering it “Tzedakah can deliver from death,” I like to think of it as, “Tzedakah can save a life.”

And we know this is true. We have heard countless stories over the years of people in dire straits who were brought out of it by the kindness of a stranger, the receipt of a micro loan, the chance to earn through a job. The list goes on and on.

It is incumbent upon us as Jewish people to give tzedakah. Even if all we earn comes from tzedakah, we are encouraged to give back some of what we receive. If you are around my age or older, you might remember a commercial where we were encouraged to give “the price of a cup of coffee” to help save children in Africa. The idea that we can do so much with such a small amount is not news to the Jewish people. We can give a lot if we have it, or a little if we have less. But here’s the trick: it is only tzedakah if it is a financial gift. Giving food, clothing, gifts, and time are all important, critical mitzvot that we should do as often as we can, but they are not technically tzedakah. To give tzedakah means giving of our money.

If you have an organization to which you give tzedakah, you are saving a life. Even if you are giving to a synagogue like CBI, the lives you save could be people you know. More often than not, we do not know the identities of the people we are helping, and that is a good thing. Other times, we can be aware of exactly who we are helping. I recently was told of a life that we can save by giving a little directly to a person who needs help. Since this has been a long post so far, I will let you read her story here. If you choose to give to her cause, you can learn about the person whose life you are saving. If you share the link to her story, you might be doing just as much good as giving to the GoFundMe, because it brings awareness.

Of course, if you are giving to other people and causes, please keep doing so. Any time we save a life it is worth saving the world. Today it is done as easily as filling out a computer form, giving tzedakah, and knowing that tzedakah tatzel mimavet, tzedakah can save a life.