Talk:Tzedakah

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Contents 1 Purim discussion 2 Social justice needs mention of the Jewish tradition. 3 Scope of Pe'ah obligation 4 In the Bible

[edit] Purim discussion

I moved the following text to here, since it was added more recently (and, in fact, directly references) the text immediately preceding it, with which it disagrees. Someone more well-versed in this topic than I might wish to sort it out. (I'm not sure what all those diacriticals are, either--probably someone's shot at using wiki markup.) Drasil 09:09, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Ğ Ă ă Ĕ ĕ "On the holiday of Purim it is an obligation for every Jew to give two people food which is equivalent to a meal to increase happiness in the month of Adar which is the happiest time on the Jewish calendar."

Not so. It should be: On the holiday of Purim it is an obligation for every Jew to give Matanos LiEvyonim - gifts to the poor, meaning charity to at least 2 people. On Purim, it is actually an obligation to give charity to whichever poor person asks.

Mishloach Manos is giving one person at least two ready to eat foods of different blessings on Purim and it doesn't have to be to poor people. It says to give it Ish Lirayeihoo - a man to his friend. So we give it, men to men, ladies, to ladies.

[edit] Social justice needs mention of the Jewish tradition.

The article Social justice currently has nothing on social justice in the Jewish tradition. I do not consider myself competent to edit on this topic myself. Thank you. -- 201.19.77.39 09:45, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Scope of Pe'ah obligation

First, if we're going to discuss the contemporary scope of the Pe'ah obligation, this isn't the right article: we should create a new article for the purpose and rename the current Pe'ah article to Pe'ah (tractate). Tzedakah is considered to be a distinct obligation independent of Pe'ah in Judaism. Second, stringing together classical sources on ones own in order to form a personal opinion about contemporary applicability is original research; all Wikipedia can do is quote notable contemporary halachic opinions about contemporary application and summarize the reasons why. The subject of Pe'ah is a particularly tricky one with a diversity of contemporary opinions, so original research is particularly problematic here. --Shirahadasha 03:32, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] In the Bible

I have removed this section. The reason is that the Biblical passages it discussed describe the obligation of Pe'ah leaving gleanings of ones fields for the poor, but they do not use the word "Tzedakah", which is regarded as a separate obligation and topic. Accordingly, these passages can't be directly connected to tzedakah or presented as what "the Bible says" about it. It can certainly be argued that what came to be regarded as the obligation of Tzedakah arose by oral traditions connecting various Biblical passages and articulating a common theme among them, but this is a bit different from claiming that it's what the Bible says or that the concept is rooted in this set of biblical passages (as opposed to others.) This is particularly true because the Hebrew word used in the Bible (tzedek) connotes the concept of justice rather than charity, and the actual word is used (for example) in the context of requirements to establish courts of law and other obligations that we would tend to associate with "justice", so the map from the Bible to the current term is not obviously apparent and needs to be sourced. We need a reliable religious commentary here to connect the rabbinic and modern concepts of tzedakah with its Biblical roots and tell us which Biblical passages are regarded as relevant and what their relevance is. As stated above, editors' own efforts to identify what they believe are the pertinent Biblical passages are essentially original research. Best, --Shirahadasha (talk) 17:44, 6 March 2008 (UTC)