The Rule of Compassion

but you shall fully open your hand to him, and generously lend him enough for his need in whatever he lacks.  Deuteronomy 15:8  NASB

Fully open –  Today is Yom Kippur, a day to reflect on God’s forgiveness.  It’s easy to recall our obvious faults, those behaviors that pulled us away from God in this last year, but perhaps this is also a time to look much deeper.  Perhaps this day, a solemn time for acknowledging God’s compassion, is also a day for us to examine our own compassionate acts.  With that in mind, let’s examine this verse in Deuteronomy.

How do you achieve emphasis in a language that has no punctuation?  Ah, by now you know that in Hebrew you repeat the word.  You double-up the text.  So, in this verse we find:

כִּי-פָתֹחַ תִּפְתַּח אֶת-יָדְךָ

Ki-fa•to•ach tif•tach et-yad•cha

I have highlighted the repeated verbal root in red (pātaḥ).  What does it mean?  The NASB translates it as “fully open.”  Other English Bibles use “surely open,” or “open wide,” or it’s simply ignored.  But is that sufficient?  Avivah Zornberg thinks not:

Giving to the poor is a spiritual exercise; it works to break one’s natural cruelty and to convert it into compassion.  This natural cruelty is the dark side of “natural compassion,” which surges spontaneously toward hopeful objects—the worthy poor, for instance, who offer the possibility of redemption.  The problem with this primal form of compassion is that the unworthy poor, those who cannot be saved, arouse an equally primal form of cruelty.  In confronting the despair of the unredeemable Other, one confronts ones’ own fear.  Precisely in this case, tzedakah (charity) becomes a commandment: You shall surely open your hand to him (the poor man) (Deut. 15:8).  Here, the act of tzedakah opens up the clenched hand of unconscious cruelty, and true compassion is born. . . That is the meaning of the intensified commandment: You shall open, open your hand.[1]

Zornberg’s comment touches something deeply controversial in us; the duplicity of our response to another’s need.  Perhaps you’ve never felt this, but I have.  I’ve spent a lot of time in places where the unworthy poor reside.  Slums in Africa, hovels in India, ghettos in the Philippines, and prostitute shacks in Indonesia.  The children in these places draw out my deepest compassion.  They are innocent victims of irresponsible adults.  Not all the adults are blameworthy.  Women pushed into poverty due to culture, endemic economic destitution, or illiteracy aren’t to blame.  But then there are those who are in these places because of drug abuse, alcoholism, violence, and sheer indifference to others.  They are victimizers, also poor, but unmotivated to do anything but hold out a hand.  Those rile me.  “Get a job!” I want to shout.  Don’t expect me to give what you aren’t willing to go and get.  And yet—Ki-fa•to•ach tif•tach et-yad•cha.  My grip needs to be loosened.  What I have is a gift from God.  He must decide what to do with it.  I need a repeated verb to remind me. . . but it’s still hard to deal with, isn’t it?

On this day I will have to ask forgiveness for my unwillingness to give–even to those unworthy of the gift.  I was unworthy of His gift and yet He cared for me.

Topical Index: compassion, cruelty, pātaḥ, open, Deuteronomy 15:8

[1] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. xxii.