When I was growing up, if you were part of a Jewish family, somewhere in the living room or kitchen, was a little box called a pushke. This box was meant to be filled with coins and then returned to the organization who had issued it or to the charity of your choice. To my shame, I remember my siblings and me trying to shake out a coin or two on occasion and failing miserably. The blue box which graced our end table was constructed in such a way as to make this impossible and so despite our evil intentions, we learned to give.

In the Jewish tradition, giving to the poor is supposedly not a big deal, it’s simply a righteous act, performing a duty spelled out by passages in the Torah. In Leviticus 19:9-10 ….And when you reap the harvest of your land you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest, you shall not pick your vineyard bare or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard ;you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger.

In Deuteronomy 15:7-8…If, however, there is a needy person among you, ,do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kinsmen. Rather you must open your hand and lend him whatever he needs.

In addition to tsedakeh which is the giving of money or material gifts, and which incidentally is extolled in the Talmud as one of the greatest of good deeds, there is another form of giving called Gemilut Hasidim. Some consider Gemilut Hasidim superior to tsedakah because tsedakah can only be given in money or kind whereas Gemilut Hasidim can also be personal service. Tsedakah is given only to the poor, Gemilut Hasidim is for rich as well as poor, and can be given to both the living and the dead unlike tsedakeh which is only for the living.

Sometimes, lending money, interest free, as part of Gemilut Hasidim is considered more of a mitzvah than tsedakeh, an outright gift of money to a poor person and which might be embarrassing to the recipient. Gemilut Hasidim is further considered by the Talmud as an identifying trait of the Jewish people; if one has compassion for others, one is to be considered as though one is a Jew.

I would take exception to that rather biased statement for numerous reasons. For example, I’m sure there must be evangelical Christians among us who are not just concerned with proselytizing and filling us with their belief that their way is the only way. Hopefully, their obsession with regulating the lives of others, also extends to tsedakeh, to giving to the needy and to ensuring that institutions such as government, which has given, doth not take away such tsedakeh as Medicaid, welfare, Social Security and good air to breathe.

My second reason for taking exception is my experience with friends and others who are not Jews but who have tsedakeh and Gemilut Hasidim down to a science. The money problems of these people are real. By that I mean their woes are not connected to portfolio losses, or inability to take their accustomed three vacations a year, or complaints about offspring with astronomical cell phone bills or high college tuition bills which do not deprive them of many of the luxury items they enjoy. These special people care and worry about others because they know what it means to scrounge for rent or have a phone turned off or a car impounded for late payment. And yet, they reach into their own meager savings or funds and they help – tsedakeh or Gemulit Hasidim. They don’t call it by either of those terms. They have more than their share of compassion and they amaze me. They don’t amaze one another because in their lives, righteous actions are a reflex.

My last reason for taking exception is my objection to the moral superiority which one religious group seems compelled to exercise over an other. Labels are meaningless. Compassionate conservative is a misnomer. We must not continue to intermingle politics with such values as a kind heart and concern for others. When you get down to it, does banning gay marriage or abortion help pay the rent, provide seed money for our kids to go to college, allow our sick and elderly to live and die with dignity? Tsedakeh and Gemulit Hasidim – words that say we really give a damn about the lives of others in terms of who they really are, not in terms of who we think they ought to be.