6 `Make sure you do not do your justice/charity before men, to be seen/admired by them, otherwise -- reward have you not from your Father who [is] in the heavens;2 whenever, therefore, you do charity, do you not sound a trumpet before you as the pretentious do, in the synagogues, and in the streets, that they may have glory from men; verily I say to you -- they have their reward!3 `But you, doing charity, let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing,4 that your charity may be in secret, and your Father who sees in secret Himself shall pay you back.
This part of Yeshua’s new-Torah discourse seems simple and to a certain degree is so. We are urged not to show off when we are doing the things God has told us to do, but to do them where only God can see them. Those who show off, those who solicit and receive admiration, are already rewarded in the here and now; those who keep it hidden will be seen by God only and rewarded by Him.
But there are a few details which, when understood, greatly increase our understanding and appreciation of what’s being said. The first is those trumpets. We find it hard to imagine even a flashy nouveau-riche magnate having a trumpeter precede him when he goes to make a gift to the poor. And we are right: that never happened. Something got lost in translation. The Hebrew word that was translated by “trumpet” is shofar. A shofar is a ram’s horn, blown in Biblical times for religious announcements and on solemn occasions: you can still buy Kosher shofars on the Internet. So the translators thought that was what was meant and, not knowing all the customs, translated it as a trumpet. But the Mishnah tells us that in the Temple there were thirteen shofarot for the collection of alms. These were in fact horn- or trumpet-shaped boxes, broad at the bottom, narrow at the top, where the zedakah or charitable contributions were deposited. And the verb used in this passage was probably leba’avir, “to cause to pass”: “when you do charity, do not call [loudly] for the collection box to be brought to you, in the synagogue or in the street”. The image that is being evoked, then, is of a showy rich man, in the synagogue or even in the street, calling for a shofar or zedakah box to brought to him so that he might in full gaping view deposit one or more precious gold coins in it. This, obviously, was deprecated, and not only by Yeshua: there was a saying that “he who gives zedakah in secret is greater than Moses”, and in the Temple – and in every city – there was a Vestry of Secret Givers, where alms could be deposited discreetly and respectable people who had come down in life could go for help. It is of such a saying, and of such a practice, that Yeshua is here reminding his audience.
And it is interesting that the Matthew’s Greek employs dikaiosunè for the first use and eleèmosunè for the subsequent ones. This shows that the author was sensitive to the shades of meaning in Hebrew (or Aramaic), where zedakah originally meant “justice” but gradually, in Yeshua’s time, was coming to mean “alms” or charity.
If we now connect this with Yeshua’s “completion” of the old Torah in the direction of inwardness, we see that once again he moves from an emphasis on the act of giving to the mentality of the giver who, if he has fully integrated the new Torah, will do his zedakah discreetly, secretly, not only because ultimately he does it for the love of God but also, if he gives directly, to avoid humiliating the receiver and thus to show his love for that neighbour.
I am indebted to Samuel Lachs’ A Rabbinic Commentary on the New Testament (New York: Ktav, 1987) for much of the information cited above.
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