So do we praise poverty or not?

As a long-time admirer of the flowing prose and majestic articulation of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’ writings, I find it easy to nod in agreement as I peruse his carefully crafted paragraphs. “How I wish I’d thought of that”, I find myself thinking, or “I couldn’t have put it better myself”.  I have to be careful, though: I recognise that my tendency to enjoy his writings as aesthetic gems can lead to me reading uncritically. That is why, from time to time, I heave a sigh of relief when I read something with which I can disagree, or which at least leads me to challenge it.

I came across such a passage yesterday in The Dignity of Difference, in which Rabbi Lord Sacks writes:

Throughout its history, Judaism resisted any attempt to romanticize, rationalize or anaesthetize the pain of hunger, starvation, or need (p 97).

This stopped me in my tracks. Is this really so?

Starting with Pirkei Avot, a baraita (6:4) vaunts the ascetic approach to acquiring Torah through suffering and self-denial:

Such is the way of Torah: you should eat bread in salt, drink just a little water and sleep on the ground. Live a life of deprivation and toil in Torah. If you do this, "you will be happy and it will be good for you" (Tehillim 128:2)—happy in this world, and it will be good for you in the World to Come.

Less dramatic but pointing in a similar direction is Rabbi Elazar Ish Bartota’s teaching (3:8):

Give Him what is His, for you, and whatever is yours, are His. As David says: "For everything comes from You, and from Your own hand we give to You" (I Chronicles 29:14).

This seemingly innocent teaching comes with a context: Rabbi Elazar Ish Bartota’s commitment to the ascetic life involved the disposal of all his possessions for charitable purposes, leaving nothing for himself and his family (Ta’anit 24a). Placing everyone one has at the disposal of others is rated as a highly meritorious act in a later mishnah in Avot  (5:13), where the person who says “what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is yours” is a chasid—a person who has perfected the cardinal middah of chesed, “lovingkindness”. And the baraita at 6:6 lists limitation of wealth-generating activities as one of the 48 things that aid one’s acquisition of Torah.

I once assumed that the canonisation of hardship and poverty was the normative position of Judaism since it fitted so completely with the tales I read and the stories that inspired me in my early days as a ba’al teshuvah. Judaism: Hillel nearly freezing to death in the snow in his attempt to eavesdrop a Torah shiur (Shabbat 31a), rabbis subsisting from one week to the next on nothing more than a solitary carob (Ta’anit 24a), and the remarkable episode of Rabbi Chanina ben Dosa, whose wife ordered him to pray for the removal of the golden table leg that offered the prospect of material survival in a life of unremitting poverty (Ta’anit 24b). Then, turning to the children’s pages of the orthodox Jewish newspapers, there were all the Eastern European fables that featured hidden tzaddikim—largely woodcutters, water-carriers and beggars—who turned out to be giants of Torah learning, possessed of superhuman or near-prophetic powers.

My feeling now, for what it is worth, is that Judaism has not resisted “any attempt to romanticize, rationalize or anaesthetize the pain of hunger, starvation, or need”. But nor does it insist that this harsh, punishing route towards a greater understanding of God is the only direction that a person can take. In this, as in many areas of practical application, Jewish tradition provides support and encouragement for the individual, whichever path to God is selected.

As ever, I look forward to receiving opinions from other group members. Please do share your thoughts!