Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily, our 40-week tour throughout the entire Babylonian Talmud.
And this week we are exploring Tractate Shekalim, which, as we mentioned, comes from the Jerusalem Talmud. But I want to talk, as we always do, about the history behind this tractate and the ideas behind this tractate. What is really so fascinating about Tractate Shekalim is that this really operated, it transformed the half-shekel, this half-dollar, into almost the technology of peoplehood. Meaning that by giving this little half-dollar, Jews around the world, because Jews didn’t just live in Israel during the Second Temple period, they lived in Egypt, they lived in all the lands in modern-day Iraq and all the lands kind of surrounding the land of Israel, and this was the technology that people were able to remain connected to that central body of Knesses Yisroel, the Jewish people, remain connected to that central location, the Temple in Jerusalem.
Now, everything really changed in 70 CE, of the common era, when the Temple was actually destroyed. Because of this, they were no longer bringing sacrifices, of course, and really, the actual half-shekel was discontinued because Jews were no longer had a central location where they could contribute to. The Romans who destroyed the Temple were even more kind of insidious and evil that following the destruction of the Temple, and I think Josephus actually attests to this, they actually enacted a new tax just on Jews, where their money, instead of going to the communal sacrifices where they had been going, but now the Temple’s destroyed, so they said, “We’re going to impose a tax on Jews not to contribute to their Temple, but to contribute to ours.” They took this practice of the Jewish people and said one of the ways in which we’re really going to destroy not just this nation, not just their Temple, but their spirit, their sense of connectivity, is by redirecting these funds away from the central Temple and really back to us, by making them contribute to our temple.
Thank God, the Roman Empire has collapsed, and even though we don’t have a Temple in Jerusalem, the Jewish people did survive, and much of the way in which we survived was through reclaiming this technology. Even though we don’t actually give a half-shekel, we give a symbolic one, Purim time, but we don’t actually give the classical half-shekel as described in Tractate Shekalim.
But there’s something else that emerged that I want to talk a little bit about the history of, because it’s really the continuation of the half-shekel, and that is the development of something known as the pushka. What is a pushka? Great question. So if you’re not familiar with that term, and maybe you remember it, I grew up hearing that term a lot.I don’t hear it so much anymore. A pushka is a charity box, you know, that has the little slot that you put a coin in. It comes from the Polish word like puszka, which was like a box. And there is a fascinating article that I want to share with you that is written by Shaul Stampfer. This is a book written called Families, Rabbis and Education: Traditional Jewish Society in 19th-Century Eastern Europe. It happens to be a fascinating book, and one of the articles in that book is called “The Pushka and Its Development.”
It’s a fascinating article where he goes through the history of how charitable giving evolved within the Jewish people, and it’s a fairly modern story, and one that I actually retell based on Shaul Stampfer’s scholarship in my book that I’m going to plug now, this is gross, but I’m doing it anyways. Why not? [It] is called I Read This Over Shabbos. This is my book on the weekly parsha. Every week we talk a little bit about the parsha and incidents from Jewish history. You can find it on Amazon or your local Jewish bookstore. I would be overwhelmingly pleased if you enjoy our approach to Torah, if you picked up a copy. It’s a little bit heavy, don’t throw out your back while you pick it up, but I’m so proud of this book. Again, it’s called I Read This Over Shabbos: Reading Jewish History in the Parasha. And on the parsha of Pekudei, which talks about donations to the Temple, I recall a lot of the scholarship that Shaul Stampfer talks about in his fantastic book. This is where I got everything from, on the pushka and its development.
Now, before the pushka, you have to understand how people collected money. You used to have to go door-to-door knocking on doors, and there would be like what we call a meshulach, somebody who’s sent, collectors who would go around, and maybe you’ve had this in your own neighborhood: somebody knocks on your door, and they’re collecting money for a Jewish institution, for their own families, or whatever it is. That’s how charitable giving was done for a long part of Jewish history. And there was another component of charitable giving that took place in synagogues. They would sell honors in the synagogue. A lot of synagogues still do this, some more frequently than others, but they would sell being called to the Torah. You could buy some honor, some prestige, and we still have that way of doing things.
But there’s a problem with both of these. The first problem is that the people who would go around collecting charity, knocking on doors, what doors do you think that they would knock on? As it is today, they’d knock on the doors of the nicer homes, the wealthier homes. They weren’t knocking on doors of people who lived, you know, relatively in modesty, probably in those times really in poverty. They would not get knocks on the door, so they kind of weren’t a part of this process, which is everything that Tractate Shekalim is not about. Tractate Shekalim is the wealthy and the poor. Everybody’s contributing in order to bind themselves to the Jewish people. And over here, you’re only knocking on the doors of like the wealthy people, that didn’t work.
The other issue was that a lot of the charitable fundraising is happening in synagogue. There’s something else that is a problem with synagogue, especially in those times. We’re talking, you know, 16th century, 15th century. What’s the problem? A lot of women were not going to synagogue. So who would get involved? It was only men. Men were saying, “Okay, we’re the ones, we’re the ones who are going to be getting involved.” And an entire half of the Jewish population was essentially marginalized from charitable giving.
The pushka, the little tzedakah box changed everything. Do you want to know what it did? It brought charity into the home, and it allowed people to give even small amounts, and this became an idea that was championed specifically by women.
There is in fact a beautiful prayer that I want to share with you, probably two, three hundred years old, and was a prayer that women used to say before giving money into their little pushka, into their little charity, what’s known as a tzedakah, box. Tzedakah is the Hebrew word for charity. And they would say, “Ribono shel Olam, Master of the World, Just as the pushka is made so that no one knows what is inside except for the collector who opens it to take out the money, so the heart of a person is hidden. No one knows what another person thinks.” That they would look at the pushka, [and] they would literally say these like prayers to God/ Obviously in Yiddish. It wasn’t originally written in English, but these prayers to God about what the pushka actually represented: the heart of every Jewish home, of every Jewish soul.
Aside from that, there actually were wars and battles that would go on over pushkas. The first yeshiva who came onto this… The first major, major yeshiva was known as the yeshiva of Volozhin. And in Volozhin Yeshiva, which is in the end of the 18th century, which really went almost up to 1900. It was open for over a century, I believe, I think I have that correct, and it was the most prestigious yeshiva. So they started sending out tzedakah boxes. They started sending out these pushkas. What a brilliant way to do this.
The problem was other yeshivas are going to go onto this, other institutions are going to do this, and we see this still nowadays where you have like a great fundraiser, and then a month later, it worked, so you see every other institution, they’re also doing the auction, the Chinese raffle, the charity campaign, they’re all doing something very similar. And that was an issue two, three hundred years ago as well:where all these yeshivas were sending out pushkas and people started to get upset, like, “Hey, we’re the pushka people. We get to do this.” So there were actually like rabbinic court cases of who has the right to put a pushka where.
I always remember in pizza stores you would go to the register of the pizza store, and there would always be a mound of different pushkas. They would almost take up the entire table. So that’s really what the rabbis have said:you can’t really have the right, one person gets to put out a pushka and nobody else. So a lot of times it can get very, very crowded.
A specific time to actually give tzedakah, give money: a lot of people do this right before they light Shabbos candles. And the custom in our home, and one of the most beautiful gifts I ever got: somebody gave me for my wedding a stack of $1 bills and a tzedakah box to put right next to the Shabbos candles, and they said, “This is a custom before you light Shabbos candles to put a little bit into the charity box, to bind yourself within the Jewish people.” As you’re accepting Shabbos, always do it before you accept Shabbos of course, but as you’re accepting Shabbos, to connect yourself to the Jewish people.
One thing that I think is really worth noting, and I think it’s absolutely fascinating, is the role the pushka and particularly women played, this small act of giving, in actually building and securing the Land of Israel, and I’m going to read directly from Shaul Stampfer: “The pushka was effective as a fundraising tool as long as it was integrated into the regular pattern of home ritual. By the integration of rituals involving the giving of charity by women, the pushka found its place in fundraising history.” “In retrospect,” this is a wild sentence. “In retrospect,” this is a scholar writing, “It would not be an exaggeration to claim that most of the land, most of the land purchased by the Zionist movement was bought with the donations of women.
“Similarly, it was due to the devotion of women, and not of men, that the yeshivas of Eastern Europe continued to exist, even when the rich turned their back on them.It was due to women donors that the kollelim in Eretz Yisroel survived and even flourished. The institutions that were supported by pushkas in critical transitional years are still with us today. They survived because in critical years they could rely on the donations of countless women week after week.”
And this, I believe, is the takeaway, is the power of Tractate Shekalim: that little amount that binds you, that everybody can participate in, and that binds you to the collective body of Knesses Yisroel.
Thank you so much for listening, and let’s together keep making Torah sweet.