Hi friends, and welcome back to Talmud Daily, our 40-week tour throughout the entire Babylonian Talmud.
And today, we are going to discuss, like we do every Wednesday, Jewish practice that emerges from this week’s tractate, Tractate Shekalim. Now, as we mentioned, shekalim, which is the plural of shekel, every year, the Jewish people, everyone would contribute a half-shekel, one half of that, like a half dollar, that would go to contribute for the communal sacrifices. Now, it’s very strange, when you think of fundraising nowadays, why have everybody give half a dollar when you could actually like have a proper fundraising campaign, where anybody who knows anything about fundraising, you know, you get like, I don’t know, 90% from your top 10 donors? I don’t know, you talk to fundraising and philanthropists, they understand these things much better than I do, Lord knows that.
But there is this sense of like when we do a fundraising campaign, you want to make sure that you have like who’s going to name the building.Why is it that specifically for shekalim, the donation was literally we only want the half-shekel? In fact, the Torah itself says in the 30th chapter of Exodus, which was, I just realize now, was the maftir, that’s the final portion of Torah, that I read at my bar mitzvah. I actually read the parsha, the portion of Torah, associated with shekalim, and over there the Torah makes it very clear, “Ha’ashir lo yarbeh vehadal lo yamit.” That is Hebrew, that’s directly from the Torah. “Ha’ashir lo yarbeh,” we don’t want more from the wealthy, “vehadal lo yamit,” and we don’t want any less from the poor. We only want that half dollar.
Why is that so? So, really what’s underlying and the practice that really underlies Tractate Shekalim is this idea of giving not in order to erect a big building, not to get your name on there, not even to make sure that it’s paid for, but giving as a symbolic act of membership, of binding yourself to the Jewish people, of actually saying, “I’m giving this,” and that’s specifically why, of course, it’s only a half-shekel. That everybody’s participation is required. Nobody is giving the full amount, nobody is giving more than anybody else. And to me, this is such a refreshing perspective. I think about any fundraising project. When was the last time anyone you saw where the fundraising project was deliberately we want everyone to just give the same amount? When was the last time that you saw something that was accomplished specifically through everybody’s participation? These are very, very rare.
And in fact, we have a practice every year where on the night of Purim and around Purim time, we give that half-shekel as a symbolic donation to a cause that we are now, you know, binding ourselves to. But there’s actually an even deeper layer to this which the Talmud says, not in our tractate, but all the tractates, as we’ll see, are interconnected. But in Tractate Megillah on page 13b, it actually says the reason why we do this specifically around Purim time:they used to announce on Rosh Chodesh, on the first day of Adar, which is the month that Purim falls out, and people would say, “You have to… Reminder to give your half a shekel,” and you had to give it by Purim, by the 15th of Adar.
Why did they do it this way? This doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Like what does Purim have to do with the half-shekel? What do these have to do with each other? So, the Talmud says in Megillah on page 13b that we deliberately do this around Purim time to counteract the money and the fortune that Haman gave to Achashverosh in the Purim story to actually buy his own influence to destroy the Jewish people. And how did Haman characterize the Jewish people? Haman said that this is a nation that is mefuzar umeforad bein ha’amim. They are dispersed, they’re everywhere, these freaking Jews! They’re everywhere, we don’t want them, we want to get rid of them. This was the original plot to annihilate the Jewish people of Haman.
And to counteract Haman’s vision of the Jewish people, “They’re scattered, they’re just the remnants all over, we just want to clean it up and have a world without the Jewish people, not scattered around, ruining the ambiance of our existence,” the original kind of genocidal anti-Semite, we counteract that with the shekel. How does the shekel counteract that? Because the shekel says we’re actually not scattered. No matter where a Jew is, when we’re contributing that half a shekel to the communal funds for the sacrifices, we are binding ourselves to the Jewish people as a whole. We are actually one unified and whole nation.
And that’s what I think the practice that emerges from this tractate: the notion of giving not an exorbitant amount, not any less, but just giving that little bit, not to a cause that serves you, not to your local shul even necessarily, not to your kid’s school, not to, you know, buy what everybody else is getting, not to get your lulav and esrog or whatever it is. But actually to give, not as an act of getting something in return, any recognition, but giving as an act of, “I want to be a part of this. I want to bind myself to this.” And this historically has been a way that people have supported the Land of Israel, saying, “Even if I don’t live there, I want to donate a little bit like that shekel to bind myself to the collective body of the Jewish people.”
This is the way that we counteract the vision of anti-Semites like Haman and all those with him who describe the Jewish people as scattered, as this forgotten remnant nation, and we counteract that with this idea of giving a little bit, contributing that standard amount, not as an act of getting something in return, but binding ourselves to the collective body of Knesses Yisroel.
So let’s continue binding ourselves, connecting to the Jewish people, and of course, let’s keep making Torah sweet.