What Is Owed: Judaism, Islam and the Debt of Kindness

In the autumn of 1943 a seventeen-year-old named Refik Veseli was learning photography in a studio in Tirana. He was a Muslim boy from Kruja, in the mountains to the north, sent to the capital by his parents to learn a trade. Working beside him was a Jewish refugee from Yugoslavia, Moshe Mandil, who had once trained the man they now both worked for. Mandil had a wife, Ela, a son of seven, Gavra, and a daughter of five, Irena. The family had been running from the German army for more than two years.¹

That September Italy surrendered, the Germans moved into Albania, and the searches began. Refik proposed his parents’ house. The accounts differ on who led the Mandils there, and on whether they walked for a day and a half or rode for several nights.² They agree on the door. At Kruja, Vesel and Fatima Veseli took them in. A second Jewish family followed, brought by Refik’s brother Xhemal. The adults kept out of sight. Gavra and Irena lived openly among the village children.

They stayed until the liberation, the following autumn.

Many years later Refik’s brothers were asked about that year. The whole neighbourhood, they said, had known.³

A family that hides fugitives from an occupying army is keeping a secret. A neighbourhood that knows and says nothing is keeping a rule.

The Albanians have a name for the rule. Besa means, literally, to keep the promise: the protection a household owes to whoever is under its roof. It belongs to the Kanun, the customary law of the northern highlands, which assigns an Albanian’s house to God and to the guest. The Kanun is no part of Islamic law. Muslim and Catholic clans alike carried it in memory for centuries, and the man who first wrote it down was a Franciscan priest.⁴ The Veselis, who were devout, understood it through their faith. Their sons said their parents had believed that “every knock on the door is a blessing from God.”

In 1987 Gavra Mandil wrote from Israel to Yad Vashem, out of what its record calls a sense of obligation to the people who had saved him. That December Vesel, Fatima and Refik Veseli became the first Albanians recognised as Righteous Among the Nations.⁵

The code that protected the Mandils took no interest in what the Veselis felt about them. It required a door to be opened, and to stay open.

Two traditions build kindness the same way. Judaism and Islam disagree about scripture, prophecy, law and land. They agree that the care of the poor, the guest and the stranger is a debt; that a debt falls due whatever the debtor’s mood; and that this is the strength of the arrangement, with nothing in it to apologise for. Law first, heart after. Both traditions hope the heart will follow. Neither waits for it.

Greater is the one commanded

The Babylonian Talmud tells the story at a sage’s expense. Rav Yosef was blind, and one opinion held that the blind are exempt from the commandments. Rav Yosef used to say that he would give a feast for the scholars if anyone could prove that opinion right, since everything he did would then be done unbidden, and surely that was the finer thing.

Then he heard the ruling of Rabbi Ḥanina: greater is the one who is commanded and acts than the one who acts without being commanded. Rav Yosef changed the invitation. The feast would go to whoever proved him obliged.⁶

Modern instinct sides with his first thought. We prize the volunteer; a gift seems worth more than a bill paid. The medieval commentators gave the tradition’s reason for thinking otherwise. The commanded person has something to push against: reluctance, inconvenience, the worry of falling short. The volunteer can stop whenever the feeling does.⁷ An obligation is what remains when the feeling has gone.

Islamic law builds the same ranking into its structure. Every act falls into one of five classes, from the obligatory to the forbidden, and the obligatory comes first. In a saying the tradition attributes to God himself, nothing brings a servant nearer than the duties laid upon him; the voluntary works come after, and build on them.⁸

In neither tradition is commandedness a second best. It is the design.

The floor

Each tradition has a word that English turns into charity, and in each case the English misleads.

Tzedakah comes from tzedek, justice. What goes to the poor was theirs by right; the giver is settling an account. Zakat, from a root meaning to purify and to grow, is one of the five pillars of Islam. The Qur’an describes the faithful as those “in whose wealth there is a right acknowledged / For the beggar and the destitute,” and it names the lawful recipients one by one, the wayfarer among them, closing the list with the words “a duty imposed by Allah.”⁹ A right acknowledged: the claim is lodged in the wealth before its owner has decided anything.

Both debts can be collected. Maimonides, codifying Jewish law in twelfth-century Cairo, is blunt about it. When a man will not give, or gives less than he ought, the court compels him, has him flogged if necessary, and may enter his property and take what is due. Pledges can be seized for it even on the eve of the Sabbath.¹⁰

In Islam the collector is written into scripture: “those who collect them” stand among the eight lawful recipients. The tradition remembers its first political crisis as a fight over the due. When tribes stopped paying after the Prophet’s death, the first caliph, Abu Bakr, refused to separate the prayer from the zakat and went to war.¹¹

Here the institutions diverge. Zakat is the more developed fiscal instrument: a fixed rate on savings above a threshold, eight named categories, and for much of history a treasury behind it. Judaism, stateless for most of its history, set no single rate. What it built instead, further than any tradition I know of, is a jurisprudence of the receiver’s dignity.

Maimonides ranks giving in eight degrees. At the bottom is the gift made grudgingly. Above it, the gift that is too small but cheerful; then giving when asked; giving before being asked. Then three rungs of concealment: the poor know the giver and he does not know them; he knows them and they do not know him; neither knows the other. At the top stands the gift, loan, partnership or job that ends the need altogether.¹²

The logic of the upper rungs is the receiver’s shame. Maimonides records sages who tied coins into a cloth and trailed it behind them, so that the poor could help themselves unobserved. A man who hands over a thousand gold pieces with a sour face, he says elsewhere, has lost the merit of them.¹³

The Qur’an legislates against the same injury from the other side. “A kind word with forgiveness is better than almsgiving followed by injury,” and the believer is warned against cancelling his charity by reminding the recipient of it.¹⁴

Both laws, having commanded the gift, then set about protecting the receiver from the giver.

What has no measure

Above the floor, each tradition commands something it has no means to collect.

The Mishnah lists the things that have no fixed measure, and among them is gemilut chasadim, the doing of kindnesses.¹⁵ Shimon the Righteous taught that the world stands on three things: the Torah, the Temple service, and acts of kindness.¹⁶ The Talmud ranks such acts above tzedakah on three counts. Tzedakah is done with money; kindness with money or with one’s own person. Tzedakah goes to the poor; kindness to poor and rich alike. Tzedakah is for the living; kindness for the living and the dead.¹⁷

The last is the limiting case. To bury the dead is to serve someone who will never thank you, and the tradition calls it the kindness of truth.¹⁸

Chesed itself is older than the rabbis. In the Hebrew Bible it names what the stronger party to a bond does for the weaker, who cannot compel it: owed, because of the bond; free, because no court could enforce it.¹⁹ When Hosea has God say “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,” the word behind mercy is chesed.²⁰

Islam’s upper tier is sadaqa, the voluntary gift. The word is built on the same three consonants as tzedakah, and the two sit on opposite tiers: the Hebrew names the debt a court can collect, the Arabic names the giving no one can demand. The Qur’an puts its spirit into the mouths of those who feed “the needy wretch, the orphan and the prisoner, for love of Him,” and who tell them: “We feed you, for the sake of Allah only. We wish for no reward nor thanks from you.”²¹ The gift passes through the person in front of you to God. The receiver owes nothing back, gratitude included.

The same page of Talmud carries a sentence that qualifies everything in the last section. Tzedakah, says Rabbi Elazar, is repaid only according to the kindness in it.²² The coin can be collected. What gives the coin its worth cannot.

The law commands what it cannot collect.

The womb in the word

Here the two traditions share more than a structure. They share a word.

Hebrew rachamim, mercy, and Arabic rahma are built on the same three consonants, r-ḥ-m, and in both languages those consonants also give the word for womb: Hebrew rechem, Arabic raḥim. The root is old and widely spread. It turns up in Akkadian, in the tablets of Ebla, in Phoenician and in the languages of southern Arabia, and the comparative dictionaries give womb as the base meaning and mercy as the derived one.²³

Every chapter of the Qur’an but one opens by using it twice: in the name of God, al-Raḥmān, al-Raḥīm. The Babylonian Talmud’s everyday name for God is Raḥmana, the Merciful, and it is the name the Talmud reaches for, of all moments, when it cites a law. “The Merciful One says” is how a commandment is introduced.²⁴

A caution belongs here. A shared root is a fact about words. It proves nothing about doctrine, and neither tradition derives its law of giving from the womb. What the word does show is where each language files mercy: in the body, ahead of choice. A womb does not decide to shelter.

A saying preserved in both of Islam’s principal collections makes the point with an animal. God divided mercy into a hundred parts and kept ninety-nine. The one part sent down is all the mercy there is among creatures, and by it a mare lifts her hoof clear of her foal for fear of treading on it.²⁵

The mare is under no commandment. People, who can decide otherwise, are given law.

The tent door

Both traditions trace hospitality to the same afternoon. Abraham sits at the door of his tent in the heat of the day. Three strangers appear. He runs to meet them, hastens to Sarah for bread, runs to the herd for a calf.²⁶ The Qur’an tells the story twice: folk unknown to him, the greeting of peace, and the calf brought without delay.²⁷

Nothing is said about what Abraham felt. He runs. The rabbis concluded that welcoming guests is greater than receiving the divine presence, since Abraham left God waiting while he saw to them.²⁸

Law followed. Whoever believes in God and the Last Day, runs a saying of the Prophet, must honour his guest. The guest’s due is a day and a night; hospitality runs to three days; whatever comes after is charity.²⁹ A feeling has no term of three days. A law does.

The neighbour is treated the same way. The Qur’an lists those to whom kindness is owed: parents, kin, orphans, the needy, “the neighbour who is of kin (unto you) and the neighbour who is not of kin, and the fellow-traveller and the wayfarer.”³⁰ Gabriel pressed the neighbour’s claim so often, the Prophet said, that he expected the neighbour to be made an heir.³¹ Another saying withholds the name of believer from anyone who eats his fill while the neighbour beside him goes hungry.³²

Then the stranger. “The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.”³³ Commanded love sounds like a contradiction until Deuteronomy says what the love consists of: God loves the stranger “in giving him food and raiment.”³⁴ In the statute, love is a delivery.

A famous line has the Torah commanding love of the stranger thirty-six times, and it is usually credited to the Talmud. What the Talmud says is harder, and more interesting.

Rabbi Eliezer the Great asks why the Torah warns in thirty-six places, or as some have it forty-six, against wronging the ger. The count is disputed inside the source. The subject is a prohibition on mistreatment. And the reason given is no compliment: the ger’s nature is bad, and if pressed he may go back to what he was. Rabbi Natan, in the next breath, turns the verse on the reader: do not taunt your fellow with a blemish that is your own.³⁵

The law assumes neither that the stranger is lovable nor that the native is kind. The warning is repeated because the temptation is reliable.

The seam

My book’s claim is that kindness is a covenant nobody remembers signing: the unwritten terms on which strangers agree to share a street, a workplace, a country.³⁶ Its chapter on justice praises tzedakah and zakat for the reason given here: they turn a kind impulse into a standing obligation. The two accounts part at three points, and at two of them it is the book that needs correcting.

The first is seeing. The book grounds kindness in recognition: the perception that another person’s reality is as real as your own. “Kindness begins in perception,” it says. Maimonides’ ladder runs the other way. Its upper rungs are a sustained effort to stop giver and receiver seeing one another, and its summit takes the receiver out of the transaction for good. On his account, to be seen in need is the injury. Mine makes no provision for that, and it should.

The traditions’ reply goes further. Recognition is a state of a person. It cannot be commanded, and it goes fastest when the other is hostile, foreign, unlovely, or one too many. A kindness that waits on recognition will fail at exactly the moment it is needed. Law is for that moment.

I accept most of that. My reply is Rabbi Elazar’s: the court collects the coin and cannot collect what makes it worth anything. On the book’s terms, much of what these traditions file under kindness is something else: justice, or piety, or law. It is no worse for that. The book’s word belongs to the tier that has no measure.

The second is the volunteer. The book’s chapter on the intimate world says of friendship that it is where kindness is “least compelled and therefore most revelatory of character.” Rabbi Ḥanina says the reverse. I will keep my sentence as a claim about character, and concede his as a claim about what lasts.

The third is the boundary, and here the correction runs against me twice. The book says that the Hebrew Bible enjoins care of the stranger “more than thirty times,” and reads the command as a demand for recognition. That figure is the modern condensation of Rabbi Eliezer, and by his time rabbinic usage had largely turned the ger into the convert. The book also cites the top of Maimonides’ ladder as the gift that makes “a person” self-sufficient. His text says a fellow Jew.³⁷

Both traditions grade the debt by membership. The collectable floor is for the community. Classical jurists direct zakat to Muslims, with the single exception of those whose hearts are to be won.³⁸ The outsider is reached through the upper tier. The rabbis rule that the gentile poor are fed alongside the poor of Israel “for the sake of the ways of peace,” and sadaqa may go to anyone.³⁹ Each body of classical law also gave the resident outsider a defined and lesser standing: the ger toshav in one, the dhimmi in the other.

The book’s chapter on nations grants that the obligations of citizenship are real. What it asks is that the circle stay open as a question: “who else might be included in ‘we’?” The legal traditions treat the circle as a thing to be ruled on. Neither position is comfortable. An open question protects nobody on a given Tuesday. A ruling does, and it protects the people inside it.

The shadows

An obligation with a boundary will be tested at the boundary.

Each of these traditions has been tested there, and the record is public.

Begin with the ger. The stranger of Leviticus is a resident alien, a foreigner living on your land. Maimonides codifies the command to love him as a command to love the convert.⁴⁰ A later medieval authority pulled the other way, teaching that the commandment’s lesson reaches anyone who is far from home.⁴¹ The gap between the biblical stranger and the legal one has never closed. The category that might have filled it, the ger toshav, the resident alien who keeps the basic moral laws, operates on the Talmud’s own account only when the Jubilee does. It has been in abeyance since antiquity.⁴²

In December 2010 some fifty Israeli community rabbis, many of them municipal rabbis on public salaries, signed a letter ruling that Jewish law forbids renting or selling homes in Israel to non-Jews.⁴³ The answers came from inside the same tradition. Rabbi Ya’acov Ariel, chief rabbi of Ramat Gan and a leading authority of the religious-Zionist world, declined to sign, and cited the ruling of the late Chief Rabbi Isaac Herzog that a democratic state may not discriminate between one citizen and another.⁴⁴ The Rabbinical Council of America called the letter objectionable.⁴⁵ Scholars set out the line of authorities who hold that the biblical prohibition at issue concerns idolaters and has no bearing on Muslims or Christians.⁴⁶

The argument is over who counts as the stranger the Torah protects. It is conducted in the Torah’s own terms, by its own authorities, and it is unfinished.

Now the wayfarer. The Qur’an counts the freeing of slaves among the highest of acts. The steep path, it says, is “to free a slave.” Manumission is a lawful use of zakat, and an owner is told to grant a contract of freedom to the slave who asks for one.⁴⁷ The text never abolished the institution, and Muslim polities held and traded slaves for some thirteen centuries. Saudi Arabia ended slavery by decree in 1962. Mauritania abolished it in 1981 and made it a crime only in 2007.⁴⁸ The praise of freeing worked inside the institution and left it standing.

The present form of the gap is the migrant worker. Across the Gulf, and in Jordan and Lebanon, millions live under kafala, the sponsorship system that ties a worker’s legal residence to a single employer.⁴⁹ The word comes from Islamic jurisprudence, where it means standing surety for another, and the fostering of an orphan. The system is modern. One historian traces its rules to British colonial administration in the Gulf, and scholars of Islamic law have argued that it violates the law whose vocabulary it wears.⁵⁰

Human Rights Watch titled its report on domestic workers in Oman with three words from the women it interviewed: “I Was Sold.” Several said their employers had told them they were bought.⁵¹ Many such workers come from Bangladesh and Indonesia, Muslim-majority countries. The line that fails them is drawn by citizenship, whatever the creed on either side of it.

The wayfarer is named in the verse that founds the zakat. The command was never the missing piece.

I cannot resolve either case. These two traditions built the strongest machinery for obligatory kindness that I know of. In both, the machinery has an edge, and the people found at the edge are the ones the founding texts worried about most.

Coda

So, the three questions.

What do these traditions think kindness is? A debt. Owed before it is felt, to people one did not choose, and in its lower reaches collectable. Judaism adds that the debt arises inside a covenant, and that its highest form is the kindness no one can repay. Islam adds that the debt is owed to God and paid through the person in front of you, who owes nothing in return.

What do they think it costs? Your title to what you own. Both deny that the wealth was ever wholly yours; a right was lodged in it before you earned it. Judaism counts a further cost, the giver’s pleasure in being seen to give. Islam counts the thanks.

What is it for? Here they differ, and I give both answers. For Judaism, the upkeep of a common life: the world, said Shimon the Righteous, stands on it. For Islam, the purification of the giver and nearness to God: zakat means growth and cleansing, and the food is given for the sake of God only. A juster community is served in both. In Judaism it is the purpose. In Islam it is the evidence.

The door at Kruja stayed open until the liberation. Vesel and Fatima Veseli kept an obligation older than their religion, and understood it through their religion, towards a family who shared neither the code nor the faith. The neighbourhood knew, and kept the rule. After the war Refik went to Novi Sad to finish his apprenticeship under Moshe Mandil, and four decades on Gavra Mandil discharged a debt of his own, by letter.

Nobody asked the household at Kruja what it felt. It was asked to open the door. What the people behind that door came to feel for one another arrived afterwards, as it usually does.