tzedakah

English

Alternative forms

• tsedakah, tzedaka, zedakah

Etymology

Borrowed from Hebrew צְדָקָה (ts'daká, “charity”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /t͡səˈdakə/

Noun

tzedakah (usually uncountable, plural tzedakahs)

1. (Judaism) The Jewish tradition of charity.
   • 2012 August 29, Jeffrey Goldberg, quoting Noam Neusner, “Mitt Romney, the Tikkun Olam President?”, in The Atlantic‎^[1]:

     Wherever Jews have lived in relative freedom and free markets—the United States, Britain and its commonwealth, the Ottoman Near East, post-Enlightenment Western Europe—we've done pretty well. We've built great communities. We've devoted ourselves to Torah. We've pursued tzedakah, charity, with abandon.

   • 2020, Michele Maxwell, The Tzedakah Box‎^[2], Balboa Press, →ISBN:

     I began to fill this little wooden tzedakah box with tiny slips of paper, each containing a single word or phrase as a “prompt” for remembering some gifted moment or intense experience of my life.

Usage notes

The description as "charity" is a rough approximation. While charity typically refers to the voluntary giving of money to someone less fortunate, tzedakah is obligatory and unrelated to the affluence of giver or receiver; Jews are required to give of their own resources to others and even those whose entire livelihood comes from receiving tzedakah are required to give tzedakah in turn. Tzedakah can take the form of any resource: money, time, advice, etc. Thus, according to Jewish tradition, the highest form of tzedakah is to give a person a job or partnership that will allow him to sustain himself without receiving tzedakah.

See also

• chesed
• sadaqa