There are many other good causes as well, such as Jewish education, building synagogues and houses of study, supporting medical research, visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved, and a host of others. Some of those also fit the rubric of helping the poor, such as by noting that the poor can certainly not pay for their medical care, and especially not for diseases whose cure is still unknown or experimental. Supporting medical research, in that context, might qualify as charity in the helping-the-poor sense as well.

Too, the common custom to give at least ten percent of one’s income to charity might not be restricted to charity in the technical sense, charity for the poor. Nonetheless, the plethora of causes and their relationship to essential charity show some of the challenges of using our money appropriately, even when all good will is involved. Some will choose to give ten percent, some more, some less. Within those monies, too, there will be a range of choices to be made about apportioning; while traditional sources offer some guidance, much is left to the individual.

Similarly, Rambam famously lists eight levels of charity, collated from various Talmudic discussions.[ii] The highest of those levels, the best fulfillment of the obligation, is to support another Jew or righteous non-Jew before that person’s financial situation deteriorates so much as to need actual alms.

The possible ways to accomplish this support include giving a gift, making a loan, forging a partnership with the needy person, or finding him some other source of livelihood. Each of these strategies, though, involves complex calculations of how to best steady a person teetering on the edge of the underclass. Since Rambam assumes that the mitzvah applies to the near-poor as well as the already-poor, the number and kinds of choices to be made are multiplied and are not in any clear way answered by codified halacha.

The person intent on giving charity in the best way possible, we now find, must make significant personal decisions at each stage. First, he or she must decide whether to give to the poor or other worthy causes. Within the amount being given the poor, the donor must identify recipients, choosing among the candidates and deciding how to divide the funds. Even once those decisions have been reached, the donor must further decide whether to give it by outright gift, loan, partnership, or finding the person employment. None of these choices is simple, each of them is largely a personal and autonomous matter, but the end result will change the quality of one’s charity considerably.

Honoring and Fearing Parents

While the commandments of honor and fear are obviously related, the Torah separates them, placing כבוד, honor, in the עשרת הדברות, the Ten Utterances at Sinai known as the Ten Commandments, and leaving יראה, fear, for the beginning of Leviticus 18. In seeking the balance between the well-defined and that left to the individual conscience, I will also try to explain both why the Torah would present them so separately, especially when works such as the Sefer haMitzvot and Shulchan Aruch[iii] juxtapose them.

Although כבוד is always translated as “honor,” the Talmud defines it by delineating specific services the child must perform, מאכיל ומשקה, מלביש ומכסה, מכניס ומוציא, giving (the parent) food and drink, covering and clothing, taking in and out. The list implies that “honor” refers to taking care of a parent’s physical needs.

The obligation of יראה, awe or fear, complements “honor” in a way that explains both of a Jew’s responsibilities to his or her parents. The Talmud defines “fear” as not sitting or standing in the parent’s place, not speaking before, contradicting, calling by his/her first name (or, if the name is unusual, calling someone else by that name), and not wading into a debate in which a parent is partaking, even to support the parent’s point of view.

All of these suggest that a child is supposed to view the parent with a certain amount of fear or awe, simply stated; indeed, Rambam says that the mitzva is to act towards the parent as towards someone with the power to administer meaningful punishment. It should be obvious that the fear is not in and of itself the Torah’s goal, so that here, too, we are prodded to look deeper into the mitzva.

Representing the Divine

A couple of Rabbinic statements clarify the Torah’s goals. The Talmud notes that Scripture uses the same terms for these mitzvot as for the attitude one should have towards God.[iv] Thus, the verse warns kabed parents, and elsewhere says kabed God; so, too, it warns איש אמו ואביו תיראו, every one of you must fear his mother and father, andאת ה’ אלוקיך תירא, fear the Lord your God. The use of similar terms, the Rabbis imply, indicates that one’s attitude towards parents should parallel the attitude towards God. As two of the three partners in a person’s creation, parents have standing akin to that of the third partner, the Creator.[v]

Recognizing that these commandments stem from parents’ role as creators also fits the Sefer haChinuch’s assertion that this mitzva inculcates gratitude, which he explicitly assumes will increase the person’s gratitude to God as well. The honoring of parents thus only partially cares about securing them their due; they also serve as a convenient vehicle to personalize our relationship with our Creator.

Rambam’s phrasing of two more rules supports this idea. Halacha prohibits restraining one’s parent (verbally or physically), even if the parent is embarrassing or otherwise causing distress to the child. In an extreme example, a child may not stop a parent from throwing a bag full of money into the ocean.[vi] Rambam highlights the relationship to God, by ruling that the child seeing such a parent throw the money away must “sit silently and accept the decree of Scripture.” Similarly, he writes that the child may not answer back if the parent embarrasses him publicly, but must maintain his fear of the King of Kings.

Note that his justification in both cases relies on the child’s obligations towards God, not towards the parent. In both situations, the goal is to see this physical person as in some way parallel to God, to use that as a stepping-stone to inculcating a more full honor and fear of God. If so, the parent’s actions must be seen as close to those of God.

This perspective of the commandments of honor and awe also shows us where the personal element enters the picture, completely unguided by specific laws. Alongside the codified laws, the Talmud gives numerous examples of admirable respect or fear of one’s parents. Perhaps most famously, Dama b. Netina is commended for refusing to wake his father, who was sleeping on the key to a cabinet that held merchandise he could have sold right then for an extraordinary profit.[vii] Since Dama was not even Jewish, the Talmud could not have meant his example as halachically instructive; rather, it meant it as evincing an ideal each Jew must strive to actualize in his or her own life.

Kibbud expresses this aspect even more fully. While a child could treat the obligations completely technically, insuring only that the parent eats, drinks, is clothed, and gets out regularly, the responsibilities of kibbud seem to call for a broader involvement in assuring that the parent’s needs, broadly speaking, are met. If so, the Torah places the more easily and exactly defined obligation, awe or fear, in a legal section of the Torah. Honor, the broader and more personally defined responsibility, is placed in the Ten Commandments.

Thus, eight mitzvot show us how poorly an over-reliance on codified halacha serves the Jew trying to fulfill the Torah. While mitzvot define a set of goals, they often give only general guidelines for how to achieve them, sometimes even when the guidelines seem very specific. In each of these cases (and I could have added others), full success requires the individual Jew to build off of halacha’s guidelines in defining how he or she fulfills the obligation in question.

I believe our failure to recognize the importance and value of autonomous religiosity has hurt us in another way, our struggles with the role of women in the religion. Next time, I will take up the topic of women’s exemption from certain commandments, and try to show that the Torah was actually suggesting a more autonomous form of religion for women, granting them a greater freedom to define their approach to God. If so, the flight to well-defined roles, the desire to be able to fit more and more into well-recognized forms of religiosity, might be not only a technical question, but go to the core of our understanding of what the religion wants of us.

For some examples, see bBaba Batra 8a-11a and שו”ע יו”ד (Yoreh Deah) 247ff.