Painted Buntings : HaShem’s Trustees

These are Painted Buntings. Momma is on the left, feeding a small spider to her child on the right. The camera’s joy is that it slows down the interaction enough that we can see it play out; in real time, it’s just a blur. Unaided, our eye can miss the underlying reality hidden within the flurry of action. This feeding is utterly mundane. It is also a miracle of chemistry, biology, and life itself in ways that exceed our understanding. The mother has an instinctual call to perpetuate her genes. It is in a sense self-serving, even as she sacrifices calories that could otherwise sustain herself.

Tzedakah is one of the three imperatives of the High Holydays. Despite frequent translation as “charity,” a more insightful rendering is “righteous giving.” Giving tzedakah isn’t a discretionary gift so much as recognition that what we currently have is not ours per se but rather is entrusted to us by HaShem, the Source of all. Tzedakah is how we trustees ensure that those who need have enough: enough to perform the mitzvah of celebrating Shabbat, enough to perform the mitzvah of making the Festivals joyous, etc. Tzedakah is comparing the current world to the idealized baseline and helping reset to the way HaShem has prescribed.

In these Days of Awe, we beseech Avinu Malkeinu to inscribe and seal us in the Book of Life for a good year. We seek to enhance our place and our abundance by the seemingly counterintuitive process of giving away. But that contradiction immediately disappears when we recall that we are trustees rather than owners. Tzedakah teaches us that we aren’t dissipating what is ours, but rather say we are distributing what we manage on behalf of HaShem. Just as the Painted Bunting so naturally gives to receive the blessing of the next generation, so too, tzedakah is our contribution to creating the world as we want it to be.