Open Your Hand

The poor person here is not far away. He is in one of your gates - your town, your street, someone you would know by sight. Two things are forbidden, and the order matters: first the heart goes hard, and only then does the hand close. If you catch the first one you never get to the second.

Notice that the verse ranks people. Rashi, working from the Sifrei, reads each phrase as an order of priority: the neediest first, your own brother before a more distant relative, the poor of your city before the poor of another city. That can sound uncomfortably narrow until you see what it is doing - it refuses to let you dissolve the duty into a general concern for everyone, which costs nothing. Start with the person nearest. Rashi has one more line on this verse, and it is not gentle: if you do not give to him, you will end up the brother of a poor man yourself.

Rashi divides the verse into a sequence of precedences drawn from the Sifrei: הַתָּאֵב תָּאֵב קוֹדֵם, the more desperate has priority; a brother on the father’s side before a brother on the mother’s side; the poor of your own city before the poor of another. He then reads the two prohibitions as two portraits. On לא תאמץ: יֵשׁ לְךָ אָדָם שֶׁמִּצְטַעֵר אִם יִתֵּן אִם לֹא יִתֵּן, there is a man who agonises over whether to give or not. On ולא תקפוץ: there is a man who stretches out his hand and closes it again. The roots make the point physically - א-מ-ץ is strength and tightening, ק-פ-ץ in biblical Hebrew is to clench shut rather than to jump. On אביון Rashi comments earlier in this chapter, at verse 4, that the word is דַּל מֵעָנִי, lower than an עני, and glosses it שֶׁהוּא תָּאֵב לְכָל דָּבָר - he longs for everything, because he lacks everything. Rashi closes our verse with a warning that reads almost as a threat: מֵאָחִיךָ הָאֶבְיוֹן - if you do not give him, you will in the end be the brother of a poor man.

Open, you shall open. The Hebrew says the word twice, and Rashi explains why: because you may have to do it more than once, and more than twice. Then comes something kind. If the person feels too proud to take a present, give him the same money as a loan instead, so that taking it is easier for him.

The second half of the verse pulls in two directions at once and both are meant. די מחסורו sets a ceiling - Rashi says you are commanded to relieve his need, not to make him rich. But אשר יחסר לו lifts it again: even a horse to ride on and a servant to run in front of him, if that is what this particular person has lost. The Talmud in Ketubot tells of Hillel doing exactly that for a man who had come down in the world, and on the day no runner could be found, Hillel ran three mil in front of him himself. So the measure is not what a human being minimally needs. It is what this human being is missing.

Three points of grammar and law. First, פָתֹחַ תִּפְתַּח is an infinitive absolute followed by the finite verb, ordinarily an intensifier; Rashi converts intensity into repetition - אֲפִלּוּ כַמָּה פְעָמִים, even many times. He also notes that כִּי here carries the sense of אֶלָּא, but rather, which is why the verse reads as the answer to verse 7’s prohibition. Second, וְהַעֲבֵט תַּעֲבִיטֶנּוּ, from the rare root ע-ב-ט, is lending against a pledge; Rashi reads it as a provision for dignity - אִם לֹא רָצָה בְמַתָּנָה, תֵּן לוֹ בְּהַלְוָאָה, if he will not accept it as a gift, give it to him as a loan. Rambam builds his top rung on precisely this instinct: in Hilchot Matnot Aniyim the highest level is a gift, a loan, a partnership or finding a man work, כְּדֵי לְחַזֵּק אֶת יָדוֹ, so that his hand is strengthened and he need not ask at all. Third, the pair of clauses. Rashi on די מחסורו: וְאִי אַתָּה מְצֻוֶּה לְהַעֲשִׁירוֹ, you are not commanded to make him wealthy. Rashi on אשר יחסר לו, from Ketubot 67b: אֲפִלּוּ סוּס לִרְכֹּב עָלָיו וְעֶבֶד לָרוּץ לְפָנָיו. The same sugya records that Hillel the Elder obtained both for an impoverished man of good family, and once, when no runner could be hired, ran three mil before him himself.

Now something unusual. This is a warning about a thought. The seventh year is coming, when money that people owe you gets cancelled - so a person might think, why lend anything now, I will never get it back. The Torah says: do not let that thought be the one that decides. Give anyway.

Read what is actually being forbidden. Not stealing, not refusing outright - a piece of arithmetic. The release year is close, the loan will be cancelled, so lending is throwing money away. That is true. The Torah does not argue with it; it calls it a דָּבָר בְּלִיַּעַל and makes acting on it a sin. And the story does not end there. Centuries later the Mishnah in Shevi’it records that Hillel saw people doing exactly this - holding back from lending to each other, and transgressing this verse - and so he instituted the prozbul, a legal device that stopped the loan being cancelled. The law had to be rescued from its own side effect.

The verse legislates against a motive, which is rare, and the language is unusually loaded. בְלִיַּעַל: Ibn Ezra records it as a noun, and cites the view that it is a compound word - בְּלִי and יַעַל - read as a curse, that the man will not rise, will not thrive, will not live. וְרָעָה עֵינְךָ is the grudging eye, the opposite of the עַיִן טוֹבָה of Pirkei Avot. The closing clauses are precisely delimited by Rashi from the Sifrei. On וְקָרָא עָלֶיךָ he asks whether the poor man is being commanded to cry out, and answers no, from Devarim 24:15, which says of the withheld wage וְלֹא־יִקְרָא עָלֶיךָ, that he should not need to. On וְהָיָה בְךָ חֵטְא: מִכָּל מָקוֹם, אֲפִלּוּ לֹא יִקְרָא - the sin stands whether or not he cries out, though Rashi adds that punishment comes faster where he does. The practical afterlife of the verse is recorded in Mishnah Shevi’it 10:3: Hillel the Elder instituted the prozbul when he saw the people refraining from lending to one another and thereby transgressing what is written in the Torah, הִשָּׁמֶר לְךָ פֶּן יִהְיֶה דָבָר עִם לְבָבְךָ בְּלִיַּעַל. The Torah had anticipated the calculation; the sages had to build around it.

Give, says the verse - and Rashi adds, even a hundred times. And do not feel sour about it while you are handing it over. There is one small word here, לוֹ, to him, and Rashi says it means quietly, just between the two of you, so that nobody else has to watch.

This verse regulates your face. Not only the giving but the mood you give in - וְלֹא יֵרַע לְבָבְךָ, do not let your heart go bad while your hand is doing the right thing. Then it promises a blessing, which is the part that usually makes people suspicious, as though decency were being paid for. The Talmud in Shabbat reads it differently. The words כִּי בִּגְלַל are heard as גַּלְגַּל, a wheel: it is a wheel that turns in the world. Rabbi Chiyya told his wife to give bread to the poor quickly, and when she asked whether he was cursing their own children, he quoted this verse. The blessing is not a reward. It is a reminder that you may be standing on the other side of it one day.

יֵרַע picks up the רָעָה of the previous verse - the same root ר-ע-ע, first in the eye and now in the heart, so that across two verses the Torah locates the offence twice in the inner disposition rather than in the deed. Rashi’s three notes here are all expansions: on נָתוֹן תִּתֵּן, אֲפִלּוּ מֵאָה פְעָמִים, even a hundred times; on לוֹ, בֵּינוֹ וּבֵינְךָ, between him and you, privately; and on כִּי בִּגְלַל הַדָּבָר, that even if you merely said you would give and were then unable, you take the reward for the saying together with the reward for the act. The Talmud in Shabbat 151b builds a doctrine of poverty out of the same phrase: the baraita of Rabbi Elazar HaKappar, that a man should always pray for mercy regarding this condition, since if he does not come to it his son may, and if not his son then his son’s son - and, immediately attached, the teaching of the school of Rabbi Yishmael, גַּלְגַּל הוּא שֶׁחוֹזֵר בָּעוֹלָם, it is a wheel that turns in the world. The blessing itself is placed בְּכָל־מַעֲשֶׂךָ וּבְכֹל מִשְׁלַח יָדֶךָ - on work already done and on whatever the hand next reaches for. It is the same hand that verse 7 forbade you to close.

The Torah says something honest here. There will always be someone who needs help. It does not hide that or promise it will stop. It says: because that is how it is, here is what you do - open your hand. And it names three people: your brother, your poor, your needy. It gets wider each time, so that nobody is left outside.

This is the verse that makes the commandment permanent, and it is worth asking why the Torah would build a law on a failure it says will never be fixed. Ramban is careful here. He will not read the verse as a prophecy that Israel will disobey, because the Torah does not openly foretell that people will break it. He reads it instead as a plain fact about the world: poverty cannot be made to disappear entirely, so Moshe legislates in advance for the case where a poor man is there in front of you. That is a different kind of realism from despair. It means the mitzvah was never conditional on solving the problem.

The apparent contradiction with verse 4, אֶפֶס כִּי לֹא יִהְיֶה־בְּךָ אֶבְיוֹן, is the classic crux of the chapter. Rashi at verse 4, following the Sifrei, resolves it conditionally: בִּזְמַן שֶׁאַתֶּם עוֹשִׂים רְצוֹנוֹ שֶׁל מָקוֹם אֶבְיוֹנִים בַּאֲחֵרִים וְלֹא בָכֶם - when you do the will of the Omnipresent the poor are among others, and when you do not, among you. Ramban on our verse is unwilling to leave it there. He objects that the Torah may allude to the future but would not explicitly prophesy that Israel will not fulfil the commandments; he therefore takes verse 11 as a statement of what is possible rather than of what will go wrong - poverty cannot wholly cease - and notes that Moshe, having promised abundance to a generation that keeps everything, and knowing that not all generations will, commands now for the poor man who will in fact be found. Ramban further reads מִקֶּרֶב הָאָרֶץ against verse 4’s promise, which was tied to the land given as an inheritance; the obligation here reaches beyond it, בָּאָרֶץ וּבְחוּצָה לָאָרֶץ, in every age. Rashi adds two notes of tone. On לֵאמֹר: עֵצָה לְטוֹבָתְךָ אֲנִי מַשִּׂיאֲךָ, the advice I am pressing on you is for your own good. On לְאָחִיךָ לַעֲנִיֶּךָ: to which brother? To the poor one. The threefold widening - your brother, your poor, your needy - closes the passage by giving the same open hand of verse 8 three separate people to reach.