What does it mean to help someone without taking away their dignity, and is it harder — and holier — to give a loan rather than a gift?

On this episode of TEXTing IRL, Elana Stein Hain speaks with Rabbi David Rosenn, President and CEO of the Hebrew Free Loan Society, about Jewish ideas of dignity, episodic poverty, and prevention. They interrogate the Torah’s fixation on interest-free lending and why Jewish tradition insists on seeing the whole person in moments of financial crisis. A provocative and important conversation that begs the question: when (and when isn’t) charity the most ethical form of Jewish giving?

A full transcript of this episode is available below.

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Jewish Responses to Poverty: Charity, Loans, and Prevention Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Elana: Hello everyone. Welcome back to TEXTing IRL: Ideas for Real Life, where we wrestle with the big dilemmas of our time through the lens of classical and modern tour texts. I’m your host, Elana Stein Hain. We’re recording on March 25th, 2026, still during the war with Iran. 

A few years ago, I gave my then 10-year-old son $20 for a day out with his adult cousins in New York. He came home with a bottle of water and with no change. When I asked him what happened, he said he spent $8 on water at the museum and gave the rest to someone living on the street who asked him for money. As good parents do, we both expressed pride at his generosity and began talking to him about how to balance our own financial needs with those of others. And as to the $8 water, that was part and parcel of that conversation as well. 

Now, when the world’s problems seem overwhelming, I always try to remember that there are concrete steps that we can take to help. Many of those steps are small. While some of them are grand, some can be done by individuals, others require collaborative action. 

In today’s episode, I wanna discuss an ever present problem in society and in our Jewish communities that may not be making our Jewish headlines, but is yet ongoing, and that is poverty thinking in Jewish terms. I wanna go beyond the term tzedakah, charity, which is quite familiar to so many. How can Jewish ideas help people to consider how to orient themselves to this pervasive issue? And yes, there is a tie in to this week’s Torah portion. Just wait and see. 

Today I’m joined by the President and CEO of the Hebrew Free Loan Society, Rabbi David Rosenn. He oversees Hebrew Free Loan Society’s wide range of interest free loan programs, and spearheads the development of new programs to benefit New Yorkers in need. He has been involved in social change in both US and Israel for decades as Executive vice president of the New Israel Fund, and as a founder and former executive director of Avodah, the Jewish Service Corps, a year long anti-poverty program. 

Welcome to the show, David. Thank you for being here. 

David: Thanks so much, Elana. I’m excited to talk some Torag with you. 

Elana: Oh, wow. So I, I have to say, people are not expecting this, but this week’s total portion, Tazriah Metzora, basically about scale disease on humans and clothing in houses, actually has a very important tie in to the way that the Torah thinks about poverty, and it goes as follows: If someone’s house gets scale disease, they’re going to have to destroy it, but they only destroy it once the Kohen, once the priest has announced that it is ritually impure. Now anything that’s found in a house that’s ritually impure by scale disease also becomes ritually impure. 

So brilliantly, the Torah suggests before the Kohen comes, the Kohen tells everybody, hey, empty out the house. Why? “Ve-lo yitma kol asher babayit,” we don’t want anything in the house to become tamei. So that’s really thoughtful, right? That’s really thoughtful. If it’s tamei, you can’t use it in certain ways until you purify it.

But what’s interesting is what Rabbinic logic does with this, because Rabbi Meir, in the Mishna, he says, wait, wait, wait. What’s the big deal? Let the things become impure. You’ll just purify them again. So he zeroes in and says, no, there’s one substance that once it becomes impure, you have to break it. You’re not gonna be able to use it. You’re gonna have to discard it. And what is that substance? I’ll say it in his words in the Mishnah. “Al mah chasah haTorah?” What does Torah try to protect here, by telling you to take it out of the house? “Al klei charso,” on your earthenware vessels. “Ve-al pacho ve-al tipyo,” your little cruze, your little bucket, the cheapest thing that money can buy.

And then he makes a principle out of this. “Im kach chasa HaTorah al mamano habazui,” If Torah cares this much about your cheap earthenware vessels, we don’t want them to become impure because you’ll have to throw them out. “Kal vachomer al mamono hachaviv,” how much more so does Torah care about what’s actually worth something! “Im kach al mamono,” if Torah cares this much about a person’s possessions, “kal vachomer al nefesh banav u-bnotav,” how much more so would the Torah care about a person’s children? “Im kach al shel rasha,” if the Torah cares about someone who is wicked, or in this case being punished by scale disease on their house, and yet we still care about their loss, “kal bachomer al shel tzadik,” how much more so would the Torah care about the possessions of someone who is righteous? 

So here we go. Very Jewish. We’ve moved from scale disease on a house to a principle that the Torah cares about the financial solvency of people, whether you’re good or you’re bad, whether it’s cheap or it’s expensive. Now, when—you work in this sphere—when you hear that, how does it hit you? 

David: Well, when I hear a teaching like this, I am moved by the Torah’s sensitivity to things that might seem insignificant to many of us. The verse is telling the owner, as you said, to take everything out of the house to prevent the possessions from becoming tamei. And even the small, little expensive things are cared about by the Torah and—

Elana: Meaning the inexpensive things. 

David: Sorry, the inexpensive things. It, it, it, it may be that many people could afford to replace their clay earth, their clay vessels, but the Torah is thinking about someone who’s living maybe on the economic edge. And for them it is actually an expense that may push them over the edge into economic stability. And so when the Torah commands us to care about these little things, it’s showing us that for many people. Little things are not little things. They’re the difference between having some kind of financial cushion that allows you to survive a financial reversal and not having that cushion at all. 

Elana: Yeah. This person’s house is about to be knocked down. 

David: Well, that’s another aspect of this that I, I’m interested in, which is the way in which the Torah is taking pains to make sure that even though there’s this spiritual process going on. There is tzara’at attacking the person’s house. Maybe the person has done something bad. At the same time, the Torah understands that the person has a financial life. They, they, they’re going to be affected by the way that this spiritual dynamic plays out. 

And so the Kohen is instructing, I’m coming to do a ritual here, but I wanna make sure that this ritual doesn’t push somebody accidentally over the edge and into poverty. 

Elana: Well, I think that’s very interesting because I think many of us, and, and I’m gonna include myself, many of us, when we think about what it means to help others to do charity towards others. Often what we’re thinking about, we’re not often thinking about their spiritual lives. We’re often just thinking about bear survival. Meaning, bare minimum. Give—these people don’t have food to eat. Nobody, it, it’s not—infrequently do we start saying, by the way, you know, if you don’t have food to eat, it also means that you, your emotional life is gonna be different. It also means that your spiritual life is going to be different. So could you talk a little bit more about what it means for you that the spiritual and the material are actually integrated here. That this is about more than just survival. It’s about a whole person. 

David: Yeah. One approach to the fact that there’s a spiritual dynamic happening with the purification of the house is to say, you know, that’s the most important thing. Spiritual life is the essential part of life, and, and our material considerations are lesser. They’re more lowly. That’s not what the Torah does. The Torah says, we’re gonna think about both of these things at the same time. We’re not gonna wall off our material concerns from our spiritual concerns. We’re not gonna say assumptions. You know, some traditions do that. Money’s the root of all evil. You’d be better off with less of it anyway. Why don’t you just concentrate on the spiritual life? 

That is not the approach that the Torah takes. The Torah wants us to think about both of these things at the same time, and it probably wants us to think about both of these things at the same time because they impact one another. It’s very, very hard for me to think of myself as somebody created in the image of God if every single day is a battle with grinding poverty. I lose that sense that I am like the sovereign of the universe because when I don’t have control over my financial life, I’m not sovereign over anything. I’m just subjected to so many contingencies, I can’t really be sure that I can provide for myself, for my family. And that’s very dispiriting, not only to me, but also other people are looking at me and probably thinking, yes, that person, they can’t figure out how to even earn a living. There must be something wrong with them. The image of God, um, that I am created in becomes, uh, something that other people doubt. 

And so there is a spiritual dynamic happening within the poverty, within the dynamic of material hardship. And that’s what I think the Torah wants us not to forget. These things don’t separate from one another. They come together all the time. 

Elana: And do you see that in terms of the way that the Torah talks about tzedakah. 

David: I will just note that, um, the Torah doesn’t talk about tzedakah, actually. The Torah talks a lot about making sure that people have enough to eat, right? You have to leave the corners of your field for the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. 

You have to let them glean. But if you search for a place in the Torah where the Torah commands us to give money to the poor, you will not find it. And that’s a shock, I think, to many people because tzedakah is so prominent for us. It is so much the main way that we use money to do mitzvot.

And if you wanna find someplace in the Torah that instructs us to use money for a mitzvah, you can find those. There are several of them, but none of them are about tzedakah. They’re all about lending without interest. Loans, for some reason, are the, the main way that the Torah instructs us to use our money to address somebody else’s need. 

And I think it’s worth asking why is it that the Torah is so focused on loans and, and tzedakah, which is our main way of thinking about how to use money for mitzvot, is really just absent in the, in the text of the Torah.

Elana: Wow. That says something about the way that the Torah is looking at the whole person, that when it comes to giving monetary resources, we’re talking loan, we’re talking something that’s gonna be returned. And you don’t wanna charge interest, right? You don’t wanna make it a hardship on them, but it’s not a free ride, so to speak. There’s something bilateral about it because it’s gonna be given back, and that in some ways is recognizing the personhood of the other person. 

David: Well, as we were talking about before, this is a, a kind of material support that also manages to achieve a number of spiritual goals at the same time. So when somebody receives, it’s very important—let me be very clear about that. If somebody needs a gift—

Elana: Of course—make it clear, yes.

David:—They should receive and they deserve from the community support so that they can have the basics. However, everybody knows that it is uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of tzedakah. There’s just a natural human reciprocity response. When someone does something for you, you wanna do something back for them, and you feel a little bit uneasy and unresolved and imbalanced if you’re not able to do that. 

And so tzedakah sets up a, a kind of an imbalance, whereas a loan, there are two parties involved. One is lending money to the other party, but then the other party is giving it back so there’s much more reciprocity and there’s much more agency on the part of the person in need. This might be why the Torah focuses so heavily on loans as a means of financial support as opposed to simply giving people money. There is an underlying spiritual dynamic that loans addresses, that tzedakah is not as successful at addressing, as important as it is.

Elana: You know what’s so interesting though? You’re, you’re making me realize two things. First of all, your point about tzedakah not being, giving people money, I’m realizing the way that tzedakah is used in the Chumash, in the Torah is, it means righteousness. It means doing justice. It means systemic, right? Meaning it it, it means doing the right thing. And we’ll get back to that. 

But you’re helping me understand that sometimes even, we’ll, we’ll take something that’s like a big idea, like systemic righteousness and we’ll try to narrow it into tzedakah. Give this 10% of your—give, give 10% of your earnings and you’re done. Right? Like, and we’ll get back to that. 

But the other thing you’re making me realize is it’s so powerful, that Rabbinic Judaism expresses—when the Torah says, “im kesef tilveh at ami,” right, which sounds like it’s saying, “if you lend money,” and then it says, okay, don’t lend it on interest. The rabbis interpret “im kesef tilveh at ami” as—the “im” there is not “if.” It’s a requirement, it’s a commandment. So what’s the commandment? The commandment is to loan someone money. 

And then it keeps saying, we know you’re not gonna want to, right? We know, right? In Devarim we have, “lo tiametz et levavecha,” don’t be hardhearted. “patoch tiftach,” open your hands. We’re not telling you open your hands to give. Sometimes it’s easier to open your hands to give a gift. Sometimes it’s harder to open your hands to give a loan. Treat the other person as your equal and say, I’m trusting you to pay me back. That actually—it takes a certain degree of horizontal equality and trust in a different way. 

David: I think that’s probably why there’s no, there, there’s no requirement to make loans anonymous, right? We all know that anonymous giving is a, is, is one of the best ways to give tzedakah because it avoids the embarrassment of, of direct transfer from one person to another and it avoids the person who’s transferring the money from feeling superior. So it’s much better to do anonymous giving.

But that’s never said about loans, because loans are much more an exchange between equals. Okay, it’s not exactly equal. By the way that, that, that verse from, Devarim that you, that you quoted, that is the verse that many people, including the sages, associate with tzedakah. But if you read that verse, number one, the dynamic of spiritual and the material combining is right there with the heart and the hand, right? Not only don’t close your hand, but don’t close your heart. Make sure that you are open-hearted and not just open-handed.

But then it doesn’t say open your hand so that you can give to the person. It says, “ki patoach tiftah at yadcha lo, ve-he’avet ta’avitenu,” lend that person “dai machsoro asher yechsar lo,” whatever they’re lacking. So even in the place where most people are looking at giving in the Torah, it’s not giving a gift; it’s giving a loan. 

The Torah’s really relentless in its insistence that this is the way that we should be treating one another. We should be making sure that people have resources and we should be trying to do it in a way that respects their dignity to the maximum. 

You spoke about prevention a little bit in your opener, and I wanna say that loans are actually not a great tool for people who are in deep poverty because they can’t afford to repay a loan. So a loan is much more for people who are on the edge and need some strengthening, and it’s going to prevent them from falling further down.

In fact, the Ramban, when he compares lending to tzedakah, says that lending is better because by the time a person gets to, they’ve already gotten to a place where they have to be asking people for money, if you lend them money, you can prevent that from happening, and that’s what’s at the top of the famous ladder of tzedakah, is trying to prevent people from getting into poverty in the first place. 

Elana: Do you see people dipping like that in their lives coming for a loan to you? Meaning to Hebrew Free Loan, for example, and then they succeed and they move on—meaning that little dip, have you seen that, you see that working? 

David: We do see it all the time. And also there is a recent report put out by the Weinberg Foundation and the Jewish Funders Network about Jewish poverty in America. And one of the things that they found was that many Jews are dipping in and out of poverty and what they call episodic poverty. There’s not so much chronic or generational poverty in the American Jewish community, but you do have a lot of families living paycheck to paycheck. And if one thing goes wrong and they don’t have a good way to solve that thing, then it snowballs and they’re all of a sudden below the poverty line. 

There are many, many things that we can do to try to prevent people from getting there. It is much more expensive to solve the problem of somebody who has been evicted than it is to keep them in their housing. So not only is it much better for them and much less disruptive and humiliating for them to be able to stay in their housing, but for society we, we benefit because people should have decent housing, but also it’s much less expensive to keep someone housed than it is to try to solve a problem once their family is living on the street. 

Elana: No, episodic poverty, that is a, that’s a very powerful term. I, I, I’m just, as somebody who’s outside and who cares, that’s a very powerful term and it actually helps me understand what a, like a loan-based approach to tzedakah is, is trying to help, which group of people it’s trying to help. Yeah. Can we get back to tzedek? Can we get back to like tzedakah in the biblical sense? Can we get back to righteousness as a whole? Justice as a whole?

David: Sure.

Elana: Even loans and even Hebrew Free Loan Society, you know, you’re doing this on a, on, on a bigger scale. Even loans are, you know, person to person. When we, when we think more systemically of, of, of trying to make a difference. What, what do you, you know, what principles, what Jewish principles do you see at play? Because I understand the individual giving the gift. I understand the individual giving the loan, but talk to me about the bigger principles that emerge from Torah, really. 

David: The closest you’re gonna get to systemic approaches to poverty in the Torah is the nationwide cancellation of debt every seven years that is talked about in Sefer Devarim, and the massive redistribution of land back to the original owners that happens every 50 years at Yovel, which is talked about in Sefer Vayikra. 

These are two hard resets that happen when the economy working as it normally does, is going to result in some misdistribution or some lopsided distribution. And when it gets so bad that people are alienated from their homesteads and they don’t have a way of supporting themselves, or they’ve sunk so deep in debt that they’re likely not gonna get out of it, the Torah says we need a hard reset.

But the sages kind of did away with the cancellation of debt through prozbul, so they canceled the cancellation of debt.

Elana: In the show notes, we’ll put an explanation of prozbul in terms of the cancellation of debt, just so that for the good of time. But yes.

David: Okay. And then it’s been a couple of millennia since anybody observed the Yovel. So what are we left with, if we’re looking for Jewish principles about systemic approaches to poverty? 

And I, I’ll, I’ll just offer this. I don’t, I don’t think the Torah has one on one policy prescriptions for sure what to do in modern 21st century economies. But I will say that there is a line in Psalms, “ashrei maskil el dal,” happy is the person who considers the poor. I think the Torah really wants us to consider poverty, to be a moral emergency and to push us to think about what to do about it and not to avoid it. 

And so the Midrash takes this verse and notes, “ashrei maskil el dal”—it doesn’t say “ashrei noten el dal,” it doesn’t say, happy is the person who gives to the poor. No, there’s a step before that. You have to actually look and see what’s going on. You have to care to notice and pay attention. 

And that’s what’s happening with those pachim ketanim, the, those little ceramic dishes at the, that you mentioned at the beginning. People are noticing that, yeah, okay, maybe, you know, people can do without that. But actually there are a lot of people who can’t do without that. And if you don’t see them, then that’s, that’s the first misstep. And we need to correct that by being the people who see poverty. And once we see it, know we have to do something about it. 

Elana: By the way, it’s possible that the way we do things now in our tithing, sort of our 10%, that’s our, you know, as my family grew up, we would call it ma’aser, right? Our tithing. In some ways, that is trying to systemically engage us with the problem of poverty. It’s if every year. Once you tally your earnings, you have to give 10% away. It, it’s pushing you to actually take a look at what’s going on around you. So hopefully people internalize that. 

Can I ask you one more question? ‘Cause I see that our time is coming to an end. I’m so curious. Free loans? No, uh, no—I always wanna say ribit, meaning the Hebrew for interest. No interest. Beautiful. Is… Are there any dilemmas in that?

David: Yeah, I, I mean, I talk all the time to people in New York City who are in the world of finance, and it’s about 30 seconds into a conversation about what I do, where they are telling me that it would just be much more effective and you could cover much more ground if you charge interest, that this is, you know, obvious to them—

Elana: Like low interest, I assume. But interest. 

David: Okay. Lowish interest, right? But then you can tap capital markets because you could charge, you know, 6% and you could borrow money at 4%. And, and, and that would allow you to just massively increase the number of loans that you’re giving. 

And, and, and that is not wrong. That is a correct observation, but it is also an observation that puts scale and effectiveness at the very tippy top of how we should be thinking about how we’re addressing these problems.

And I really do think that there is something very powerful in the messaging of this community is going to make financial resources available to its members who are struggling. And we are not going to charge them for the privilege of borrowing. We are gonna be there as an act of compassion and solidarity. This is not a slightly less expensive commercial bank. This is something, this is a statement that we’re making about what we should do for one another. 

Now, people will say, well, that’s lovely messaging, David, but don’t you wanna reach more people? And then I will point to the fact that if you build in interest into the model, even low low interest, let’s say you’re gonna charge 6% interest, which is relatively low. Subprime credit card could be 25, 30% interest for a year. So, so 5% interest sounds like a great deal, right? 

But once you build that into the system, what happens when the economic shifts and your cost of capital goes up? So then you have to, you’ve built it into the system, then you have to start charging 8% and 10% interest. There are non-profit micro finance organizations in the United States that make loans to lower income small business owners, they charge around 16%. Once you’ve gotten up to that, like you are already imposing a, a financial hardship on the borrower. 

It’s a better deal than they can get otherwise, but it is not the message that I think that we wanna send, that the market cannot provide a solution for everything. Markets are great, but they don’t solve everything, and sometimes society has to step in and say, we’re gonna do something different. We’re gonna do something that isn’t exactly based on the principles of the market because the market is not solving this problem. 

Elana: What I’m coming away with from this conversation, many things, the integrated, spiritual and financial, the sense of prevention as opposed to once somebody’s already down, the ability to look somebody in the eye and say, I trust you to pay me back. Right? The idea of, you know, market versus what are you actually saying to the person who’s in front of you. 

But I think the biggest thing that I am walking away with, it’s just this notion of episodic poverty. I, I think it’s not something that I think about. It’s not something that I realized, and to be honest, when I read Tazriah Metzorah, and from now on, when I see a conversation in the Torah about a house that has scale disease that’s going to be torn down, what I’m actually gonna see is, oh my goodness, this person is now living at the edge, and the hope is that they’re gonna be able to come back, but how do we help them while they’re at the edge from falling off a cliff? 

And, and to know that yes, it’s true when it comes to scale disease, we blame the person whose house it is, right? We do. We blame the person. And I’m wondering, in our lives when we see people who are impoverished, is our first move to sort of go to blame and distance, or are there other ways to think about this? And I think you’ve given us many. So thank you very, very much for this, David. Any last word?

David: Elana, it was a pleasure. I, I don’t have a last word except to thank you for letting me say a little bit about the mitzvah of interest free lending, which the Torah seems to care a lot about and repeat many times, but for some, for some reason in, in the Jewish community, it, it doesn’t get enough play, and so I appreciate the opportunity to give people a chance to think about why they might want to involve themselves more in lending to people as a way of addressing material need, and if they, you know, don’t care to do that themselves directly, they can always go to their local Hebrew Free Loan Society. There are about 40 of them around the United States. There’s one in, in Israel Ogen, which we have a great relationship with. And I hope that people have opportunities to fulfill this mitzvah. 

Elana: We’re gonna put a link in the show notes. Thank you very much.