Almsgiving

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Almsgiving is the giving of money, food, or goods to the poor performed as a religious obligation rather than ordinary kindness — an act framed, in the traditions that prize it, as worship in its own right. The English word descends through Old English ælmesse from the Greek eleēmosynē, “mercy” or “pity,” and the etymology preserves the link the practice everywhere insists on: charity as the outward form of an inward disposition toward the world.

The discipline appears, in distinct vocabularies, across the major religions, and the differences are as telling as the resemblance. In Islam zakāt is one of the five pillars, a fixed levy — conventionally a fortieth of certain accumulated wealth — owed annually and reckoned not as donation but as a due; the Arabic root carries the sense of purification, and the giving is held to cleanse what remains. Judaism speaks of tzedakah, from the root for righteousness or justice, so that to give to the poor is to do what is right rather than to be generous; medieval authorities, Maimonides among them, ranked its degrees, placing anonymous gift and the enabling of self-sufficiency above public largesse. Buddhism and the older Indian traditions know dāna, the open hand, where the merit accrues to the giver and the gift to a monk or renunciant is the paradigm case. Christianity inherited the Jewish emphasis and made almsgiving, with prayer and fasting, one of the three classic works of penance.

What the traditions report of the act diverges sharply on one point: whom it is for. Some texts present alms as primarily relief of the poor; others present it as primarily the giver’s own purification, expiation, or accumulation of merit, with the recipient’s benefit almost incidental to the transaction with God. The two readings coexist within single traditions and are not always reconciled. Scholars of late antiquity have traced how the early Christian elevation of the poor as privileged recipients — and of wealth as something to be redistributed for the soul’s sake — reshaped the ancient world’s older ideal of civic euergetism, the benefaction aimed at the city and its citizens rather than at the destitute.

Almsgiving sits close to sacrifice and to ascetic renunciation without collapsing into either: it is a giving-up that is also a giving-to, a transfer that the traditions read simultaneously as social act and as transaction with the divine. The practice is among the most widely shared of religious obligations, and among the most variously explained. The hand opens everywhere; what the opening is taken to accomplish differs from one tradition to the next.

→ In the library: Hujwīrī — Kashf al-Mahjúb, ch. XX: On Alms (al-zakāt) (1911 tr.)

→ Related: Agape · Asceticism · Sacrifice Ritual · Eid Al Fitr · Yajna