Give Anyway, Even When You Think They Don't Deserve It

The human instinct to give conditionally is not a moral failure. It is a practical survival mechanism. You give more readily when your own household is flourishing. You give more readily when the person asking seems genuinely unable to help themselves. You give more readily when you believe your generosity will make a difference. These are not ignoble impulses. They are the ordinary calculus of finite resources.

Deuteronomy 14:14 says something different. Sifrei Devarim, the tannaitic commentary on Deuteronomy compiled in Roman Palestine during the second century CE, confronts a reading of the verse that would restrict the obligation to give to situations where the giver's own household has been blessed because of the person in need. If my prosperity is somehow connected to your presence, then I owe you. If it isn't, perhaps I don't. The Sifrei demolishes this reading with a single phrase: "in any event." You give regardless. Period. No conditions attached.

The Exact Wording That Closes Every Escape

The Hebrew of the commandment uses a doubled construction, common throughout Deuteronomy to indicate intensity and unconditional obligation: "bestow, you shall bestow upon him." Doubled verbs in biblical Hebrew are not mere rhetorical emphasis. They are structural: the repetition indicates that the obligation holds across all possible scenarios, including the scenarios where you might most reasonably expect to be exempted. Bestow when your household is thriving. Bestow when it is not. Bestow when the person seems worthy. Bestow when they don't. Bestow in any event.

The Sifrei reads this construction carefully. The first occurrence addresses the situation where giving seems natural and easy. The second addresses all the situations where it does not. The Torah's decision to use the double construction rather than simply commanding giving once, suggests that the legislators anticipated resistance and built the response to that resistance into the commandment's grammar.

Why Does the Torah Need to Command Something So Basic?

Because gratitude, as history shows, is not automatic. The commandment to give "in any event" would not need to exist if human beings naturally gave without conditions. It exists because the default is conditional, and the Torah is overriding the default. The 1,913 texts of the Ginzberg collection, drawing on rabbinic legend from across a millennium of tradition, preserve a striking interpretation of Joseph's years in Potiphar's household. The Torah says that everything Potiphar owned prospered because of Joseph. This is the exact situation the restricted reading of Deuteronomy would use to define an obligation: you owe generosity to someone whose presence has demonstrably benefited you. Potiphar's house flourished because of Joseph. If the obligation to give depended on that kind of demonstrated connection, Potiphar would have owed Joseph an enormous debt.

The story, of course, goes differently. Joseph ends up in prison on false charges while Potiphar prospers. The midrashic tradition does not resolve this by saying that Potiphar eventually made restitution. It is left unresolved, a deliberate dissonance between the Torah's command and the story's outcome. The Sifrei's insistence that giving is unconditional, not contingent on demonstrated benefit to the giver, is partly a response to stories like Joseph's: the deserving person is frequently not the one who receives generously from those they have benefited.

Eve and the First Gift Refused

The 2,921 texts of Midrash Rabbah preserve a tradition about Eve that cuts to the heart of conditional giving. When God provides the fruit of the garden freely, with one restriction, the serpent's argument to Eve is precisely conditional: you will not die, you will gain wisdom, you will become like God. The serpent frames the forbidden fruit as something you deserve because of what you are capable of becoming. The logic is transactional: your potential justifies the taking.

The midrashic tradition reads Eve's error not primarily as disobedience but as the acceptance of conditionality in a situation that required unconditional trust. She evaluated what she deserved. She calculated. She found herself, in her own estimation, deserving. And that estimation, however sincere, was the beginning of the problem. The Sifrei's unconditional giving commandment moves in the opposite direction: remove the calculation. Give because the person in front of you is a human being in need. Do not evaluate what they deserve. The giving is prior to the evaluation.

David's Approach to Obligation

The Psalms attributed to David in the midrash-aggadah tradition return repeatedly to the theme of giving without calculation. Psalm 41, attributed to David, opens: "Happy is the one who considers the poor; the Lord will deliver him in the day of trouble." The word translated as "considers" in Hebrew is maskil, often used for wisdom or careful thought. But the kind of thinking David describes is not evaluation of the poor person's worthiness. It is attentiveness to their situation, an active noticing of need followed by a response to what has been noticed.

David's own life, in the rabbinic reading, exemplifies this. He was generous to those who served him, even when they could not reciprocate. He was generous to Mephibosheth, Jonathan's disabled son, giving him a permanent place at the royal table out of loyalty to a dead friend, with no expectation of return. The Sifrei's "in any event" is David's practice described in legal terms: the obligation to give does not arise from what you will get back. It arises from the presence of someone who needs.