How Much Is Enough When Giving to the Poor

The Torah says to give. It does not say how much. That silence is precisely what drew the rabbis in.

Deuteronomy 15:10 commands: "Give to him." The Hebrew is emphatic, a doubled construction that indicates intensity, but the commandment names no quantity. The sages of the second century CE, working through the legal implications of Deuteronomy in the tannaitic midrash known as Sifrei Devarim, treated this open-endedness not as a freedom but as a problem. A commandment without a minimum is a commandment without teeth. How do you know when you have fulfilled it? How do you know when you have done enough?

The Weight That Made It Real

Sifrei Devarim records a specific answer: the minimum gift must weigh five selaim in Judean measure, which equals ten in Galilean measure. The measurement matters because weights varied by region in ancient Israel, and a law requiring a minimum amount had to specify which standard applied. The Judean sela was heavier than the Galilean one. By anchoring the minimum to the Judean weight, the tradition chose the stricter standard: when defining how much you must give the poor, err toward more rather than less.

Five selaim was a meaningful sum, roughly equivalent to the redemption price of a firstborn son, or several days' wages for a laborer. It was not a token. But it was also not a crushing burden on a person of average means. The rabbis were calibrating between two failures: giving so little that the poor person was humiliated rather than helped, and demanding so much that potential givers were frightened away from giving at all.

Shammai and the Ethics of Measurable Generosity

Shammai, the great first-century CE legal authority whose school debated nearly every halakhic question with the school of Hillel, is linked in the broader rabbinic tradition with a stringency about precision. The tradition associates Shammai with the principle that vague obligations tend to become empty ones, that the most merciful thing you can do for a commandment is define it concretely so that real people can actually fulfill it. Shammai's famous formulation, "make your Torah study fixed" (Avot 1:15), is an instance of this logic: an unfixed practice does not happen.

The charity minimum follows this reasoning. An obligation without a floor invites rationalization. People tell themselves they will give more later, when circumstances improve. The rabbis set a floor not to limit generosity but to prevent the paralysis that comes from open-ended demand. Once you know the minimum, you can exceed it. Without the minimum, you may never start.

Is There a Maximum?

The question of a maximum is handled differently, and the answer is more surprising. The Talmud in tractate Ketubot (50a) records a tradition that one should not give away more than a fifth of one's income to charity. The concern is not stinginess. The concern is that excessive giving can reduce a person to poverty, which creates a new burden on the community. The person who gives away everything noble as it sounds, has in effect transferred his own poverty to someone else's doorstep.

The aggadic tradition grapples with this ceiling by offering examples in both directions: figures praised for extraordinary generosity, and figures warned that giving beyond one's means is its own form of disorder. The community that functions well needs people who are stable, not martyred. Charity is a system, not just an act.

What Happens When the Need Is Greater Than the Amount

The deeper problem, and the one that Sifrei Devarim circles without quite resolving, is what happens when you give the minimum and it is not enough. A person comes to you starving, and your five selaim will not sustain them. You have technically fulfilled the commandment. Have you fulfilled its spirit?

The later tradition, drawing on the broader Deuteronomy passage, insists that the commandment is not just about the amount but about the manner. Deuteronomy 15:7-8 says, "You shall not harden your heart and you shall not close your fist." The language is physical, anatomical. The open hand is the image the Torah returns to. Giving the correct amount with a clenched jaw and a turned face violates the spirit of the law even when it satisfies its letter.

The tradition of Elijah's gift to a poor man captures this in narrative form: the prophet who feeds a widow with miraculous oil is performing the same basic act as the householder who meets the five-sela minimum, but at a different register of attention. The floor of charity is where the law starts. The ceiling is, in practice, the height of your heart.