Rav Hisda was one of the leading sages of Babylonian Jewry in the third century, and in his prime he was also one of the wealthiest. One day, late in life, after his fortunes had collapsed, he was heard groaning — not from physical pain but from the memory of what his wealth had once been able to accomplish.
When Hisda was rich, he used to give away robes by the hundreds. His ovens baked bread not for his household but for free distribution to the poor. His house had two entrances. At the doorpost between them hung an open purse — full of coins. Anyone who walked in one door could take what they needed from the purse and walk out the other door without saying a word. There was no gatekeeper, no ledger, no test of worthiness. The shame of asking had been removed entirely.
Now, impoverished, Hisda sat remembering those ovens and that purse. His groan was not for his own lost comfort — he had Torah, and that was enough. It was for the beggars who once ate from his bread and could no longer find it at his door.
Gaster's Exempla of the Rabbis (1924, No. 178) preserves this glimpse as a portrait of tzedakah at its highest register. Hisda's charity was structural, anonymous, and continuous — not an act of giving but an architecture of giving. And when the architecture crumbled, the true mourning came not from the giver but for the receivers who had depended on it.