A philosopher once stood before Rabbi Akiba with a question designed to unsettle him. "If your God loves the poor," the philosopher asked, "why does He not support them Himself? Why leave them hungry at the gates of other people's houses?"
Akiba's answer was three words long in its core logic. "So that we may be saved by them." He expanded: "God allows the poor to remain among us so that the opportunities for doing good may never fail." Poverty is not evidence that God has forgotten the poor. It is the doorway through which the rest of us are invited to become righteous.
The rabbis surrounding that exchange built an entire theology of tzedakah around similar teachings. Loud prayer is not a requirement of devotion. Quiet prayer with the heart turned to heaven is worth more. Charity outweighs all other deeds. One who gives charity in secret, the sages said, is greater than Moses. They found scriptural proof in a small juxtaposition. Moses once said, "I was afraid of the anger" of God (Deuteronomy 9:19). And Solomon said, "A gift given in secret pacifies anger" (Proverbs 21:14). Read the verses together and the secret gift becomes a shield even Moses did not know how to hold.
A miser is compared to an idolater. Charity is greater than sacrifices. "The beneficent soul shall be made fat," Proverbs promised (Proverbs 11:25), and the rabbis added: the one who gives, gains. The counterintuitive accounting runs through the whole of Jewish musar, moral instruction. You do not become poor by giving. You become rich. And the poor, far from being the weak point in God's plan, are its center.