Sacrifice of Charity

In both Christian and Jewish theology, charity was one of the forms of post-sacrificial sacrifice. Halbertal (On Sacrifice, 40-1) observes that this is not merely a matter of substitution but of fulfillment.

Sacrifice, he points out, always exists under the possibility of failure. A worshiper brings his gift, but God may not receive it. The gap between offering and acceptance is filled with anxiety and fear, the possibility that God might have reason to refuse to welcome the worshiper into the circle of exchange.

Charity closes that gap. To give to the poor is to give to God, and Halbertal quotes some Jewish sources that suggest that the charitable person actually puts God into his debt, reversing the normal lender-borrower relations. God is supposed to take care of the poor, so the charitable pay God’s debts, and put God in their own debt. This thought doesn’t appear in the New Testament, but Jesus does say that clothing, feeding, caring for the “least of these” is equivalent to doing the same for Himself. Here there is no gap between gift and reception; because the hand of the poor is the hand of God, a “sacrifice” given into the hand of the poor is accepted.

Charity is thus not some second-rate sacrifice, but preferable to sacrifice “because it erases the abyss between giving and receiving without recourse to ritual, which minimizes individuation” (41). Charity is the fulfillment of sacrifice, “guaranteeing” that the offerer is received into the circle of exchange. Charity thus fulfills the purpose of sacrifice between than sacrifice does.