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(35) And if your brother becomes poor, and
his means fail; then you should uphold him: as a stranger and a settler he should live with you
והחזקת בו You should uphold him — Do not leave him by himself so that he comes down in the world until he finally falls altogether when it will be difficult to give him a lift, but uphold him from the very moment of the failure of his means. To what may this (the differences between whether you assist him at once or whether you wait with your help till he has come down in the world) be compared? To an excessive load on the back of a donkey. So long as it is still on the donkey’s back, one person is enough to take hold of it (the load) and to keep it (the donkey) up, as soon as it has fallen to the ground not even five persons are able to set it on its legs (Sifra, Behar, Section 5 1).
R’ Jonathan Sacks
The Dignity of Difference p. 30
David Hume noted that our sense o empathy diminishes as we move outward from the members of our
family to our neighbors, our society and the world. Traditionally, our sense of involvement with the fate
of others has been in inverse proportion to the distance separating us and them. What has changed is
that television and the Internet have effectively abolished distance. They have brought images of
suffering in far off lands into our immediate experience. Our sense of compassion for the victims of
poverty, war, and famine, runs ahead of our capacity to act. Our moral sense is simultaneously activated
and frustrated. We feel that something should be done, but what, how, and by whom?
(11) Some time after that, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his kinsfolk and witnessed their labors. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his kinsmen.
