Give a Lot of Tzedakah

I can think of two classics from way back. One is “Ish Chassid,” which was composed by Ali Scharf when he was a teenager and released on the 1975 JEP II album in combination with English lyrics.

The zemer that we sing on Motzaei Shabbos tells the story of a great talmid chacham who is penniless, with no clothes or food for his children, although his wife tried for years to support the family. So the Torah scholar goes out to look for a job and meets a man who offers him 800,000 golden coins if he’ll build him a palace. It’s a job that would normally take decades, and after the first day on the job, the talmid chacham sits down and cries, realizing how many years he won’t be able to learn Torah because of this tremendous job. Just then, Eliyahu Hanavi appears to him and calls in an army of angels to build the palace. By the next morning, the palace is miraculously built, and he goes home as a wealthy man, able to continue his Torah learning in comfort. I don’t know where that palace is today, but I’m sure it would make a great tourist attraction…

The JEP song is an adaptation of the beloved zemer, with English words written back then by Rabbi Mordechai Finkelman and sung by Rabbi Berel Leiner and Rivie Schwebel — one of Rivie’s very first solos. The song begins with a knock on the door (“One night a man knocked on my door, at a glance I could see he was poor…”), followed by lyrics whose message I still remember 45 years later when I give tzedakah: “The money will last for a while, but I’ll always remember your smile.” As important as the money is, equally important is the smile with which it’s given.

The other classic tzedakah song is one we all grew up with, Uncle Moishy’s “Give a Little Tzedakah,” written by Zale Newman on the first Uncle Moishy album and probably played over a million times, much to the chagrin of grownups everywhere.