In a 2010 lecture on Leviticus 25, Dennis Prager said: Jews feeling responsibility for a fellow Jew has carried on to the modern era.
For a Jew to go on welfare, even during the depression, was unheard of. It was considered an embarrassment to the Jewish community if a Jew went on the dole.
You’d think that Jews would be the most conservative group in America, and they are for themselves. I say to my fellow Jews who are liberal — why don’t you preach what you practice? Jews practice conservative lives but they advocate liberal lives.
Jews created free loan societies. You got a loan from the Jewish community and there was no interest. Jews were known for taking care of their own.
I wish every community took care of itself and thought it was an embarrassment to go on public welfare.
The underclass doesn’t care [about taking welfare]. Like the freeloaders at my father’s synagogue, they complain the most.
Do you want to create an angry person? Give them something for nothing.
The chapter never speaks of charity nor does it ever appeal to feelings of compassion. There are no claims about love or forgiveness. This is an unemotional chapter.
My motto is the bigger the state, the smaller the citizen.
Just as the communist manifesto is that nobody will have property, the Torah’s view is that everybody should have property.
Chaim Amalek emails: Prager has got it dead wrong, at least with respect to welfare program participation among contemporary Jewish communities and also, one suspects, lots more. Here in New York State, the communities with the highest rate of welfare program participation are not Negro ghettos or Mexican villages, they are Jewish, and more exactly, they are communities of Toi-reh-Yidden who live off the goyim’s generosity.
From Wikipedia:
“Kiryas Joel The great majority of its residents are Hasidic Jews who strictly observe the Torah and its commandments, and belong to the worldwide Satmar Hasidic dynasty.
Most of the village’s residents speak Yiddish as their first language. The village has the youngest median age (15.0) of any population center of over 5,000 residents in the United States.[1] Residents of Kiryas Joel, like those of other Haredi Jewish communities, typically have large families. Kiryas Joel is the place in the United States with the highest percentage of people who reported Hungarian ancestry, as 18.9% of the population reported Hungarian ancestry in 2000.[2]According to 2008 census figures, the village has the highest poverty rate in the nation. More than two-thirds of residents live below the federal poverty line and 40% receive food stamps”.
Kiryas Yoel, a Hasidic town in upper New York state, has now earned the dubious distinction of being the fastest growing place in the region as well as the poorest city in America and the one with the greatest number of food stamp recipients according to the US Census.
