In Emor, God defines the restrictions related to the sexuality and marriage of priests. He then describes some holidays, including Passover, Shabbat, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot, as well as the 49-day omer period between the second night of Passover and Shavuot. He tells the Israelites to bring food offerings to the priests for those seven weeks.

What I believe is its most significant verse, however is the one Robert read. It repeats a verse from Kedoshim, last week’s Parashat. “And when you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I the Lord am your God.”

That’s a good example, I think, of how the Torah uses faith as a seedbed for Tzedakah.

The verse says that no matter how hard we work to bring in the harvest -- to succeed in what we do – the success does not belong entirely to us and, at the very moment when we have a sense of entitled ownership because of our labors, we should keep the less fortunate in mind. So, our profit carries a measure of social responsibility. We are forbidden to harvest our crops down to the last stalk because there are some taxes to be withheld.

According to the Mishnah, there are three types of withholdings: gleanings dropped while harvesting; gleanings inadvertently left behind in the field; and at least one-sixtieth of the field is not to be harvested at all, but left standing for the poor. That’s how the rabbis made the ethical imperative of this commandment concrete. There are two characteristics of the directive: First, because compliance is a matter of choice, mutual responsibility is possible only if everyone acquiesces.

Second, the commandment includes leaving some of what you earned for the stranger -- the alien, the foreigner -- who may be even more vulnerable than your needy residents. So, strictly speaking, charity does not begin at home.

Rabbi Sforno, in the 16th century, underscored the context in which this verse occurs. He noted it comes after the requirement that the Israelites bring bread made from the new harvest to the Tabernacle as a token of thanksgiving to God.

The Torah advises the farmer while he is self-satisfied to remember that God cares as much for those who glean as for those who reap and that the well-off are merely divine instruments for alleviating human suffering.

When I read this verse I thought about our obligations to others and that the conscience of most people causes them to do, at most, the minimum, and that in a secular age such as this one, government must become the moral arbiter of society.

Michael Goldstein