Q&A: The Half-Shekel and Gifts to the Poor
The Half-Shekel and Gifts to the Poor
Question
I understand that the half-shekel nowadays is mainly symbolic, since there is no Tabernacle. If so, wouldn’t it make sense simply to donate a modern half-shekel coin, and why is there such obsessive involvement with the exact amount? And on a related note, is gifts to the poor more of a symbolic commandment too, or is there really a point in giving, on that very day, for meal needs to two poor people, an amount not less than… etc., etc.?
Answer
Ask the obsessive people. It has great value as clarification, for increasing Torah and understanding it. And of course, once you’re clarifying it, there is value in making the commemoration resemble the original. But there’s a big distance between that and obsession.
Regarding gifts to the poor, I don’t understand the question. There is Jewish law, and it is binding today as well. Why not?
To the best of my knowledge, the dispute between the Ashkenazi custom (to donate three half-coins of the currency used in that country; Orach Chayim 694:1) and the Sephardi custom (to donate the exact amount) depends on the question whether the Temple commemoration is a reenactment of what was practiced in the Temple—where they would give the higher of the two amounts (Maimonides, Shekalim 1:5)—and that is the Sephardi custom. Whereas the Ashkenazi custom is either to make merely a general commemoration of the Temple (see the notes of Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik on Sukkah 41a, who framed the conceptual inquiry between these two possibilities in several laws), or that the custom is only because of “to advance their shekels before his shekels,” and therefore it is not really subject to the formal parameters of the half-shekel (see Yalkut Yosef, Festivals, in “The Laws of Purim Night and Day,” notes 9, 11, 13, and 14).
Happy Adar!