Q&A: Sukkah 25a, “And because of four things the property of householders is handed over to the government”
Sukkah 25a, “And because of four things the property of householders is handed over to the government”
Question
To the honorable Rabbi Michael Abraham, may he live long and well,
It says in Sukkah 25a: “And because of four things the property of householders is handed over to the government: for keeping paid promissory notes, for lending with interest, for having the power to protest and not protesting, and for pledging charity publicly and not giving it.”
And in Maharsha, he explains that “those who pledge charity” means householders, the leaders of the community, who pledge a large amount of charity and do not give all of it, saying that this was not really their intention, but only to get others to donate properly.
But this requires clarification, from what we rule in Beit Yosef (Yoreh De’ah sec. 259), that a charity collector may say that the charity fund is empty even when that is not the case, in order to encourage donations. So what is the difference between that and the statement of community leaders who promise a high amount in order to stir the public, yet are punished for this by having their property handed over to the government? In both cases there seems to be deception.
And I, in my poverty, thought to resolve it as follows: those who pledge charity publicly deceive people and do not give, whereas charity collectors, based on their assessment of the needs, say that there is not enough in the charity fund for the needs of the poor, and that is not deception. Rather, it is simply not revealing all of their activity to the public. They also do not personally benefit from the money they collect. Moreover, they usually give the public an accounting at the end of the year. But those who pledge charity publicly present themselves as givers and do not give, and they derive personal benefit from that.
With faithful regards,
Answer
According to your explanation, this is in fact deception. However, I have previously explained that deception differs from lying in that with deception, the falsehood consists in withholding information that the other party is entitled to know. That is unlike ordinary lying, where the falsehood is not about information the other party is entitled to know. If so, it requires clarification whether here the public is entitled to know how much charity they actually gave. Perhaps it is similar to stealing gratitude (Rashi in Hullin in the passage about deception), since the public owes them gratitude for having given a lot when in fact they did not—though one could distinguish between the cases. And really this is a bit difficult, because the Talmud here did not mention the issue of deception at all. Furthermore, according to this, saying that the charity fund is empty would also be deception, since some people gave more charity because of it.
But in my humble opinion, the question is flawed from the outset. The fact that the property of householders is handed over to the government does not necessarily mean that there is a halakhic prohibition here. Perhaps it is only a moral failing. And in that case, there is no need at all to reconcile the halakhic rulings. Indeed, there may be no halakhic prohibition involved, but there is a moral defect, and therefore their property is handed over to the government.