Julie Salamon
Rambam's Ladder: A Meditation on Generosity
and Why It Is Necessary to Give.
(New York, Workman Publishing, 2003)

In the two and a half years since September 11, 2001, a lot of ink has been spilled exploring why people sometimes do evil things. Comparatively little attention has been paid to the other side of the coin. Why are people good? Why do people act altruistically, giving of their wealth and of their time to help other people, often those who are strangers to them? Is there a way to inculcate these traits in ourselves and in others?

Moses the son of Maimon, usually known in the West by the Greek form of his name -- Maimonides -- and as the Rambam (Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon) by traditional Jews, was one of the most important Jewish thinkers who ever lived. He was born in Moslem Spain in 1135, spent time in North Africa and Israel and wound up in Cairo as both leader of the Jewish community and physician to the Sultan. In his Guide for the Perplexed Maimonides sought to reconcile Judaism with the dominant Aristotelian thought of his era. But Maimonides' most signifi-cant work (in terms of the impact it continues to have on Jewish life today) was his 14-volume codification of Jewish practice known as the Mishneh Torah.

Rambam tried to provide a complete guide to living a Jewish life, so his work includes rules and principles for the giving of charity. Included in these principles is Maimonides' well-known "Ladder of Charity," where he ranks different types of giving. Highest on his scale is the person who provides someone else with a loan, enters into a partnership, or gives someone a job, so that the recipient becomes self-sufficient and no longer needs to rely on charity. The ladder then moves down through other rungs -- giving anonymously, giving in a way that causes shame to the recipient, giving less than one ought to but doing so cheerfully, all the way down to giving grudgingly.

Julie Salamon is a culture writer for the New York Times, a resident of Lower Manhattan, and the daughter of Holocaust survivors. In the days and weeks after September 11th, while American troops were searching for terrorists in Afghanistan, she began a "quest for goodness" in her own city and neigh-borhood. And she found herself coming back to "Rambam's Ladder" for the assurance it gave her that, as she put it, "reasonableness is always complex."

Salamon's book is not easy to characterize. It is emphatically not an exposition of or commentary on Maimonides, though she does a fair bit of both. Rather, she uses Maimonides' levels of charity as a springboard for her own thoughts on the subject, and for her discussions with both practitioners and recipients of charity.

While Salamon uses the "ladder" as the organizing principle of her book, she actually turns it on its head. Maimonides began with the highest level -- helping another achieve self-sufficiency -- and worked his way down to the lowest -- giving grudgingly and only when asked. This reflects, accord-ing to Salamon, his understanding that we start with what is ideal but, as realists, are willing to settle for less than the ideal. Salamon, however, begins her book with the lowest level and works her way up, reflecting her own quest for self-improvement.

Salamon's book is not a "feel good" read, though many of the anecdotes and interviews are inspiring. She is also willing to ask the hard questions: How do we help people become self-reliant when they are resistant to making the changes in their own lives that would be necessary? Should we spend our time and money helping specific individuals, or would we be better off working for societal change so that no one is homeless, jobless, hungry, and without medical care? Is corporate giving really charity, or is it just another form of public relations? Like a master teacher, she does not seek so much to answer these questions for us as to prod us to think them through for ourselves.

Rambam's Ladder exemplifies one of the messages of the ICJS: Judaism and Christianity both have something distinc-tive to contribute to the world, and Jews and Christians ought to be open to both sharing with and learning from each other. This is not at all a "Jewish book" in the narrow sense. Salamon applies wisdom gained from a Jewish text and from her distinc-tively Jewish life experience. But most of the people we meet in the book are not Jewish, nor is her intended audience a specifically Jewish one. Both Moses Maimonides and Julie Sala-mon can help guide us as we search for ways to heal our society and our world.