Giving in Love: Marc Gafni: Part Sixteen

posted by Gafni assistant

In Jerusalem, my home, the streets are filled with beggars, men and women who for all sorts of different reasons make their living by asking passers-by to “share the wealth.” In almost any other city in the world, these people would be deemed panhandlers and consigned to the bottom of the social ladder. While I cannot yet tell you that these people are Jerusalem’s elite, there is a strong sense that they are holy people. We invite them to our weddings, we wait on their blessings. We talk to them like they are family. For they are.

The holy beggars of Jerusalem, city of lovers, are an essential part of her spiritual fabric. One has the sense that the beggar is doing the passerby a favor. After all, their open hand is affording us the opportunity to give. The ancients taught that when the human being is possessed of a desire to give, the universe will give him wealth so he can fulfill that desire. Such spiritual physics turns our common understanding of the nature of reality on its head.

For many Western tourists coming to Jerusalem, the beggar scene is hard to bear. Remember, in the West we are taught from an early age to get a good deal. Getting a good deal is quite a different spiritual mantra than randomly giving out money on the city streets.

Often I am asked by tourists who come to my lectures, “But do we have to give money to people who look like fakes?” An understandable question to be sure, yet, it is still sourced in that possessive part of us that is pained by the thought of parting with something that “belongs to me.”

I usually give the startled tourist four different answers. “First, you should know that every time you pass a person whose hand is outstretched and you ignore them, something closes in your heart. The love-channels in your being begin to clog up. Not only will it become more and more difficult for you to give love out, it will also become increasingly difficult for you to receive love back.”

There is a teaching that if you have a hundred different coins, you should give them to a hundred different people. Even though the money will have little real life impact on the recipient’s economic reality, the very act of giving to every hand you meet could have real life impact on your reality.

Even small change makes for change. Simply put, giving is at least as much for the giver as it is for the receiver. “The rich need the poor more than the poor need the rich. Unfortunately, neither is conscious of it.”

marc gafni
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