Giving and Service: Charity as a Religious Duty

Judaism calls giving to the poor tzedakah, righteousness, an obligation rather than mere kindness, while Islam commands both obligatory zakat and voluntary sadaqah. The entry shows how widely traditions share the duty and why they hold that it purifies the giver of greed.

Tithing sets aside a tenth of income or produce, rooted in the Hebrew Bible where the tithe went to the Levites, the temple and the needy. Christianity carried it forward as a standard of proportional giving and stewardship.

Sadaqah is Islamic giving that is not owed: it has no threshold, no rate and no due date, and the hadith literature counts even removing an obstacle from the road as sadaqah. Its sub-category sadaqah jariyah, such as a well or a school, keeps benefiting others after the giver has died.

Khums is a fifth part, assigned in Quran 8:41, and Twelver Shia jurisprudence applies it at twenty per cent to annual surplus income. Half goes to the marja and half to sayyids, so the levy funds an independent clerical establishment, a contrast with the voluntary giving of the previous stop.

Seva is selfless service performed without expectation of reward, honored especially in Sikhism and Hinduism. It may be labor, giving of means or sharing of skills, and the entry says it dissolves ego and builds a community of equality and mutual care.

Langar is the free kitchen of every gurdwara, where anyone is fed seated in a line on the floor. Guru Amar Das made eating there a condition of seeing him, so the seating itself argued against caste precedence, and volunteers cook and serve it as seva.

Ministering assigns each member of a Latter Day Saint congregation to look after specific households. Since the 2018 reorganisation, which replaced home teaching and visiting teaching, the instruction is to find out what a household needs and do that.

A goshala shelters cattle for life, including cows no longer productive for milk, and is maintained by Hindu and Jain religious trusts and lay charitable societies. The entry grounds it in reverence for cows and the Jain principle of ahimsa, extending charitable care beyond human beings.