A while ago, in an aside that became a cause celebre of its own, I mentioned that there were some advantages to having a non-Jewish doctor in terms of Shabbat issues. At the time, I stressed (although not enough) that there were other very good reasons to use a Jewish doctor if possible, but have neglected to discuss those. Having begun the process of educating myself about them, here are my preliminary findings:

Rabbi Willig pointed me in the direction of a Sifra that says that Jews should conduct their business (buying and selling) with other Jews. The question is how much halakhic weight that statement carries, and how it should be applied in practice. R. Uziel, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel in the 1940’s, believed that this derasha constituted a full fledged obligation. He was asked whether hiring Jewish workers was a matter of tsedaqa, the highest level of charity being to support a fellow Jew, and responded that it was more than that. Further, he said, the standard of what to pay a Jewish worker was not whatever was the accepted wage at the time, but to be sure to pay a livable wage for that time and place.

R. Yitzhak Yaakov Weiss, author of Responsa Minhat Yitshaq and for many years the head of the rabbinical court of the Eidah haChareidis in Jerusalem, took a sharply different view. The question he was dealing with was whether it was permissible to buy from a chain store (whose owners were non-Jewish) when there were smaller, Jewishly-owned stores that had to charge higher prices because they did not benefit from the economies of scale that the chain store did.

He first noted that the codifications of Jewish law— Rambam, Tur, and Shulhan Arukh— do not report this requirement, and that the original statement of the Midrash sounds more like an etsah tovah, good advice, than a well-codified hiyyuv. In fact, he suggests that it actually stems only from the mitsvah of ve-hehezaqta bo, that we have an obligation to insure that our fellow Jews find their economic way in the world before they are so impoverished that they need charity.

Having dispensed with the blanket obligation to use Jews, he nevertheless rules that if there is only a small differencel in price between the Jew and the non-Jew’s prices, we would be obligated to patronize the Jewish establishment. He derives this from a series of Talmudic discussions about when we are allowed to do other kinds of business with non-Jews rather than Jews. In one instance, there is a discussion as to whether we have to lend money to Jews (without interest) when we could lend to non-Jews at interest. The conclusion, there as here, is that if we can do so without significant loss, we are required to deal with Jews. Once the loss becomes significant, however, he permits patronizing the non-Jewish establishment.

What is significant? Although he cites an opinion that anything over a perutah (a few cents) is significant, the more convincing standard is one-sixth, that if the Jew’s prices are one-sixth higher than the non-Jew’s, we would have the right to patronize the non-Jewish establishment. Since the original verse that led to this derasha was about fraud, where overcharging by a sixth is considered fraud, it makes sense to apply that standard here as well.

In addition, however, Dayyan Weiss suggests that if the question is one of economic survival for the smaller stores, Jews should patronize those stores as an expression of tsedaqqah. Aside from a general concern with supporting Jews, we should be particularly careful to safeguard a Jew’s livelihood before he loses it, so that where a store’s economic future is in jeopardy we might go above the general standard, as an expression of tsedaqqah (I wonder if he would have permitted counting all the extra money spent in that way as part of ma`aser kesafim). As I write these words, I openly acknowledge that I have not been as careful about this in the past as I should be, and will attempt to be more cognizant of this issue in the future.

Daf Yomi