The logic of this reading works as follows: God is actually the one who is obligated to provide for the poor. The destitute are his creatures, whom he brought into the world. When a person provides charity to the poor, he is in fact paying God’s debt. Charity is, therefore, like lending to God. The charity giver, by paying God’s debt, transforms his relationship to God from a debtor to a lender. In that act of giving, the giver reverses the relationship of dependence between himself and God, since the one who owes is considered a slave to the lender. Charity is thus described as enslaving God, shifting from a creditor to a debtor.
This reversal relates to the trauma of sacrifice in a complex fashion. As was explained above, sacrifice—korban—assumes that a person offers up a gift that might be rejected. It maintains an essential, hierarchical gap between giving and receiving. But in giving to the poor, no such gap exists. The poor person stretching forth his hand is not typically in a position to exercise his power of refusal; he must keep his hand outstretched to accept the offer of assistance. Since God is the one who has to feed the poor, however, the hand of the poor stands for God’s hand. Charity is an actual gift to God that he couldn’t refuse, because it is mediated through the hand of the desperate. A person binds God—his superior—to the gift cycle precisely by giving to a dependent—the poor.
This Talmudic position doesn’t aim at providing an incentive for charity; if this were the case, the poor might become a mere instrument in “forcing” God into a debtor status. The statement rather provides a description of what actually happens in giving; it doesn’t prescribe the aim of giving or the motivation for it. When someone gives out of compassion for the plight of the poor, he is entering a gift cycle that reverses the structure of the offering. Charity is preferred over sacrifice because it erases the abyss between giving and receiving without recourse to ritual, which minimizes individualization. What is more, this way of giving reverses the hierarchical order implied in the offering of a sacrifice; charity reverses God’s position from a lender to a borrower.
Moshe Halbertal – On Sacrifice p.61
The Sea Is Not Full 