When actor Ashton Kutcher prepared to play the role of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, he went to extreme lengths to inhabit the tech icon’s mind, including adopting Jobs’ famous, strict fruitarian diet, an extreme regimen consisting almost exclusively of raw fruits, nuts, and seeds obtained without harming the plant. However, just days before filming began, Kutcher was hospitalized with severe pancreatic failure, a medical crisis triggered by the intense metabolic strain of eating nothing but raw fruit. In explaining an obscure name that appears in the Torah’s lengthy genealogical passages in Parshas Noach, Midrash Rabbah anticipates the risks of extreme diets. The name of one of Yaktan’s sons, Chatzarmaves, is based on this son living in a region of abject poverty. According to the Midrash, Chatzarmaves is a contraction of chatzir (grass) and maves (death). Unlike an affluent contemporary fruitarian who voluntarily forgoes more nourishing food, the people in Chatzarmaves’s region were so poor that they had nothing to eat besides grass. It was also the only material they could use to make clothing. The resulting malnutrition and exposure to the elements impaired their health to such an extent that they expected to die each day. The fact that his parents or contemporaries called him Chatzarmaves in recognition of that scarcity implies that others enjoyed more affluent lifestyles. Evidently, even in the earliest Biblical era, extreme poverty existed alongside greater wealth, and this might be the first recorded instance of such a contrast.
Regarding Chatzarmaves, the Midrash offers no additional context about the paupers he lived with or his relationship with them, leaving his name ambiguous. Did his sympathizers call him by this name, alluding to the plight of the poor because he suffered the same financial strains and symbolized their struggles? It could be, however, that his critics labeled him with this epithet because, in his area, he remained affluent while the indigent suffered and he failed to support them. Either way, the message is clear: we must live up to our responsibility to help others.
In the 20th century, new political ideologies claimed that centralized planning or government intervention can eradicate poverty. On the one hand, the Torah appears to disagree. It declares in the Book of Devarim that poverty will always exist: “…for there will never cease to be needy ones in the land.” On the other hand, if it commands us to assist the poor and alleviate their plight, as the same verse continues, “which is why I command you: open your hand to the poor and needy kin in your land,” it believes there is a solution. Rabbi Samson Rafael Hirsch (1808 – 1888) goes so far as to say that, by fulfilling this commandment properly, we can, as a society, fully eradicate poverty, at least in the Land that lives by His Law. Rabbi Hirsch observes that the Torah does not say that poverty will always exist in the Land of Israel, but in “the land” in general, meaning in the world outside it. In the Jewish land, the Torah commands us to respond to poverty with generosity, especially by lending without interest. “In your land,” he writes, “in the land of God’s Law…the Law is to help level these natural disparities. Every poor brother is to find a “brother” in his more affluent kinsman; in this land every poor and needy individual belongs to you….in a Jewish community that is aware of its duty, individual poverty and misery should be only a passing phase, and with God’s assistance, be changed to a happy existence on Earth, commensurate with the dignity of a human being.” Although his Torah commentary is far from a political platform, Rabbi Hirsch seems to argue that, according to the Torah, government is not responsible for eradicating poverty, but that each person, and each community together, must observe the Torah’s mandate to take responsibility for his fellow Jew.
When we live aware of those who need our help, and as individuals and as a community we do not outsource our responsibilities to others, we do not let the significance of the unusual name Chatzarmaves slip away.