The highest degree of tzedakah, most famously articulated by Maimonides, is to help someone achieve self-sufficiency by means of a gift, an interest-free loan, or a partnership. Of these, only loans preserve the dignity of the recipient while also offering the possibility of enormous philanthropic leverage. That is why Central and Eastern European Jewish communities organized the so-called Gemilus Chesed, or free loan society, which our forebears then transplanted to America.

New York’s Hebrew Free Loan Society is a UJA-Federation of New York affiliate agency founded in 1892. Adapting our time-honored tool to the needs of today’s economically vulnerable, the Society’s programs now include retraining and microenterprise loans for Russian-speaking immigrants and a microenterprise program for the Hasidic community, whose economic options are constrained by limited secular education.

The shortage of decent affordable housing is one of the most pressing needs of low-income families across the country. For two decades, the federal government has dramatically cut key programs designed to produce, maintain, and subsidize housing to serve poor families.

HUD’s Section 202 Supportive Housing Program for the Elderly is this nation’s principal housing program serving older adults. In the late 1970s Congress provided funding for the development nationwide of over 21,000 Section 202 units annually; Congress’ most recent 2008 appropriation for the program will fund 3,400 units. There are an estimated 200,000 older adults on waiting lists for Section 202 housing units in New York alone. The other major federal program used by the low-income elderly is the Section 8 voucher program. Under the voucher program, individuals with a voucher find a private sector apartment and pay a portion of the rent. Only 25 percent of people nationwide who qualify for Section 8 vouchers actually get them. As with Section 202, waiting lists are enormous and years long.

Elderly immigrants from the Former Soviet Union arriving in the U.S. after retirement are almost uniformly poor. While many of them were professionals — doctors, engineers, scientists, teachers — their only current source of income is SSI (which pays a maximum of $750 a month) supplemented by food stamps and Medicaid. Thus, accessing Section 202 housing or a Section 8 voucher, both of which limit what beneficiaries pay for housing to about 30 percent of cash income, is their only hope for economic independence.

The Society’s Immigrant Basic Needs loans make it possible for modest numbers of elderly immigrants on the Section 8 waiting list who are lucky enough to be offered a voucher to take advantage of the program. To use a Section 8 voucher, recipients invariably must relocate to a new apartment. Our loans of up to $5,000 pay for moving expenses, a modicum of new furniture, first month’s security and other costs related to such a move. Thus, immigrant retirees supported by or living with their adult children can escape the humiliation of financial dependency.

In today’s economic crisis, our Immigrant Basic Needs loans also provide critical housing assistance to nonelderly immigrant families who had achieved economic stability. While not a panacea and certainly not a solution for families who now face a structural imbalance between high fixed costs and sharply reduced incomes, small loans are proving quite helpful to families who lose one of two incomes, experience a substantial reduction in self-employment revenue, or a cutback in hours. Borrowers are coming to us for loans to pay for the cost of moving to a cheaper apartment, to pay for several months of back rent once they are back on their feet, or to simply pay the rent for several months until their situation stabilizes.

Most readers of the Bible will tell you that it was the first woman who fatally led the first man to eat tempting, forbidden fruit, awakening a sudden acute consciousness of their naked bodies. Of course, first an erect — talking, walking — snake tempted Eve, a snake that loses its erection as a punishment for making her false promises, ever after vulnerable to the regretful woman’s heel. Had woman not made him think with his snake, that classically disowned and disembodied part, Adam might have enjoyed Eden longer, in serene fellowship with his God. Gender trouble begins in Paradise.

The body and its parts come to life in stories where meanings and judgments attached to the body and sexuality are ever re-invented. Some ideas that are familiar in academic forums seem counterintuitive in popular contexts, and one such idea is that everything has a history, including our material bodies. The body in which you live is formed as much — if not more so — by culture as by nature. Biblical foundation stories — not so much what they say, but how we have apprehended them over time — have been formative of the Jewish self-image, even as the refashioning of the Jewish body throughout history governs how we interpret Bible stories.

When Jacob puts on animal skins to pretend to be his hairy twin Esau, and further pretends that the stew his mama cooked up from a domesticated kid is the wild game that the outdoorsman Esau was actually hunting, Jacob — obedient to his ambitious mother — inherits the patriarchy by passing as a man. Just as Jacob passes as a man, Joseph, Moses, and Esther also “pass” as foreign nobility, initiating a long tradition of anxiety and confusion about Jewish passing.

The Bible also suggests rather paradoxical constructions of women’s bodies, including barren women with children and seductresses without desire. The matriarchs, the prophet Samuel’s mother, Hannah, and Samson’s mother are barren. Each miraculously conceives a son whose privileged destiny entails personal sacrifice from her. Although “barren mother” may be a contradiction in terms, longing and loss are part of this Jewish maternal profile.

Other biblical women achieve political aims by seduction. Tamar fools Judah into impregnating her; Yael lures the enemy general Sisera into her tent, gives him a skin of milk when he asks for water (you can imagine what the Midrash does with that detail), and then instead of being penetrated by him, she penetrates him, driving a tent pin through his temple. Esther touches the royal scepter and saves her people (no wonder some Israeli journalists dubbed Monica Lewinsky “Queen Esther”), and Samson, who can tear a lion with his bare hands and single-handedly defeat an army, becomes metaphorically impotent (losing his eyesight, hair, and strength) when Delilah whines. These lusty women actually seek power, each proving the rule that the bedroom is the battlefield where men always lose.

The intellectual boy with body and virility issues (Woody Allen), the controlling, self-sacrificing Jewish mother, and the acquisitive, sensuous but selfish “Jewish American Princess,” all descend from patterns of representation in Jewish sacred stories. Or, perhaps, we find these stereotypes embedded in our sacred stories because we have become so identified with these prejudices. Much in the intervening years helped codify Jewish physical and sexual distinction, where in a world of enforced binaries, Jews often occupied an intermediate place sexually and racially.

In 17th-century Spain, physicians documented that Jewish men menstruated. In 19thcentury Germany, the sickly Jew became a familiar type, despite all statistical evidence that Jews were extraordinarily healthy as a group. Sociology and sexology identified adaptability (passing) as a Jewish trait that accounted for Jewish men being sexually feminine and susceptible to white collar crimes (cheats, like Jacob). The Nazis taught Jewish physiognomy, and in America, Jews had not always been precisely racially white, a shift that correlated with their changed class profile. In the yishuv and at the birth of the State of Israel, the muscular Maccabean Jew was deliberately and aggressively substituted for the frail, studious, and victimized shtetl Jew. The Israeli body and the Jewish soul persist in a dynamic of shape shifting.

Though the Jewish body is a much studied concept, of course we know that there is no such thing as a Jewish body. In my own extended family, we are big and small; ebony and blond; darkand blue-eyed; loud and meek, of diverse ethnicities and nationalities. Yet, we refer to Jewish body parts: famously, a Jewish nose, and Lilith Magazine once devoted a good part of an issue to how Jewish women feel about their “Jewish hair.” It may sound nostalgic to refer to “a Jewish soul” but “a Yiddishe neshama,” nevertheless calls forth a soul fed on the chicken soup of mitzvot; “a Yiddishe kopf,” a “Jewish head,” once imputed a special kind of Jewish business sense: quick, clever, and a little devious.

We may know better, but we buy into Jewish physical and sexual distinctiveness. I sometimes ask an audience to think of what the word “masculinity” conjures up for them. What are our cultural associations with “femininity”? I then ask what happens when we qualify these words with the adjective “Jewish”: “Jewish masculinity”? “Jewish femininity”? For many people, the adjective “Jewish” upends the meanings of masculinity or femininity.

Persistent and often contradictory constructions of the Jewish body have evolved from patterns in our earliest stories. Although these perceptions are illusions, they are situated at the borders of reality and invade with powerful, imperialist armies. The consequences are felt by Jewish bodies in every generation.

Apassage from Midrash Tanhuma makes a compelling case for understanding the essence of Jewish community through the lens of one of our tradition’s central teachings — that human beings are created in the image of God, b’tzelem Elokim: The tabernacle is equal to the entire world; [and it is] also equal to the creation of a human being which is itself a smaller version of the world. What does this mean? When the Holy One Blessed Be God created His world, God created it just like a woman creates her baby — starting from the belly button and everything grows from here and there on four sides; so too did the Holy One Blessed Be God create the world from the foundation stone of the Temple first, and from this emerged the world. And why is it called the foundation stone? Because from it the Holy One began to create His world.

As described in the Bible, the mishkan, or tabernacle, is akin to a theater-in-the-round, exposed on all sides to the community that lives amongst it. Part of the resonance and complexity of the tabernacle that Tanhuma teases out is that the root of the Hebrew word for tabernacle, mishkan, shares its meaning not only with the word for God’s presence — shekhina — but also with that of the word for neighbor — shakhen. Quite literally, three key semantic elements of the Hebrew root s-kh-n enliven the complicated prototype for Jewish community and holiness grounding the Israelites in the desert.

Consider the mishkan as the world’s first Jewish Community Center, a JCC: Jewish by virtue of a covenant expressed in the hovering shekhina, God’s presence; Community in the tabernacle’s being fully exposed and open to every engaged shakhen, or neighbor, in the Israelite camp; and Center since the tabernacle serves as a hub — whether the community is stationary or in transit — for all life occurring around it.

If all of the Tanakh’s stories were unraveled into individual narrative threads, one of the easiest to follow would be the one describing the journey of humankind from creation in the image of God toward concretization of a divine mission — what the Book of Exodus 19:6 proclaims to be a “nation of priests.” From the individual callings and altars of the great figures of the Book of Genesis to the formalization of the mishkan in the desert to the establishment of the Temple — of which the mishkan is ground zero — the Bible is a story of how a people who are created with the raw stuff of the Divine understand their priestly mission, a communal expression of who the nation is at its core. Jewish history after the destruction of the Second Temple is in some sense a chain of attempts to embody the priestly calling in the institutions and systems of the nation when the priesthood can no longer play this central role.

Institutions truly reflective of the communities they serve can only meet their fullest potential when all participating, or not yet participating, see reflections of their own most intimate selves — body and being — within these institutions. Yet at the same time, in a manner paradoxical as great teachings must be, this reflection takes place in the literal center of the neighborhood, in an intensely public manner. A fully evolved Jewish community, modeled on the tabernacle, grounds itself in a vital circle with ineffable holy work at its center. In community, people see themselves simultaneously as individuals and as part of a whole; most important, each face that has gathered is empowered to be a reflection of the image of God.

A final thought: As the central holy place in what might be called the first Jewish community, the shared model of the human body and the tabernacle, created b’tzelem Elokim, ensures that both entities transcend concepts of being and permanence — always built and rebuilt and on the move. The tabernacle, constructed with basic physical materials, traveled with the Israelites modularly during the time in the desert. The raw materials of the human body replace themselves completely every seven years. Circulation of blood and water and the formation of bone and flesh are constant. Yet somehow, until death, the essence of the body as defined by the human name we give it remains the same. The body and the tabernacle are paradigmatic holy entities defined by the tension of being not only fully transient but also fixed and unique. Tradition hints that the ineffable complexity of this common tension reflects a thread of what it means to be created b’tzelem Elokim: in one place and all places, formed and formless, communal and individual — and embodying the image of God in every form.