When it comes to prayer, the Talmud teaches that God wants our heart (Sanhedrin 106b). But when we do tzedakah, it seems that that God wants both our hands and our hearts working together to respond to people in need.

These parts of ourselves don't always cooperate. Sometimes we'll see an opportunity to make a difference, and we'll shut our hearts or keep our hands from reaching out. Sometimes the hands go to work, but our heart's not really in it.

Perhaps that is the reason that the Rabbis chose this verse from the Torah as the main source for the obligation to give tzedakah:

If there is a needy person among you, one of your kinsmen in any of your settlements in the land that Adonai your God is giving to you, do not harden your heart and shut your hand against your needy kinsman. Rather, you must open your hand and lend him sufficient for what he needs. [Deuteronomy 15:7-8]

This verse clearly gets our whole body into the act. When confronted with someone in need of tzedakah, we are warned not to harden our heart and shut our hand. Note well the allusion to Pharaoh in Egypt. When you ignore a person in need of tzedakah, you harden your heart to their situation. Well, the most famous hard-hearted person in the Torah also happens to be the number one oppressor of the Jewish people. Don't be like him!

Instead, we are commanded to keep our hearts open, which leads us to open our hands as well. Or if it's not a causal relationship the verse intends (open heart leads to open hands), then perhaps the point is that true tzedakah involves both our hearts and our hands – spirit and action together. As the rabbis put it: ayn tzedakah mishtalemet eleh l'fi ha-hesed sheh-bah: Tzedakah is perfected according to the compassion with which we give it (Sukkah 49b).

But if the heart and the hand are such equal partners in tzedakah, then why does the end of our passage focus just on the giving (you must open your hand…) – the heart seems to drop out altogether!

After all, how hard would it have been the verse to add three little words (one in Hebrew!) so it would read: Rather, you must open your hand and your heart and lend him sufficient for what he needs? Not only would this be good religious instruction, it would also make for a symmetric verse, something so common in biblical Hebrew style that it's noticeable when a verse is not symmetric.

And perhaps that's the point. We are supposed to notice that the open heart is there at the beginning, but gone at the end. It's as if the Torah is teaching us that tzedakah needs both our intention and our action, our love and our deeds, our hearts and our hands. But on days when our hearts are just not in it, the urgency of people's need is no less, so at the end of the day (and the end of the verse) we must still give, even if the emotion is missing.

The ideal we strive for is to be the kind of people who give our hearts, our time and our concern along with our tzedakah money. Of course, we're not ideal every day, and the Torah urges us to make sure that striving for our own ideals doesn't come at the expense of people in need.

The bottom line? We should keep giving, even on days when our hearts feel closed. The needs are simply too urgent for us to wait until we are in a compassionate mood. And who knows? Maybe the causal arrow works the other direction as well. Opening our hands for tzedakah and acting the way good people act, may just have the effect of opening our hearts.

Rabbi David Rosenn is the founder and Executive Director of AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps, a year-long domestic Jewish Peace Corps program, with sites in New York, Chicago, New Orleans and Washington, DC. For more information and applications, visit www.avodah.net.