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I am trying to understand R Heinemann’s position. Granted, it is an off-hand remark during a lecture, but he seems to be pretty confident in this. His two arguments are: (1) non-Jewish motivation is not tzedoka but self-interest (2) government is not baal tzedoka but uses taxes. Note that he is seemingly talking about getting tzedoka in general, not for learning.

First, Shulchan Aruch (YD 254-255) says it is osur to get tzedoka from non-Jews in public – unless he can be assisted by Jewish or private non-Jewish funds. Not sure whether SNAP etc are “public”. Is getting assistance public? maybe not, especially as there are now electronic cards rather than visible food stamps, for those who remember. Still, S’A does not hang to the word “tzedoka”. YD 255 is way more expansive – one should roll in pain (tzaar) rather than depend (itztarech) on human beings (briyut), this expression repeated twice. This does not seem to allow parsing motivation of givers, whether they are Jews, idol worshippers or bnei Noach, whether it is a private donor or law-based system. Not sure if even Yang’s $10K passes this.

YD 256 follows that saying that those who deceive “haam” will later need actual charity (lashon Rambam). Now, here the words are tzedoka and “am”, so we are talking about Jewish tzedoka. Would this mean to permit “getting around” rules for public assistance? Would need a reference for that. Also, several commentaries of YD 254 mention “hillul Hashem”, and it is no doubt that even rare cases of Jews accused or arrested lead to that.

To summarize, “there are those who allow”
1) non-Jewish assistance for those who need it and
2) getting community support for Torah learning (shevet Levi)

so even if you are meikil on both of these, you still need (3) to equate “those who need it” with “support of Torah learning”. Vaad position above asks for Jewish public to support learning, not the non-Jewish, or for non-religious community in Israel.

So, there are 3 difficult steps here, each requiring a lot of justifications and kulos. Would you eat hot dogs that have so many levels of kulos?