Biblically speaking, inner prayer and outward compassion are inseparable. The Hebrew term for personal righteousness is tsedaqah, and the Hebrew term for outward justice is identical—tsedaqah. That’s crucial because it implies that the historic biblical understanding of devotion to God was this: to be righteous is to care for the poor, and to care for the poor is to be righteous, which is why prophets like Isaiah and Amos got so worked up about people who were inwardly devout but outwardly disengaged. In the ancient Hebrew understanding of righteousness, a community of pious, private spiritual
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