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The two key terms are Tzedakah (tzedek- justice) and mishpat (judgement). The word mishpat means the judgment given by the shofet (judge); hence the word can mean justice, norm, ordinance, legal right, law. The word tzedakah may be rendered by "righteousness." While legality and righteousness are not identical, they must always coincide, the second being reflected in the first.
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"Above all, the prophets reminded us of the moral state of a people: Few are guilty, but all are responsible."
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By the Middle Ages, community responsibility encompassed every aspect of life. The Jewish community regulated market prices so that the poor could purchase food and other basic commodities at cost. Wayfarers were issued tickets, good for meals and lodging at homes of members of the community, who took turns in offering hospitality. Both these practices anticipated "meal tickets" and modern food stamp plans. Some Jewish communities even established "rent control," directing that the poor be given housing at rates they could afford.
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Many people tend to see the worlds of the spiritual and the mundane as intrinsically conflictual; they see ritual and ethics as distinct and unrelated. The first, they suggest, is a matter of our quest for transcendence, our search for spiritual fulfillment, while the second ensures that the "nonspiritual" world in which we live is safe, habitable, and cordial.
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"The Jewish religion values continuity. Our traditions have been passed down from generation to generation for the last 35 centuries... We should be passing unspoiled wilderness and viable populations of every single species to future generations." [From COEJL website, http://www.coejl.org/learn/for_position.php]
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The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And, the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. Because of indifference one dies before one actually dies.
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We name this calling into question of my spontaneity by the presence of the other ethics. The strangeness of the Other, his irreducibility to the I to my thoughts and my possession, is precisely accomplished as a calling into question of my spontaneity, ethics.
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In question is the other man who descends from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But do not become alarmed. We are not in the presence of a racist idea here. I have it from an eminent master: each time Israel is mentioned in the Talmud one is certainly free to understand by it a particular ethnic group which is fulfilling an incomparable destiny.
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The Torah itself is exposed to danger because being itself is nothing but violence, and nothing can be more exposed to violence than the Torah, which says no to it. The Law essentially dwells in the fragile human conscience which protects it badly and where it runs every risk. Those who accept this Law also go from one danger to the next. The story of Haman irritated by Mordecai attests to this danger. But this irresistible weight of being can be shaken only by this incautious conscience.
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The epiphany of the Absolutely Other is a face by which the Other Challenges and commends me through his nakedness, through his destitution. He challenges me from his humility and from his height…The absolutely Other is the human Other. And the putting into question of the Same by the Other is a summons to respond…Hence, to be I signifies not being able to escape this responsibility. 
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