Now that [Maimonides] father was dead, he was faced with the question of a livelihood. The normal nad natural solution would habe been the rabbinate. A rabbi's income was certain. According to Maimonides, both individuals and communities were expected to donate specific sums, and attempts were made to convince them that they should maintain scholars, students, and others who studies the Torah and whose trade was the Torah. But it went against Maimonides's grain to use the Torah as a spade. The notion that the communities were obligated to subsidize scholars in their studies was something he regarded as an "error, for neither the Torah nor the books of the later sages have any guiding principle, any indication to support this."

No one could demonstrate that the great teachers of the past "demanded money from people; they did not collect money for respected and distinguished academies, or for the exiles, or for their judges, or for those men who propagated the Torah, or for any important scholar or for anyone else among the people. Had Hillel asked for help, they would have filled his house with gold and precious stones, but he did not wish to take anything, he nourished himself from the proceeds of his work; he scorned donations for the sake of Torah.

"It is said that a heavenly voice proclaimed about Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa: 'The whole world is fed because of the virtuousness of my son Hanina, and my son Hanina is satisfied with a measure of carob from one Friday to the next, and he never asks anything of anyone.' Karna was a judge in Palestine and a water carrier, and when litigants appeared before him, he said to them: 'Hire someone to carry the water for me or replace what I lose through the trial, then I will decide your case.' The Jews of that time were not so hardhearted as not to practice charity, and we do not find that even one of those poor teachers rebuked his contemporaries for not giving him wealth. But the poor rabbis were pious, they believed in truth, they believed in God and the teachings of Moses, through which man can partake of the afterlife; that is why they did not presume to exact money from people, because they realized that accepting money would desecrate the Name of God, and people might think that the Torah was like any other trade for earning a living. The man who believed this makes the Word of God despicable. Truly, people err when they dare to strike truth in the face and act against the clear and simple statements in the Bible."

— Maimonides av Abraham Joshua Heschel (Sida 63 - 64)