Berachos 6b: When a person needs to accept charity from others, his face changes colors like a krum. What is a krum? When Rav Dimi came, he said: There is a certain bird that lives in coastal cities, called a krum, which displays a rainbow effect in the sunlight.
ברכות ו ע”ב: כיון שנצטרך אדם לבריות ־ פניו משתנות ככרום, שנאמר: כרם זלת לבני אדם. מאי כרום? ־ כי אתא רב דימי אמר: עוף אחד יש בכרכי הים וכרום שמו, וכיון שחמה זורחת מתהפך לכמה גוונין.
Every time Rabbi Chaim Kreiswirth traveled to Eretz Yisroel, he would bring along large sums of money that he had raised, and would distribute tzedaka to the needy. Once he was sitting and handing out money to one person after another, when his son Reb Dov asked him, “Doesn’t the Gemara say explicitly that when a person needs to accept charity, his face turns colors like a bird in the sunlight? Yet here in Yerushalayim the takers don’t seem troubled at all.” Rav Kreiswirth answered immediately with a smile, “That’s a Bavli, not a Yerushalmi.”
Source: Mayim Chaim, p. 41
[Rabbi Shmuel Nussbaum, author of the biography Mayim Chaim, raised a question. The Yerushalmi (Orlah 6a, quoted in Tosafos on Kiddushin 36b) makes a similar statement: that one who is supported by another person is embarrassed to look him in the face. (This fact of human nature is used as a device to remember that when a live grapevine is buried in the ground and then sprouts up again, as long as the new sapling’s leaves point away from the old vine, it is still deriving its nourishment from the old one, so it is not considered a new tree, and is therefore permitted. But once its leaves point to the old vine, it is growing on its own, so it is forbidden for three years.)
But there is a difference between the Bavli and the Yerushalmi. The Yerushalmi only says that one can’t look his benefactor in the face, but Rav Kreiswirth wasn’t the benefactor. He was only a middleman, distributing funds he had collected from others. The Bavli, on the other hand, says that even in such a case, the recipient is embarrassed to have to live off tzedaka, and his face turns colors.]
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