Just Food

For more information on the Hazon Food Conference, the best thing to do is click here or here. These links rock and include many of the food conference materials themselves. Although you will not feel the joy of the Asilomar facilities, the energy of the group or the wonderful weather, the learning is still top notch!!

One of the people I reference below is Andrew Kimbrell who advocates for Food Safety on a legislative level. He's a lawyer and pretty much rocks my world! Learn more about him here

It was he who retold a story of feeling frustrated after losing a big case and complaining about the loss to his brother. His brothwr said, Did you fight as hard as you could? Did you fight hard? Then you win anyway. You have it all wrong, you don't have to win to succeed-to succeed you have to stay faithful to your truth.

Post conference and everything I learned about the lack of government safety regulations around genetically modified foods and the dangers associated with eating them, I am going organic. (As best as I can given my budget).

Below is a draft of a sermon I am scrapping-but one which encapsulates many of my post Hazon Conference thoughts. If you read this and are planning on attending my senior sermon on Feb 2-well, you might see some seriously overlapping material.

Over this past Winter break, I took three short, but powerful trips. I feel like I went around the world and back and I want to talk about them with all of you today because I am trying to make sense of all I have seen and done. My travels have got me thinking alot lately about rivers...

Once upon a time, there was a village located on the edge of a river. One day, the villagers were just going about their daily lives and their daily business when one villager noticed that there was a baby drowning in the river. The villager, of course, ran over and pulled the baby out of the river. This is probably a familiar tale to many of us. You know what happens next. Another baby comes down the river and the villager pulls this one out too. And then another one comes and suddenly our ordinary person going about their ordinary life is suddenly pulling drownign babies out of the river.

Recently, I heard the claim, Tzedkah is opposite of justice. Sometimes, the small acts of tzedakah we try to do bandaid the larger problems of injustice.

For example, My first trip over the break was with the URJ's Mitzvah Corp to New Orleans to pitch in with the Katrina relief efforts this past winter break after all the rivers there overflowed when their levee system failed. Painting a home was an act of tzedkah. By painting Willie and Mrs. Jefferson's 3 story, small, suburban home a beautiful sky-blue color in the shabby Broadmore neighborhood of New Orleans, this group of young Jews applied a much needed bandaid to the wounds of the whole Jefferson family and to the Broadmore naighborhood.

However, this bandaid ultimately masks larger issues of justice such as why, three years later, so much is left to be done? What underlying corruption existed which laid the ground work for the levees to fail in the firast place? How Willie, his four kids and four grandkids will make ends meet without the income from the apartment they used to rent out of the basement level of their home which is now a gutted, moldy, dirt and debris filled space? What is happening to address the system of poverty that makes him so reliant on this income? Why is it so hard for a working family today to make it in this world? Who is looking after the future education of young Willie the third whose thirteenth birthday I helped celebrate with a fresh coat of paint? Who will make sure his life of mediocre and insubstantial education, of scraping to get by, is different from the life his father and grandfather lead?

Painting this home was like pulling a baby out of the water.

However, I ultimately disagree that tzedakah is the opposite of justice. Think of all the Jewish sons who were not fortunate enough to have shifrah and puah as their delivering midwives in Egypt; those babies were thrown in the river to drown and without someone to save them, they perished.

Moses himself was a drowning baby in a river. Thanks to the act of tzedakah performed by the Egyptian princess, he was pulled from the water and saved. Through her tzedakah, not only Moses, but ultimately we as a people were saved. I believe in the power of doing tzedakah, I believe we needed to paint Willie and Mrs. Jefferson's home.

But I do agree, tzedakah alone is not enough.



Back to our story in the village. Another villager comes along and the first asks the second just this question, where are these babies coming from? The second simply shrugs and pulls out another baby. The first says to the now forming crowd of villagers, you keep pulling out these babies, I am going up river to go see what is going on. But this famous fable of the vilager ends here. What happens to our ordinary hero once he goes up stream? What does he do next?

Asking the question alone is not enough either. Further investigation is required

Moses sees the slavery of the Israelite people and he does not just murder each task master oppressing a slave one at time. Although this could have been important acts of tzedakah for each individual enslaved Jew, this response would create an ineffecient system of justice which sees to have some major, inherent flaws. Moses has to ask the question, where are the babies coming from? Why are the Egyptians oppressing the slaves so harshly? Why are the Israelites enslaved in first place? And why is this wrong?

As a child growin up in Pharoh's palace, perhaps he came to know the reasons for the enslavement of the Jewish people illuminated to us, the Torah's reader, by the narrator. Pharoh was (Ex 1 verses). Moses understands Pharoh's rationale for doing what he is doing. And maybe, as a Hebrew son, raised by a Hebrew nurse-maid, his own mother, he also understood the plight of slavery intimately from the other side as well.

Moses has a unique perspective in this respect. Most Egyptians likely took the enslavement of the Hebrews as a given reality. Like hunger and poverty in our own country, we too sort of assume, this is just how it is. But Moses sees it from another point of view because he has intimate knolwedge of this community by being involved in the issues which are part of their lives.

Sometimes we need to ask, where are these babies coming from? My second trip over break was to Monterey California where I spent four days along the waters of the Pacific, perched far out at the end of Monterey Bay on the scenic 17-mile drive on Highway 1 up the west coast. I was there for Hazon's Jewish Food conference. Fresh with blue and white paint still streaking my hair and my clothes, I engaged in study, conversation, seminars and sometimes heated debates around the issues of non-Orthodox kashrut and the connections amongst Jews, ethics and food practices such as labor issues, fair trade, hunger and poverty, and the ethical treatment of people, cows, chickens and the earth? I have walked away from this experience with a commitment to going organic and a head full of why's. Why are farmers so underpaid? How can I help change our eating and agricultural practices to help move from agri-business back towards agri-CULTURE? How come children on school lunch and breakfast programs do not have access to food over the summer and what are they eating? Why is it that our farming bills proctect farm business more than farmers? How do we still have such antiquaited laws around modern technologies of genetically modified foods such that a modified soybean plant is considered a pesticide which is classified as "Generally considered safe" and therefore free and clear of the mandate for reasearch which would find answers to such puzzling questions as, how safe is it REALLY for us to be eating such GMO foods as this?

What are some things we all do which bandaid provide essential bandaids but those same bandaids may only be masking larger problems?

Only after the questions are raised can we begin to do the hard work of figuring out what, what do I do to contribute to this injustice? What can I do to make this stop?

What are the questions we need to be asking today? What are the injustices we see all the time byt have not yet really asked about and therefore have never investigated?

The river story ends with the villager journeying upstream. The fable does not tell us what happens next. But the sacred myth of our people does not. In the Exodus, you all know what happens next.

Moses has already removed himself as a contributing factor to the unjust system of slavery by fleeing Egypt. He returns with his brother Aaron and journeys upstream to speak to Pharoah and see what this river is and if he can stem the flow.

The justice work of freeing the Israelite people from their slavery is tireless, thankless and down right messy. Bottom line, it is tough work.

This work seems to be incredibly hard. In fact, in this week's parasha, Beshelach, it seems as if difficulty of the work in an incarnate form is chasing after the Israelite people. In Exodus 14, The word mitzrayim is repeated 15 times in the 16 verses from Israelites' departure from Egypt until their entrance into the sea. We can almost hear the chant of mitzrayim, mitzrayim, mitrayim cajoling from the text. The people in particular repeatedly says "mitrayim" over and over, most noticeably just moments before being cornered in to the sea. This mantra, mitrayim, mitzrayim, mitzrayim, again and again seems to be the sound of the horse and chariots beating down behind the people. It is as if, not just the Egyptians but the challenge they themselves represent which is running them down. In verses 10 and 17 respectively we are told that the Egyptians noseah (v, 10) travel after the Israelies and yavo, come after (17) them. the language of the text further emphasizes not just that the Egyptians were following after the Israelites, but in fact, chasing them down in verses 8, 9, and 23 when it says, mitzrayim yrdof acharehem-Egypt chased after them.

It is the arduousness of obtaining their freedom that chases them, it is the adversity that compels the Israelite people forward to a free life, to a Jewish life, to a just life.

Yirdof, pursue, tirdof, you will pursue. The Torah text later in Numbers 16:20 says tezedek, tedek tirdof. Justice, justice you will pursue or chase after. In its context in Numbers, the verse is talking about judges need to pursue justice. Reform Judaism, in particular as atomized this verse to apply it to our pursuit of justice in this world. But playing with the grammar of the words, I want to propose another lesson from within this verse highlighted in the context of our story today. Tzedek is a singular masculine noun. Tirdof is a second person singular, masculine imperative verb and the "you" of the command is not explicit. Perhaps tzedek tzedek tirdof is not calling to each of us to pursue justice but to Justice as an entity to pursue each of us.

My third trip of the winter break was to a small town between the Yucatan River and Cancun, Mexico. I went with American Jewish World Service's Rabbinic Student Delegation trip along with two dozen other rabbinic students from five different seminaries including four others from HUC, including Jill Cozen-Harrel and Hannah Goldstein from the New York campus. In Mexico, we did a lot of hard, messy work. We both survived for 10 days as a pluralistic group in a rural, severly impoversihed community, we also helped to turn a dirty forrest into a walking, biking and hiking trail; the new foundation of this village's ecotourism industry. The tiol of building was strenuous and exhausting. And as our energy flagged, it was the challenge of the work that spurred us on, taunting us to slack off and not tend to the task of bringing just wages and a better life to this far off place. We were driven ahead by the clammoring chant of justice justice chasing behind us.



Even after all of Moses' hard work and the incredible tests faced by the Israelite people they find themselves again at the river-an expansive, uncrossable body of water standing between the people and their freedom, standing between life and death. Just getting up stream, just getting to the river's edge is not the end of the journey-it is not enough. Moses still has to CROSS the sea! And not just Moses, but all the people, all their households, the mixed multitudes, all standing at the sea and they ALL have to cross over. This is not only difficult but seemingly impossible. The only way to get this done is by something outrageous, something bold, something magical...Make the sea part! And...the miracle happens, the seas part, the people cross over and they sing and rejoice in their freedom.

The sea parting was seemingly impossible, yet it happened. The work of bringing justice to the world is seemingly impossible, yet it happens too. But how?

At the Hazon Food Conference, I heard Andrew Kimbrel, author and advocate, speak. He taught us his theory of the pilot's dilemma. He recounted a fictional play he had seen about of a WWII fighter pilot who followed orders to bomb villages from high above in the air, easily killing their inhabitants. However, when his plane is shot down, and he is rescued by two specific villagers, and he is subsequently given order to kill them, he is unable to do so when confronting there very same villagers face to face.

Kimbrell said the pilot's inability or ability to do harm was a matter of his distance from his targets. By remaining far away, we are eaily complicit in if not perpetuators of acts of injustice. But from close up, we cannot knowingly do harm to another human being.

The seemingly impossible task of bringing justice to the world may be as simple as crossing over the many seas which divide humanity. We are segregated by social structures, time commitments, competing priorities, and sometimes, just not thinking to consider who else and what else is out there beyond the world we already know. Consider for a moment, the wrongs in the world we remain distant from, unfamiliar with and therefore unconnected to. I used to know little to nothing about the lives of people post Katrina, the challenges facing our nation's small farmers, and the incredible difficulty of creating a viable life in the remote corners of Mexico. But now that I have come close to these people, these thoughts and these ideas, I can not remain an uncaring, ignorant party.

What do you want to know more about? Who are the people, what are the causes that seem so far away that they become impossible to care about and easy to ignore?

Perhaps bridging the distance makes the seemingly possible less overwhelming, and more obtainable.

But it is impossible for each of us to care about everything and I am not suggesting this. Caring about ourselves, the people in our immediate circles, the commitments we have including work, graduate school, internships, placements, practica...is already exhausting. There is only so much we hcan take on, tend to and concern ourselves with. When I was in New Orleans, we met with a panel of several young, Jewish community leaders involved in tending to life in New Orleans after Katrina. One said that the main place to focus was issue of clean up. Another countered by saying, how can we clean up unless we can organize and put some structure to the approach, other wise it would just be chaos. And still a third felt it was impossible to organize a city without a functional, strong and uncompromised mayoral government. The more they talked, the clearer it became. Not only did they each have different areas of concern, each one saw what they perceived to be the baby in the river and that each person's baby was someone else's river. As much as they may not have agreed on what was the most important thing, they all were working on a complicated interconnected system of rivers, streams and tributaries, each one connected to the other, each one working together to manage the flow of the rivers of justice.

I do not yet have all, or even any of the answers to the many questions raised by my two weeks of travel. But what I pray for is this. Justice is closer than we think. It takes each of us paying attention, asking the questions we have not yet asked, looking at the places we have not yet looked. It takes each of us bridging the distances and coming closer to one another, especially to those and that which we do not know. But underlying all of this is it takes all of us, each of us working on our own tributary in the great river of that which is just. My question today is this-what piece of the puzzle is yours?