East End Temple, New York, NY

Rosh Hashanah 5772

Here is my question for today: What did you have for breakfast? Was it the same thing you eat every day? Can you even remember? What did it taste like, and where did it come from, and how did you decide what to have? Did you get to eat sitting down, or even, at all?

Eating is one of the very most basic experiences of life. We cannot survive without consuming food. We do it every day. After breathing, eating is pretty much the most essential thing we do.

On the High Holidays, we try to reflect on our lives and do the work of tshuva, of repair and return. We try to become more attuned to our own needs and possibilities, and more aware of what we can do to repair the world. The essential nature of food is such that its influence spans all of our lives. By taking a closer look at what we choose to put in our bodies, we can change our lives, and we can change the world.

I have been shifting in what I eat through much of my adulthood. Into adulthood, I ate pretty much everything. My first foray into paying more attention to what I ate came in my first year of rabbinical school, in Jerusalem. I decided to try keeping kosher for Passover. So there I was, in Jerusalem, spreading butter on my matza and plopping on top of it - a wedge of sausage. Probably beef sausage, but still. That was my version, at the time, of keeping kosher for Passover.

Since then, I’ve been pretty much all over the map, and have made decisions based on a number of different interests. I gradually took on different elements of kosher eating - separating milk from meat, giving up forbidden animals, and so forth. I also became interested in the lives of the animals I was eating, and tried to eat free range meat. Sometimes that meant kosher but not free range, sometimes the other way around. I’ve sometimes tried to focus on food grown locally, sometimes more on ethical treatment of workers, sometimes more about avoiding big agribusiness products. These days, Lynn and I are eating vegetarian, but still eating fish. (Lynn thinks the fish just need better PR - “we’re meat too”!) We make an effort to keep things somewhat vegan at home for ourselves, but not for the kids, that feels like more than we can handle. My point is that I’ve really been all over the place, and made some decisions that were revisited quickly, and others that have stuck for quite a while.

I’ve also taken on saying blessings before I eat, which I remember to do most of the time. Occasionally, I remember to say a blessing after. And since I’ve gotten more interested in meditation, I try, sometimes, to eat a bit more mindfully, really smell and taste the food I am eating, and not just wolf something down while answering email.

Eating mindfully, with conscious awareness, can be meaningful in a few ways. It can help us to be more in the moment, more spiritually awake, and just get more out of being alive right now. Making mindful choices can also help us to eat more healthy, real, food. And we can work to repair the world with the power of the money we spend on our diets, choosing to support quality of life for humans and animals, and the whole natural world.

Now, I want to be clear: By sharing with you some of the decisions I’ve made about food, my intention is not to get you to do as I do. Instead, I mean to say that I am still shifting all the time in how much or little attention I pay to what I eat, and how I decide. What I want to encourage us all to see is the powerful opportunity each of us has to live better, and live our values, in the most daily and basic way possible.

Judaism’s guideline for eating traditionally has been the practice of kashrut, or kosher eating. Kosher literally means appropriate, what is appropriate to eat. Over the centuries, kashrut has held to some basic rules, and has also been interpreted in different ways. These days, as more people are interested in expressing ethics through eating, what is appropriate has evolved to include more than just choices about milk and meat, pork and shellfish.

In a new book, The Sacred Table: Creating a Jewish Food Ethic, Rabbi Mary Zamore, the editor, has collected essays on the multiplicity of perspectives on what is appropriate for modern, liberal Jews to eat. In addition to some American Jewish history of eating, and discussion of traditional kashrut, the book is structured to include essays that fall within four basic categories of Jewish values related to food. They are: Bal tashchit, the commandment against wasting resources; tzaar baalei chayim, the comandment to not abuse animals; oshek, the commandment to not oppress workers; and shmirat haguf, the commandment to care for our bodies.

The first category, the value of bal tashchit, derives from Torah. Deuteronomy records the commandment that we may not cut down fruit trees for the purpose of war; maintaining that protecting a food source is more important than victory. And in a midrash on Genesis, God says “ And all I have created, I made for you. But be mindful then that you do not spoil and destroy My world. For if you spoil it, there is no one after you to repair it.”

Much of what we learn from the tradition of bal tashchit aligns with the goals of the environmental movement. By eating food that was not produced with an excess of chemicals, we can help maintain the land as productive for future generations. We can buy some of our food from more local sources, or any that are not produced with the waste incurred by massive agribusiness. And we can recognize that the resources needed to produce meat on the scale we now eat it, a scale never before seen in the history of the world, might be better used in a way that could feed more people and better maintain the land.

Tzaar baalei chayim, the prohibition on cruelty to animals, is also Biblical in origin. When we see the donkey of even our enemy struggling under a burden, we are obligated to help it up. And the rabbis of the Talmud determined that tzar baalei chayim was so important that it supercedes even the laws of Shabbat and holidays; we are to violate the restriction of doing work on Shabbat if that work is needed to rescue an animal from unnecessary suffering. So, we can consider how much meat we eat, if at all, and where it comes from. We might consider whether the animals we consume were raised on a massive industrial scale, subject to extreme suffering, or whether they were raised with more humane consideration. And we might decide that the production of eggs, which requires the destruction of male chicks, and milk production, which requires separation of new-born calves from ever-pregnant cows, is acceptable, or not.

In being mindful regarding oshek, the prohibition against oppressing workers, we recall the commandment from Deuteronomy “You shall not abuse a needy and destitute laborer, whether a fellow Israelite or a stranger in one of the communities of your land,” and the instruction that Shabbat is not just for us, but for our workers as well. The same conditions that we expect for ourselves are due those whose labor helps sustain our lives, including those who raise our food. It is not easy to research every company or individual who produces what we eat. But again, purchasing food more locally instead of from giant industrial purveyors helps with that accountability. And we can turn to the systems some companies are creating to certify reasonable wages, like fair trade labeling. And the Jewish community has recently created a label called “heksher tzedek,” certifying that a product is kosher not just by ingredients, but by labor practice as well.

Shmirat haguf, preservation of our own bodies, is commanded as well. Our tradition teaches that our souls are connected to the infinite, to the universe, to God. And our bodies, therefore, are only on loan to us; we are obligated to take care of ourselves as well as we can. To this end, we can try to be mindful that what we eat will serve our health. Can we reduce the amount potentially carcinogenic material we ingest through chemicals introduced into our food, and from packaging material? Can we eat more food that is, indeed, real food, and not processed compounds of ingredients? And as we know, two of the rabbis of contemporary American food politics, Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan, both advocate for at least significantly minimizing the eating of animals and animal products like eggs and dairy. Their argument is for the benefit of the environment and overall food economy, and for the benefit of our individual health.

I believe that spirituality and justice go hand in hand. Mindfulness in our daily life -- really being present when we interact with others, when we walk down the street, and when we eat -- can help us live better both in our immediate experience and lead us to make better choices that impact the world. We are going to be living, every day, so why not get the most out of it? Why not really be present in our relationships; and why not really taste our food? And when we are present to others and to our world, we grow in our compassion, and end up making choices that more include the needs of others. I believe increasing our mindfulness about eating can help to do both. By saying blessings, or slowing down to really taste and chew, by eating in a way that connects us to our Jewish tradition or is more healthy for us, we can enjoy every meal more. And by making choices that help us repair the world, by reducing cruelty to animals, treating workers fairly, and creating a sustainable world, we exert power and connect ourselves to our world, and to all that is greater than us.

As I think you know, in general I am not a big guilt guy. I don’t want to be that rabbi who shakes a finger at you and tells you everything you are doing wrong. So please believe me when I promise I am not going to look at you askance when you enjoy your cheeseburger. My intention today is to do the opposite. Rather than feel overwhelmed by how much could be changed, let us feel an invitation to change just a bit, and thereby, to live just a bit more fully, and ethically. Any of the ways of eating more mindfully that I have suggested today can help us to live more deeply and connect us to things greater than ourselves. So I encourage us to think today of one area -- just one -- that we might start with in our own lives. Might we say a motzi before eating? Reduce the amount of meat we eat? Try to cook at home just a bit more? And if anyone here is interested in talking together about how we might grow healthier, or more ethical, in what we eat at the Temple, please let me know. You may have noticed the edict banning soda at the Temple. I think we are ready to go even further.

When we act out of our core, we are most powerful. And there is nothing more basic and immediate than what we put in our bodies. Let us seize the opportunity for change that the holidays offer -- for return, and renewal -- and grow more powerful by being more mindful about what we eat.

Ken y’hi ratzon.

Yom Kippur 5772

Ghana and Relationships

In today’s haftara from Isaiah, we just read: “Is this the fast I look for, a day of self-affliction?... Is not this the fast I look for: to unlock the shackles of injustice, to undo the fetters of bondage, to let the oppressed go free…” God, through the prophet Isaiah, is not criticizing prayer or fasting in general. But this is a stern reminder that our lives must include both introspection and action, and that each should lead to the other. This haftara is read yearly on Yom Kippur so that our reflection today might lead us to action in the world, toward the end of bondage and oppression.

This summer, I had the rare opportunity to learn about the lives of the oppressed, and the opportunity for justice, in a way I could never have before. I traveled to Ghana, in West Africa, with 15 other rabbis and two group leaders from American Jewish World Service to do volunteer labor and learning. As it turned out, I learned in one way how limited we are, and in another, deeper way, how much we can accomplish.

My fellow rabbis and I stayed for almost two weeks in the village of Sankor, in Winneba, two hours from Ghana’s capital city, Accra. We stayed at a school, and organization, called Challenging Heights, and we lived squeezed into a few rooms of a house that is still the home of some family members of the organization’s founder. I’ll describe the organization and its mission just briefly. In Ghana, thousands of children are sold into slavery in the fishing industry by parents who can’t support them and hope that this way, their children will learn skills to make their way in the world. Instead, of course, they suffer abuse and deprivation worse than you can imagine. Challenging Heights’s visionary founder and director is James Kofi Annan, yes, whose name sounds like the former U.N. Secretary General, but I promise, you’ve never met anyone like James. James is a former trafficked child, who escaped his slavery, and, illiterate at 14 years old, educated himself, went to college, became successful in banking, and then left to found Challenging Heights, which physically rescues enslaved children, rehabilitates and educates them. The school also educates many other local children and helps families through skills training and micro-finance, so they can support their own children. It also works with the police to prosecute the traffickers of children.

Our project was to help in the construction of a new computer center in the school’s compound. Challenging Heights had identified the center as the project they needed help with, and we were there to help.

So on the first day there we were led to a pile of dirt and introduced to the team of six contractors with whom we would spend the next week and a half working. We and the contractors introduced ourselves to each other. They handed us shovels, and showed us how to start digging. We hauled cement blocks, loaded sand and gravel into wheelbarrows, mixed concrete, hauled it and poured it, and repeated, and repeated. The contrast between us and the local guys was striking. We were all rabbis, men and women, between 35 and 55 years old, with work gloves and sturdy shoes, and a range of physical limitations. The contractors were all between about 16 and 25, all men, slim but incredibly strong, and they wore pants, sometimes a t-shirt, and flip-flops or cast-off, falling-apart shoes.

And it felt really good to do the physical work. At home, all of us rabbis do most of our work talking, sitting at our computers, and at meetings. It felt good to pick up a shovel and be productive, and see the results of our labor at the end of the day. We made jokes about building the pyramids in Egypt, and I thought about the stories I’d heard from my father about his years on kibbutz in the early 50’s, hauling bags of cement to build their farming communes, and build the land.

But very quickly, the work also started to feel a little ridiculous. The Ghanaian guys did the skilled labor, and allowed us to do the hauling, mixing, and mortar work, but only under their supervision. They could haul far more weight any of us could. It was quickly apparent to all that they probably could have finished the project in about the same time with or without us. I felt indulged, and I didn’t like it. I felt like I was consuming resources, instead of providing them to people who needed them. I felt worse than a tourist. I had come, yes to learn, but also to help, and instead I was just allowing local people to provide me with “an experience.” We started to calculate what the cost of all our plane tickets could have bought the children of this school or the people of the village. Maybe AJWS should have just donated the money, and we could have stayed out of the way and let them build their own building.

Then, after a couple of days on the worksite, we got to learn the guys’ names, and they ours. And we got to chatting. I heard some of their family stories, and a bit about what their lives were like. Freddy, with whom I talked the most, told me that he had had to stop going to school and go to work in plumbing and construction. He still dreamed of getting an education, but seemed to doubt that would ever really happen. Later in the week, when the thin PVC pipe that brought all of the running water into the compound was ruptured by someone’s overzealous pick-axe swing, Freddy repaired it using nothing but a match, a piece of paper, and a bit of rubber cement. When he asked me my age, he was incredulous when I told him that I was 41. He said, “When I am 41, I will be much older than you.”

Slowly, we began to see things differently. We were encouraged by our group leaders and by Ruth Messinger, the president of AJWS, who joined us for a couple of days, to appreciate the value of cultivating these relationships with the workers, children and teachers of the school, and with James, the director. And I had kind of an epiphany; I was reminded of something I know well from my work as a synagogue rabbi. Very often, the ostensible work that I do with people is less important than the relationships we build with each other, and the relationships that I help them build with community, with values, with God. The subtext is actually the main work. This was true in Ghana, too. While they certainly didn’t need us to build that building, without our having been there to do it -- to mix and haul all that cement -- many other important things could not have happened as well.

First, while we had been at least intellectually aware that much of the world’s population lives with so little, I could understand that reality in a new way by living among people, even for a short while, who have no sanitation, no toilets, minimal access to unclean water, poor education, and often not enough to eat. Without being there, and without working side by side, we could not have learned about the lives of our hosts, traded songs and stories, and accomplished something together. And while we, the rabbis, benefited in so many ways -- including being able to come back home and share some of what we’d learned, as I am doing right now -- there were benefits for our hosts too. They were not just receiving AJWS’s money, but encountering people who wanted to travel around the world to learn from them, and ask them what they needed, roll up our sleeves and join them in their work.

And we were also helping cultivate the relationship between AJWS and Challenging Heights. Long after we had returned home, and these particular contractors finished this job, the ongoing relationship between the two organizations will be essential to providing a link by which Jews in America can have an impact on the lives of hundreds of people in Ghana. The work we performed helped fulfill AJWS’s development philosophy. That is, they fund what local NGO’s tell them they need. They don’t presume to know better than the organizations themselves what is needed. This guiding principle is altogether too rare in development work. Ruth Messinger told us a story attributed to Colin Powell, upon his return from touring the devastation wrought by the great tsunami in 1995. He said that at that moment in Sri Lanka, the highest point on that island nation was a mountain of blankets -- a mountain of blankets donated to a country where the temperature never drops below 75 degrees. So rather than telling Challenging Heights we were going to build them a water purification system, or more toilets, or a solar trash compactor -- all of which they could have used -- we built what they told us they needed, a computer center to educate their children.

If we are really interested in helping, we have to listen to what someone tells us they need. And to be in a position to listen, we have to have cultivated a relationship in the first place. The fact that AJWS has such relationships with over 450 NGO’s throughout the developing world means it can provide real, useful help both in response to crises and natural disasters, and most especially, to do the important, long-term human-rights and development work they do.

And that realization rang so true to me because it is something we have discovered here at the Temple too. The reason we have remained committed to community organizing, however slow-going, and the relationship-building in general that Karen and I talked about last night, is that this is the only road to becoming a truly caring and effective community that thrives in the long run. Building relationships, slowly and with commitment, is how we create and sustain marriages, friendships, communities, and it turns out, is how we pursue the commanded work of global justice. It is risky, sometimes frustrating and often very slow work. But there is no shortcut, and the reward is infinite.

In today’s haftara we are commanded to pursue justice. Is this the fast I look for, God asks? A day of self-affliction, bowing your head like a reed, and covering yourself with sackcloth and ashes?... No, we read, When you see the naked, to clothe them, and never to hide yourself from your own kin.

We are not supposed to just lament all wrongs of the world, both local and global. We enter into relationship and see what can indeed be done. And we do not hide ourselves from our kin, from our neighbors and from the stranger, here in NYC and around the globe, but rather, meet them with mutuality, curiosity and compassion. Then, we read, your people shall rebuild the ancient ruins, and lay the foundations for ages to come.

I pray that the foundation our group of rabbis laid in concrete for a computer center in the tiny village of Sankor, will indeed be the foundation for much more.

It has led me to deliver this sermon right now. It has led to a new relationship between EET and AJWS, and I am pleased to remind you that this coming Friday night, October 14, for our first Simchat Shabbat (formerly Synaplex) of the year, we will host Ruth Messinger, AJWS’s president, who will speak on what can be done in the pursuit of global food justice. Some of you remember her as Manhattan Borough President, and at AJWS since 1998 she has been the powerful voice of the Jewish community’s commitment to global justice. It will be great to see you all there - I promise you’ll be glad you came.

In November, I’ll be presenting images from my time in Ghana, telling stories from that experience, and amplifying some of the issues faced both by the people in the village of Sankor and throughout the developing world. What I’ve shared today is just the tip of the iceberg I want to tell about what I saw, and learned, while in Ghana, and with the aid of photos, I’ll get to share many more stories. I hope you’ll join me. That will happen in connection with Global Hunger Shabbat, sponsored by AJWS. Then before Passover, I’ll be teaching a class called Food and Freedom, where we’ll explore further what can be done to pursue justice through food, here and around the world.

Through these opportunities for learning this year, I hope all of us together can cultivate a deepening relationship with not only with AJWS, but thereby as a Jewish community with people in the developing world. We will not be able to do that directly, as I had the privilege of doing this summer. But we can each play our role, our commanded role, in pursuing global justice. That task indeed can feel huge, and overwhelming, but opening ourselves to engage just a little, learn and act in our own limited way, we too can lay the foundation for ages to come.

Ken y’hi ratzon.