Rabbi Eleanor Steinman
Erev Rosh Hashanah 5769
Temple Sinai
Toronto, Ontario
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Moshe goes to see his Rabbi. “Rabbi, last week I missed saying grace after meals.”
“Why,” asked the Rabbi.
“Because I forgot to wash my hands before the meal.”
“That’s twice you’ve broken the law but you still haven’t told me why.”
“The food wasn’t kosher.”
“You ate non-kosher food?” asked the Rabbi.
“It wasn’t a Jewish restaurant.”
“That makes it even worse,” said the now angry Rabbi. “Couldn’t you have eaten in a kosher one?”
“What, on Yom Kippur?”
Food choices are complex, anxiety producing, and even guilt-laden. Often, we know what we should be eating but we make choices based upon our desire. Increasingly though, people are making choices about what they consume as a reflection their values.
My friend, Rachel[1] has an addiction to Diet Coke. She can tell the difference between Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi blind. She claims that a container of Diet Coke is so connected to her identity that when she informed friends of her pregnancy, the first question they asked was, “what are you going to do about diet coke?” Her answer, an obstetrician that let her drink it. Her pregnancy was a typical one. She and her husband welcomed a beautiful daughter who seems to be untouched by her mother’s vice. Rachel is not a one can-a-day person. She can drink a 2-liter bottle in one sitting. The challenge for Rachel is that drinking diet coke does not align with the other value-laden choices in her life. A Shabbat and Kashrut observant Jew and an environmentalist, she strives to minimize her carbon-footprint. Reduce, reuse, recycle is her mantra. This also informs her eating habits. When possible, Rachel eats locally grown produce. Given an option she always will choose organic. All of those Diet Coke bottles and cans were piling up in her recycling bin, and Rachel could no longer handle the conflict between her Diet Coke and the environment. After all, several cans of diet coke per day produces enough carbon in the atmosphere the equivalent of flying roundtrip from Toronto to Chicago.
Rachel made a big decision. She is now in the process of giving up diet coke. For now, she is no longer brings it into her house and is appreciating every sip in restaurants and other people’s homes. Rachel’s decision highlights a trend happening throughout North America. There is a heightened awareness about where food comes from and at what cost, people are literally eating their values.
Prior to the Industrial Revolution we would not have a choice but to eat local and work hard in our land for food. Now the process by which food reaches our tables is radically different.
What was once a complex process of taking elements from the earth and modifying them is now simplified. Take bread for instance. First the growing area must be prepared. The soil should be smoothed and then long furrows are prepared. Place fertilized in the furrow. In a semi-circular motion place the wheat seeds. Water the field. Monitor the field and check for insect infestation. Check the wheat field regularly. Use a scythe to cut the wheat kernels once the wheat stems turn yellow and the kernels are fully dried up. Or use a "combine" machine to cut off the crop in a neat quick manner. Now it is threshing time. Gather the wheat in a sheet and pound it on the ground or with a rock. Check if the wheat kernels have been separated from the stalk. Voila wheat. Now the raw wheat can be powdered into flour and crushed and de-branned into cracked wheat.”[2] Now there is flour with which to bake. Of course now yeast, water, salt, sugar several hours and miraculously freshly baked bread will emerge from the oven. The majority of us avoid all of these steps. We want bread? We go to the grocery store and select a loaf wrapped in plastic form a shelf. Maybe if we’re really feeling adventurous we go to our local baker, but that is usually reserved for challah on Shabbat.
The challenge is, when we Jews make motzi, we say hamotzi lechem meen ha’aretz we offer a blessing to God who enables us to bring forth bread from the earth. The phrase originates from Psalm 104 “l’hotzee lechem meen ha’artez,”[3] which describes God’s providing the opportunity for the human being to toil in the land that, in turn, enables the human being to bring forth bread.[4] When we recite this blessing whether around a family Shabbat table or before a communal meal here at Temple Sinai we need to do so with the intention of appreciation for the process that gets food to our table. Otherwise we are disconnected from the whole process.
Food production and consumption is not simply a tool for survival, it is an opportunity. The 20th-century philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel proposes, “there are three ways in which we may relate ourselves to the world—we may exploit it, we may enjoy it, we may accept it in awe.”[5] These three world-views are completely human. The challenge for us is to move from one to the next and not to get stuck. In 1955 Heschel commented, “as civilization advances, the sense of wonder declines. Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind.”[6] Now is the time to reclaim our sense of wonder, to ask questions about where our food comes from, to make our food choices with the same attention and integrity we afford our other indulgences.
Agriculture is a major focus of Biblical law. “You shall not sow your vineyard with a second kind of seed, else the crop—from the seed you have sown—and the yield of the vineyard may not be used.”[7] “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest.” You shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard…”[8] Upon entry into the Land of Israel we are commanded, “when you plant any tree for food, you shall regard its fruit as forbidden. Three years it shall be forbidden for you, not to be eaten. In the fourth year all its fruit shall be set aside for jubilation before God; and only in the fifth year may you use its fruit.”[9] It is time to get back to the land in a way that enables us to honor our Jewish values while living in the twenty-first century.
We can learn from others about appreciating food origins. In Animal Vegetable Miracle: a year of food life, Barbara Kingsolver describes her family’s move from Arizona to Appalachia in order to “live in a place that could feed us: where rain falls, crops grow, and drinking water bubbles right up out of the ground.”[10] The family was fed up with the talk of environmental concern and decided to minimize their carbon footprint, at least based upon food consumption. Kingsolver with the assistance of her husband and daughter, document a year of living locally. They raise their own turkeys, chickens, tomatoes, and beans and make festive meals seem like true harvest celebrations. Most people of my great-grandparents’ generation, “had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics: when various fruits and vegetables come into season, which ones keep through the winter, how to preserve the others … Which crops can be planted before the last frost, and which must wait … What animals and vegetables thrive in one’s immediate region and how to live on those with little else thrown into the mix beyond a bag of flour, a pinch of salt, and a handful of coffee. Few people of [Kingsolver’s] generation, and approximately none of our children, could answer any of these questions, let alone all. This knowledge has vanished from our culture. We also have largely convinced ourselves it wasn’t too important.[11]” But it is!
Kingsolver aligns herself with the slow food or localvore movement, focusing upon the distance that food must travel to reach her family. Camille, Kingsolver’s daughter and a co-author writes of the problem with bananas. “Many summers ago, best friend Kate, from Tucson, came out to visit the family farm in Virginia for the first time. She was enamored of our beautiful hills, liked working in our garden, and happily helped pick blackberries from the sea of brambles that skirt the surrounding fields … But one day, on a trip to the grocery store, we hit a little problem. When my parents asked if there was anything in particular she would like to eat, she replied, ‘Let’s get some bananas!’ Baffled by Barbara Kingsolver’s refusal, in the car it was explained to Kate that it seemed wasteful to buy produce grown hundreds of miles away when we had so much fresh fruit right now, literally, in our backyard … Plus, think of all the gasoline it takes to bring those bananas here.”[12]
Barbara Kingsolver’s family decides to make some radical changes to their eating habits and can document the benefits. We do not need to make such dramatic changes in order to elevate eating from ordinary to sacred, from chol to kadosh. We can stop eating on the run. We too can savor every morsel because food is that precious.
Today the Jewish community is on the brink of what I believe is a major step forward in the reclamation of our food. The kosher food production process is being pushed to to meet with our ethical standards, from chol to kadosh. The Central Conference of American Rabbis following the lead of our Conservative colleagues signed onto the “hekhsher tzedek” movement.
Hekhsher Tzedek came out of concerns about the treatment of employees with particular attention focused upon fair wages, benefits, healthy and safety, employee training, quality control and animal welfare, corporate accountability and integrity, and the environment at kosher food production plants. The idea being the Jewish community cannot responsibly eat kosher slaughtered meat that that comes from a plant where employees are not treated well. It is not possible to rank one ethical standard above another, fair treatment of workers on par with an aversion towards animal cruelty.
The initial locus of concern comes from Agriprocessors, the largest kosher slaughterhouse in America. Recently the owner was charged with 9,000 misdemeanor counts of child labor violations. The Orthodox Union, the principle provider of kosher supervision announced it will suspend supervision unless new management is hired at the plant. Undercover reports revealed workers without adequate training, and the employment of illegal immigrants who do not receive health care or adequate pay. Quickly the movement broadened and questions about all foods we eat as Jews.
“Hekhsher tzedek” calls for an additional marker on any type of commercial product, a marker that indicates the food item is produced in a way that meets benchmarks consistent with Jewish ethical standards. This symbol, like that of certified fair trade or dolphin-safe, would indicate to the consumer that the producer cares. This mark then enables us, the consumers, to not only shop for food products, but to shop reflections of our values.
We are at a new beginning. Rosh Hashanah is a time for reflection, rejoicing, and for realigning ourselves with our priorities. Now is the time to make the changes in what we choose to eat. Now is the time to make changes to our shopping. Now is the time to reconnect with the processes by which food arrives to our tables. I know that no one here wants to take advantage of workers or to disconnect from our words of appreciation. During the next ten days we can start to make small changes. For some, maybe it is cutting back on diet coke. Others might want to try saying motzi when sitting down to eat bread. Try taking the extra twenty seconds to read where the produce going into the shopping basket comes from if there an option between Ontario and elsewhere choose local. We do not need to make a radical change like Barbara Kingsolver. We need to make mindful choices.
Low-fat, no-fat, sugar-free, on sale, full price, two-for-one, organic, locally grown, day-old, farm-raiser, cage-free, kosher, kosher style. We can bring our own bags or pay for them. It almost makes a person want to throw up their hands and run for the farm stand. Quickly our sense of awe and wonder turns to anxiety and frustration. This does not have to be so hard. All of these movements; hekhsher tzedek, localvore, diet-coke weaning, take tremendous discipline and require extra time and money. But I don’t think eating our values needs to be too complicated, it just requires a little bit of time, no money, and a lot of perspective. When we sit down to eat we need to take a moment of appreciation. Perhaps simply a deep breath before the first bite is enough. Maybe, if we’re eating bread a motzi. If someone made the food, we could do a better job of thanking them – that kitchen sign “kiss the cook” might not be so silly! These are small steps as part of a bigger project to reclaim awe and wonder for the miracle of creation, the process of bringing forth sustenance from the earth, and having sufficient food to eat. Hopefully then, we won’t have to turn to rabbis for pardon when eating like Moshe!
[1] This was originally posted at http://jcarrot.org/what-diet-coke-taught-me-about-food-tshuvah/#comments. With Rachel’s permission I have summarized her story.
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat Sept. 16, 2008
[3] Ps. 104:14
[4] Translation my own, based upon other uses of “l’hotzee” in other places, especially the Prophets. Also, I interpret herbs or herbage as plants.
[5] Heschel, Abraham Joshua. God in Search of Man. 33-34.
[6] Ibid, 46.
[7] Deut. 22:9
[8] Lev. 19:-10
[9] Lev. 19:23-25.
[10] Kingsolver, Barbara. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A year of food life. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. 3.
[11] Ibid, 9.
[12]Ibid, 310.
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