blogs/rabbi-huberman

Judaism, Hunger and the Homeless #454

There is a line in the traditional "Grace After Meals" prayer which in recent years has been deleted by many Conservative and Reform congregations.
 
It is found in the Psalms, and it reads: 
 
"I was once young, now I am old. I have never seen a righteous man abandoned, or his children forced to search for food." (Psalms 37:25)
 
It's an interesting verse. It teaches that a righteous human being will always be welcome at someone's table, and that his or her children will not go hungry in difficult times.
 
It does make sense that someone with a positive attitude, a good sense of humor, someone who is good-natured and humble: this isn't someone who will ever lack people to break bread with, either in good or challenging times.
 
But what about someone who isn't like that?
 
In the closing decades of the last century, as homelessness grew in the streets of New York, Washington DC, Toronto and so many other cities, many Jews began to express their discomfort with this verse.
 
They asked, "Does that mean that a person roaming the streets hungry - they and their families living in homeless shelters - is not righteous?
 
"Can we in good conscience recite this verse within a prayer which joyously thanks God for providing us with sustenance?
 
Indeed, the printed version of Grace After Meals (Bikhat Hamazon) read at our synagogue omits this verse, because it does not reflect our understanding of righteousness and the relationship it bears to people who are in need, and in situations outside their control.
 
As we observe, there are those who thrive in this world who are not righteous. Likewise, there are many who suffer who are kind and compassionate.
 
This challenging discussion between good and evil, reward and punishment, lies at the core of this week's Torah portion.
 
The Parashah, Bechukotai ("If you follow my laws"), completes our reading of Leviticus, the third book of the Torah, and it leaves us considering an uncomfortable.
 
We are told that if we follow God's laws, the land will sustain us, but if we disobey God's laws, the land will dry up and cease to provide.
 
For our ancient forebears, faced with what amounted to a choice between sustenance and starvation, this was hardly a decision at all.
 
Many traditional scholars hold fast to this portion, going as far as to insist that much of the harm that has befallen the Jewish people has been, in some way, connected to bad communal behavior: 
specifically embracing the practices and religions of other nations.
 
For centuries Jewish scholars have sought to connect the manifold persecutions of the Jews with some indiscretion practiced by the Jews of that generation, some hoodwinking or evasion of God's laws.
 
Such investigations collapsed when confronted with the obscenities of the Holocaust.
 
Some traditionalists have sought to link the Holocaust with some collective crime committed against God over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They have not met with success.
 
This is one reason that modern scholars have such difficulty with the Deuteronimic concept, highlighted in this week's Torah portion, which inspires the teaching that Jews have been rewarded and punished through time, according to their faithfulness or disobedience to God.
 
Many Jews today reject this idea.
 
They observe that often it is not God punishing humanity, but humanity bringing misfortune upon itself.
 
It follows that if we elect leaders who value privilege and profit over justice and compassion, there will be more people without homes, and more children going to bed hungry.
 
If we adopt agricultural practices which place a burden on the air, the land, and the water, then, as the Torah predicts this week, the earth will cease to feed us.
 
If we continue to add chemicals into the environment, we will see more and more powerful cancers, respiratory ailments, and other health issues.
 
Every Shabbat morning, after the sixth aliyah, we pause to read the names of our many friends and fellow congregants who require a prayer for healing this week.
 
Reflecting upon this week's Torah portion, though, we must ask ourselves: Is asking for God's help when our friends are sick all we're supposed to do? Is healing God's sole responsibility? Do we expect to bribe God by our good behavior, or by an earnest weekly prayer?
 
People have their best hope for good health when we remind them that they have not been forgotten, that we are anxiously awaiting their return to their families and their community.
 
A hospital visit, a phone call-even a text or email.
 
This week's Torah reading provides us with a challenge. It teaches us that God's world is not black and white: all the more reason to remind ourselves that we are in this equation, that our participation is vital.
 
Hunger is a human issue. 
 
So too is the health of our planet.
 
And, in so many cases, the speed of a fellow human being's recovery can be influenced by the support, and the comfort, and the encouragement with which we can so easily provide them.
 
In the end, it must be humanity's task, not God's alone, to build a just society.
 
Many who live in prosperity understand this. They support charitable causes, and often invite friends in spiritual or practical need to their table, or support their communities in countless other ways.
 
But others clutch what they have, and blame the hungry for own predicament, or criticize society's social network for inspiring weakness and dependency.
 
Judaism has a different view: that life is a partnership between God and humanity to perfect an imperfect world.
 
More often than not, homelessness, sickness, and an unhealthy environment are conditions that we have created by our collective choices, as a society.
 
But the words we read in the Torah and the Psalms can inspire us. There are choices we can make every day which can bring the world closer to completion. This only begins when we soften our hearts to those in need, supporting them, if we can, before they fall.
 
It cannot be up to God to feed everyone. Oxfam Canada tells us that there is enough food to feed the world. And yet this is what we are allowing to happen:
925 million people do not have enough food to eat -more than the combined populations of the United States, Canada and European Union.
Women account for over 60 per cent of the world's hungry. 
65 percent of the world's hungry live in only seven countries: India, China, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Ethiopia.
In our congregation, we will continue to omit that line from the Psalms which insists that the righteous will never go hungry. I am sure that, among the close to the one billion people each night who go to bed hungry, there are many righteous.
 
And, as we are inspired to consider this week as we read Parashat Bechukotai, it is not God who is pulling the strings of the world's numerous injustices and challenges.
 
It is humanity. It is us.
 
And in the words of the ancient Rabbi Hillel, "all of the rest is commentary."
 
Shabbat Shalom, v'kol tuv (with all goodness)
 
Rabbi Irwin Huberman