Parshas Lekh Lekha - Famine, Hunger, and MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger

 

In Parshas Lekh Lekha we're introduced to Avraham - one of the most important and complex Biblical personalities. Constantly tested by God, (1) a staunch advocate of righteousness and fair judgment, (2) and a deeply committed exemplar of the values of charity and hospitality, (3) Avraham is a deeply nuanced and inspiring Torah figure. 

In God's first communication with Avraham, God commanded him to "go forth from your native land and from your father's house to the land that I will show you." (4) At 75 years old (5) Avraham packed up and moved his entire family and started traveling, eventually arriving in the land of Canaan. 

Before anything else, that versatility and ability to redefine and rebrand oneself at such a mature age is unbelievable. Additionally, there is in this first divine command an echo of the current coronavirus situation: we don't know if and when we will find a vaccine, we don't know if and when it will be effective, and we don't know if and when we will be able to go back to normal. We are currently traveling an uncharted path without clear direction or destination, heading towards a "land" that, we hope, God will eventually show us. Like Avraham, all we can do is put one foot in front of the other and keep on traveling. (6)

On top of those uncertainties, once Avraham arrived in the land of Canaan he encountered a famine so intense that he was forced to relocate to Egypt. There have been other times in history when essential crops failed, draughts ravaged whole societies, or the price of food inflated beyond what the average person could afford. Thankfully, in the United States, we are not living in that reality. 

After emerging from Egypt with much newfound wealth, Avraham's and Lot's flocks were too large to be supported by the resources of the land. This was a very different kind of famine, one that was due more to the ineffective allocation of resources and wealth-induced waste that to the resource-deficient poverty of the first famine. 

According to the USDA, Americans waste more than $161 billion on food each year. (7) According to the World Wildlife Federation, the energy expended in producing all of that waste is equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of 37 million cars. This isn't just an environmental issue. According to Feeding America, 35 million Americans (including 10 million children) were struggling with hunger and nutrition deficiency even before the coronavirus. 

To spell this out in more easily digestible numbers, the average American family wastes over 30% of the food they buy while many of their fellow citizens starve. This is a spiritual ethical disaster. 

How can we shift this culture? How can we kindly and productively call out people and organizations who waste food? What personal changes can we make to stop wasting food ourselves? How can we effectively allocate resources to people who need it? And how can we pray to God about our problems when God's own children are starving all around us? 

These are not simple questions to ask, not easy problems to face, and not straightforward issues to solve. 

Perhaps we can start by creating a culture where we talk about these things, where we don't allow shuls to routinely throw out whole tables of food after every Kiddush. Perhaps we can create a culture where we plan what we buy better so that we have less waste at the end of each week. Perhaps we can create a culture where it's expected that when you leave for a long trip you take your Tefillin, your Siddur, your Gemara, and a box of granola bars to give to hungry people. Perhaps we can create a culture of calling our representatives and asking what they've done lately for their hungry constituents. And, of course, perhaps we can create a culture of donating time and money to organizations and food kitchens that actively fight these problems. 

This week I've donated to MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger. MAZON is an organization that lobbies and advocates for hungry people of all faiths and backgrounds in Israel and the United States. They partner with other charities and educational institutions to educate people about these issues, and they work to enable more effective allocation of resources to people who need it. 

They're an incredible organization and I recommend you donate as well. 

Notes:

(1) According to Mishnah Avos 5:3 Avraham had ten tests. There are various given lists as to what exactly they were. 

(2) For example, see Bereishis 18:17-33 where Avraham protested God's intended destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. However, see the following post where I discuss some other places where Avraham didn't protest. 

(3) see Bereishis 18:1-8

(4) Bereishis 12:1. Unless otherwise noted, all Tanakh translations are taken from the JPS translation in the second edition of The Jewish Study Bible.

(5) see Bereishis 12:5

(6) I'd like to thank R' Jeremy Wieder for making this connection in his Thursday Parshah/Mussar shiur. There's also a beautiful Pri Tzadik that explains that a deeper spiritual understanding of the expression "Lekh Lekha," which implies a kind of double "traveling," is that every person is obligated to be constantly "traveling" towards higher states of spiritual consciousness. 

(7) To give this some perspective, if all that waste were the GDP of a single country it would be the 54th richest nation on earth. Put another way, it's greater than the combined GDP of the bottom 50 countries.

(8) This week I also got to interview R' Joel Pitkowsky, Treasurer and Board member of MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger. It was a deeply inspiring and spiritually-charged interview. You can watch it here.