Fresh Updates from RAC

While sanctuaries are filled with the white robes of Confirmation and the chanting of the story of Ruth, we sometimes forget that Shavuot is also a harvest festival and that Ruth’s story is not just one of choosing Judaism, but one deeply steeped in farming, gleaning and reaping. What better time of year, then, for the Senate and House to mark up the Farm Bill?

The Farm Bill governs America’s food policy for the next five years—from farm subsidies to crop insurance to international food aid to domestic anti-hunger programs. Wait, anti-hunger programs? Why are those included in the Farm Bill? Why is an anti-poverty program included in a huge bill all about farming? If we look at Jewish tradition, however, it makes total sense.

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As a fellow Eisendrath Legislative Assistant, Raechel Banks, wrote yesterday, “There are many ways to ‘share our bread with the hungry’ (Isaiah 58:7).” She discussed a very tangible  way of helping to combat hunger in our midst (I still have blisters on my fingers from cutting potatoes for 3 hours straight). Today, however, I want to talk about a way of sharing with the hungry that is more difficult to conceptualize, but has no less of an impact on millions of lives – international food aid.

There are nearly one billion people around the world with insufficient access to food. That number is greater than the populations of the United States, Canada and the European Union combined. One in seven people go to bed hungry each night and hunger is the leading cause of severe health problems and death worldwide.

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This week the Senate Agriculture Committee is marking up the Farm Bill. Translation: A group of 20 senators is sitting around a fancy table working their way, line-by-line, through over 1,000 pages of a bill that will govern nearly all farm-related and food policy both domestically and internationally for the next 5 years. And you thought your schedule for this week looked rough!

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This piece was originally published on February 16 in the Jewish Daily Forward.

Let us speak of SNAP.

“SNAP?,” you ask. “What is SNAP?”

SNAP is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly know and still best recognized as the food stamp program. And now it is in danger.

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“Rabbi Shimon said: If three have eaten at one table and have not spoken over it words of Torah, it is as though they had eaten of the sacrifices of the dead, for it is written (Isaiah 28:8) ‘All tables are covered with filthy vomit; no place is clean.’ But if three have eaten at one table and have spoken over it words of Torah, it is as if they had eaten from the table of God, for it is written (Ezekiel 41:22) ‘He said to me, ‘This is the table that stands before God.’’”– Pirkei Avot 3:4

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Earlier this month, I joined many in the Jewish community in St. Louis and across the country in a Food Stamp Challenge. The Challenge was sponsored by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Mazon and the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements to raise awareness for the Supplementary Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) and to keep the program from falling prey to severe budget cuts. We limited all the food we ate to $31.50 per person, per week — the average food stamp allotment — to call attention to the challenges faced each meal, each day, by 46 million of our neighbors, many of them children.

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The White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Wait, what? What happened to separation of church and state? How can this office exist, if it is created by the government? What do these so-called partnerships entail?

Actually, the separation of church and state is very much alive in the Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, as I learned at an event on Monday at the Brookings Institution.

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Rabbi David Saperstein spoke this morning alongside religious leaders from across the country urging Congress: “Don’t push the poor and most vulnerable off the ‘fiscal cliff.’” Joined by leaders of some of the nation’s most prominent Christian and Muslim organizations, Rabbi Saperstein stressed, “It is simply not acceptable that deficit reduction might increase the burden on those struggling the most in our communities. It is intolerable that debt reduction should come on the backs of the poorest among us, that it increase poverty or inequality.”

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