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    Is Your Food Just?
    September 16, 2008
    Community | Ethics (2 comments)

    By Emily Grotta
    I don't keep kosher, but I have been appalled at the news about the  Agriprocessors plant in Postville, IA and the company's treatment of its workers. It's the kind of news story that gives all Jews a bad name.

    That's why I applaud the news today that the movement to develop a "ethical  standard" for food today received yet another stamp of approval from the Reform Movement, as the Union for Reform Judaism joined the Central Conference of American Rabbis in endorsing the Conservative Movement's Heksher Tsedek Commission. 

    The Union's resolution quotes the CCAR's:

    "Those who produce kosher meat are engaged in sacred work and therefore are expected to adhere to the highest standards and values of Jewish tradition. Those who keep kosher, including the growing number of Reform Jews who are embracing the observance of kashrut, should not be forced to choose between their ritual observance and their ethical values." 

    So now, in addition to worrying about whether I am adding to global warming because the food I eat traveled thousands of miles to reach me, I have another worry--how the workers who raised and processed the food were treated. And that, of course, is the point of the new kosher: taking time to think about the food we put into our bodies, and all that implies.

     

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    Comments

    dcc said:

    It is fantastic that the Reform Movement has followed the lead of the Conservative Movement on this proposal. Perhaps, just maybe, the majority of the Jewish community will force the violent, regressive, oppressive minority in our community to pay attention to what Rabbi Telushkin calls “peculiar and inaccurate perception that in Judaism ethics are an extracurricular activity."
    September 16, 2008 2:40 PM
    Larry Kaufman said:

    As I indicated when I blogged about the Reform rabbinic endorsement of hechsher tzedek http://blogs.rj.org/reform/2008/09/hechsher-tzedek.html, it's unusual for the Reform movement to follow rather than lead on a social justice issue.

    But there is one aspect of the Postville saga on which we should be weighing in more aggressively than what I have seen to date. Without in any way giving a pass to the Rubashkins and their rabbinic enablers, we should be making more noise about the behavior of the Federal immigration enforcers in ICE in their treatment of workers, even if undocumented, and their devastation of families and of the economy of the Christian-owned businesses in Postville.

    We don't have to condone illegal immigration to assert that the involved workers are also made b'tzelem elohim, in the image of God, and we have to look at them in the remembrance that we were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt.

    Not that we expect much derech eretz (responsible behavior) from our current government, but we should demand it of ourselves. I confess to not having followed our Religious Action Center's positions on this total issue, but clearly there's more to the story than the ethical side of kashrut.
    September 16, 2008 6:27 PM

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