by JanetheWriter

Photo by Naomi Abelson

Several years ago, I helped chaperone a quartet of high school students from my home congregation to Washington, DC to attend a L'taken social justice seminar sponsored by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. Although waaaay beyond high school myself, I learned a lot in those three and a half days in our nation's capital. The lesson that has stayed with me the longest, though, is this one: When standing on a river bank, if children begin to float by in the rapids, it is, of course, our duty to pluck them from the raging waters. Equally imperative, however, is our obligation to trek upstream and find out why they're falling in the water in the first place.

Yesterday, that two-part lesson slapped me in the face as I stood on the corner of Mercer and West Fourth streets in the West Village, handing out bananas to the men and women who flock to HUC-JIR each and every Monday evening for the meals provided by the College's two-decades-old, student-run soup kitchen. As I watched the members of this community--b'tzelem elohim, just like you and me--consume the sandwiches, and barter amongst themselves to accumulate a stash of milk, fruit and cookies for another meal, I was overcome by sadness.  I'm sad for them, sad for the hand they've been dealt, and sad that the citizens (myself included) and lawmakers of my beloved country--the "America the Beautiful" we sang about just two weeks ago in synagogue--can't do better by them when it comes to "liberty and justice for all." 

And, while the HUC soup kitchen is a most sacred endeavor--for the 100 or so people who benefit from its services each week and for those whose handiwork makes it possible--it fulfills only part of the imperative from God, as detailed in Isaiah, "to deal [our] bread to the hungry [and] tear apart the chains of the oppressed."  It pains me that while the United States continues to spend trillions of dollars and sacrifice thousands of young American lives in battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, back home nearly 50 million people live in food-insecure households, 800,000 sleep on the streets, and full-time minimum wage workers earn a tad more than $10,000 a year, a whopping $2,900 below the poverty line for a family of three.  Saddest of all, with figures like these, it appears that not even the largest soup kitchens or the most sophisticated social service agencies can begin to make a meaningful dent in dealing bread to the hungry or tearing apart the chains of the oppressed.

Although I certainly don't have the answers, I do know this:  Even as we continue to support the work of the HUC soup kitchen with our hearts, our hands and our dollars, so too must we continue to trek upstream to our halls of governance and justice to investigate and reengineer the reasons our children still fall into the river. 

Editor's Note: See more photos from yesterday afternoon on the URJ Facebook page (and while you're there, be sure to "like" URJ on Facebook!)

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