Rabbi Adam Rosenwasser

December 18, 2009

Shabbat Chanukah II: Don’t Let the Light Go Out!

Chanukah might very well be our “fattest” holiday.  There is a well known saying that the meaning of Jewish festivals can be reduced to the following:  They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat!  Indeed, my earliest memories of Chanukah revolve around food.  I always enjoyed Grandma Shirley’s latkes, fresh out of the oven, smeared with applesauce and sour cream, just waiting for me to devour as many as possible.  I had a huge appetite as a child, and greasy, hot, brown, “jewish food” like latkes, kugels, knishes, gefilte fish, brisket, matzo ball soup always hit the spot.  I never could get enough.   

 So I find it a bit strange that our Torah portion this week is Mikketz, which describes a great and terrible famine that engulfed Egypt for seven years.  On this last night of Chanukah, before we all enjoy a wonderful potluck together, do we really want to think about the horrors of hunger?  Of course not.  Chanukah is a time of joy, and celebration, and family, and dreidels, and gifts, and sufganiyot and latkes.  But even as we gather together, reveling in the holiday spirit, the hard cold facts remain:  We have been hungry before, and many, MANY people STILL go hungry.  These candles of the Chanukiya give us warmth and joy, but perhaps they can also inspire us to shed a little light on a world that for many, is still quite dark.

 Joseph emerges as the hero of parshat mikketz for how he handles the situation of the famine in Egypt .  A quick review: Pharaoh has a couple of dreams which he is unable to interpret.  One about seven healthy cows being devoured by seven scrawny ones, and the second about seven ears of healthy corn being swallowed up by seven shriveled ears.  Pharaoh sends for Joseph who informs him that Egypt is about to face seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine.  Joseph comes up with a plan. He tells Pharaoh the following: “Let Pharaoh find a man of discernment and wisdom, and set him over the land of Egypt .  And let Pharaoh take steps to appoint overseers over the land, and organize the land of Egypt in the seven years of plenty.  Let all the food of these good years that are coming be gathered, and let the grain be collected under Pharaoh’s authority as food to be stored in the cities.  Let that food be as a reserve for the land for the seven years of famine which will come upon the land of Egypt , so that the land may not perish in the famine.”  Let’s break this down.  First, Joseph gives Pharaoh a roadmap.  He says, “Here is the problem.  I have a solution.”  Then, Pharaoh gives Joseph the job.  The next step is that Joseph delegates, and gets other people involved to organize the land.  Community organizers if you like.  They store away as much food as they can in the seven years of plenty, perhaps pickling vegetables, turning the fruit into jams and preservatives, and Joseph specifically names grain as food to be stored in the cities for the famine to come. 

Joseph manages a great undertaking.  The text tells us that “the inhabitants of the land gathered food by handfuls; “kchol hayam,” literally as there is sand in the sea, an expression used throughout the Bible to connote a nearly infinite amount.  When the famine comes, the people have saved up enough food to get Egypt through the seven awful years, and even to feed their neighbors, Joseph’s brothers who journey from Canaan to Egypt to bring back food so that their families will not starve.  Joseph attacks the problem head on, using his wisdom and foresight to save Egypt . 

The potential disasters of famine are averted, but Egyptian society remains more or less the same.  After all, a few chapters later, we are told that a new king arose over Egypt who “did not know Joseph.”  This is of course, the beginning of our people’s enslavement in Egypt which lasts 400 years.  Joseph saves Egypt from starvation, but other major problems, inequality and slavery, remain. 

What Joseph did resembles what we call today, “social action.”  That is, he tackles an immediate problem in an effort to avert human suffering.  But he never addresses the root cause of the problem.  Why were there periodic famines in the first place?  Was there something about the social structure, or the agricultural system, or the distribution of resources that perpetuated human suffering generation after generation?

Fast forward a few thousand years to America in the 21^st century.  We all know that there are hungry people out there.  In fact, according to an organization called Second Harvest, in 2008, 14.6% of American households were characterized as “food insecure,” that is, the people in the household were not receiving enough to eat.  That equals out to about 49 million hungry Americans.  This is a staggering number.  But we try to solve the problem.  Every year at this season, all across America , we collect cans of food, buy toys for poor families, and serve holiday dinners to ameliorate the desperate situations that families and individuals face.  A hungry person can go to a soup kitchen and receive a good, satiating meal.  Hungry families can go to a food pantry and go home with a box of canned goods that will feed them for a week.  But no matter how many cans we give, there will always be more mouths to feed.  As our society is currently structured, there will always be rich and poor, haves and have nots, winners and losers.

There is another way to think about the problem of hunger, and about many of the social problems which cause so much human suffering in this world.  Here’s a story that illustrates what I mean:

One summer in a village, the townspeople gathered for a picnic in a park by the river.  As they began eating and chatting, someone noticed a baby in the river, struggling and crying.  The baby was going to drown.  Someone rushed to save the baby.  Then, they noticed another screaming baby in the river, and they pulled that baby out.  Soon, more babies were seen drowning in the river and the townspeople were pulling them out as fast as they could.  It took great effort, and they began to organize their activities in order to save the babies as they came down the river.  As everyone else was busy in the rescue efforts to save the babies, two of the townspeople started to run away along the shore of the river.  “Hey, where are you going?” shouted one of the rescuers.  “We need you here to help us save these babies.”  “You go right ahead,” said the man.  “I’m going up the river to find out why all these babies are in the water in the first place!”

Social action is pulling babies out of the water—working as hard as you can to save lives and care for those who are suffering.  Going up the river to figure out who’s throwing all the babies in the water, that is what we call the work of social justice.  Social justice.  Social justice calls us to deal with the structural and systemic causes of the issue.  It can involve lobbying those in power, and advocating for those who have no power.  Social justice is discovering that there is something terribly wrong in society, and the cause of that wrong needs examining and then possibly upheaval.  Social justice for Joseph would have been creating a taskforce to study the recent famines, and to come up with a comprehensive plan, perhaps changing the economic or agricultural systems in place, to prevent famine from happening at all.

To effectively fight the good fights of our day, we need to engage in both social action and social justice.  The individual babies need saving, but there also needs to be a group of people looking hard at why the babies are in the river in the first place.  We know that the United States alone has enough resources to feed the population of the world.  So even as we collect cans and give money to important hunger fighting organizations, we need to make sure that the underlying causes are addressed and dealt with.

Here at Beth Am, all of us have the opportunity to engage in both social action and social justice work.  Our social action projects include chicken soupers, which provides food for shut-ins here in our own community, a soup kitchen where our members volunteer once a month, building bookshelves and collecting books for the Costano school in East Palo Alto, and of course our annual Hunger and Homeless fundraising campaign which is going on right now.  For those interested in social justice and advocacy work—the task of finding out why there are so many babies in the river--- there’s our Beth Am chapter of PIA, Peninsual Interfaith Action, and our Pursue Justice program, which will be sponsoring a health care forum here on January 31^st.   As I encouraged you to get involved on Rosh Hashanah, I will once again encourage active engagement in both.  Send me an email, look at our website, and talk to your friends and family about how you want to work with us to make the world better.  We want to work with you, to teach you and learn from you. 

On this last night of Chanukah, we can learn a valuable lesson about making a difference in the world from the Maccabees.  These were people who took action.  Whereas others believed that to defeat the Assyrians we should sit around and wait for God to intervene, the Maccabees decided to take matters into their own hands.  Like Joseph, they came up with a plan.  They fought for what they believe in, and  they won.  Look around for a moment at this wonderful congregation.  Each one of us, whether we decide to jump into the water to save the life of a drowning baby, or whether we decide to join a focus group studying the reasons why the babies are in the water, has so much potential to make a difference in the world.  Chanukah will soon be over.  We will have to wait to light the beautiful candles for another year.  But even though the candles will burn down, we can take the message of doing acts of social action and social justice with us.  As the last verse of my favorite Chanukah song states,

What is the memory that’s valued so highly that we keep it alive in that flame?  What’s the commitment to those who have died when we cry out they’ve not died in vain.  We have come this far, always believing that justice will somehow prevail.  This is the burden, this is the promise, and this is why we will not fail.  Don’t let the light go out!