Rabbi Jonathan Lubliner

Awareness of the divine begins with wonder.  It is the result of what man does with his higher incomprehension.  Radical amazement has a wider scope than any other act of man.  While any act of perception or cognition has as its object a selected segment of reality, radical amazement refers to all of reality; not only to what we see, but also to the very act of seeing as well as to our own selves, to the selves that see and are amazed at their ability to see.  The sense for the “miracles which are daily with us,” the sense for the “continual marvels” is the source of prayer.  There is no worship, no music, no love, if we take for granted the blessings or defeats of living.

-Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man

First . . . take a few minutes to watch the following: http://youtu.be/YRnHsG7WxI4

I recently came across this short video entitled Gratitude from filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg.  If I were looking to incorporate something from social media into our daily liturgy,  I’d be tempted to utilize this youtube selection because it captures the significance of wonder and thankfulness, which is the essence of Jewish prayer.

The playbook of tradition we know as the siddur (prayer book) is filled with gratitude about the most ordinary of miracles: a prayer upon awakening, a blessing for functional body plumbing, a series of benedictions thanking God for the ability to open our eyes, get out of bed, and put on our clothing.  Jewish  law also mandates the recitation of berakhot  (blessings) before and after food and drink of every kind, and has even established benedictions for seeing a rainbow, hearing thunder, witnessing a shooting star, or seeing the ocean for the first time in a long while.   To view this as the product of a religious tradition overburdened with ritual minutiae misses the point — it isn’t about how the poetry of being furnishes an excuse for the recitation of a formula, but how a liturgy of gratitude can help us overcome the numbing effect of the humdrum, the taking for granted that coats our capacity for amazement with indifference.    The blessing isn’t the words, but our capacity to be surprised, as the philosopher Martin Buber once put it; our recognition of the sublime poetry of God’s world in real time.

Those who cultivate the path of wonder in the here and now are often the people most aware of life’s fragility, its ephemeral quality.  The sunset we contemplate in awe cannot be frozen in time; the sky darkens and the colors fade.  We may yet be privileged to witness an incredible sunset tomorrow, but it will somehow be different.  This sunset, this day, this moment will never ever come again.  They cannot be held, only savored and released, perhaps remembered.  The truly grateful person may sometimes be wistful, but isn’t bitter at an inability to hold on to what was never his to begin with.  Instead, in each and every moment lived in deep appreciation there is a glimpse of the Eternal, an inexhaustible treasure trove of a world  of possibility renewed each day, each hour, each second . . . in essence, renewed for us each and every time we stop and allow ourselves to be amazed at the mystery of existence.  To utter a blessing  at being is just a gentle reminder that our very being is itself a blessing.

A few lines from William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey come to mind . . .

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

Just this week I was excited to pick up Who I Am, the autobiography of The Who’s lead guitarist, Pete Townshend.  Were I to create a soundtrack of my adolescence, much of the music on it would come from The Who.  As a teenager I identified with them because they were iconoclastic and cynical, yet somehow managed to communicate a belief that the world could be a better place . . . maybe.  They were loud, in-your-face, and famous for destroying instruments (on stage) and their bodies (off stage); still, beneath the veneer of toughness, you could catch glimpses of their vulnerability and idealism.  In short, for a rebellious adolescent with a strong sense of moral rectitude (a.k.a. self-righteousness), the music of The Who resonated deeply.

Even if I no longer play their music very often, I remain fond of The Who and still believe their 1973 rock opera Quadrephenia one of the best rock albums of all time.  It is the story of a teenager named Jimmy caught in a web of confusing and contradictory impulses and desires. He’s a tough guy, yet a hopeless romantic —  by turns a beggar, a hypocrite, and a lunatic.  In response to the question, “Who are you?” (ironically, the title of a later Who album), Jimmy has multiple answers.

There is no more fundamental question than this: Who are You?  Indeed, it’s the very first question that God asks a human being.  After Adam and Eve eat from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and their eyes are opened, “They heard the sound of the Lord God moving about in the garden at the breezy time of day; and the man and his wife hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.  The Lord God called out to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you (ayekkah)?’” (Genesis 3:9).

But read in context God’s question is not a simple query about Adam’s whereabouts.  Rabbi Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenberg, the 19^th century author of the commentary ha-K’tav v’ha-Kabbalah, points out that in Hebrew, had God wanted to ascertain Adam’s physical locale (like God would need to ask!), the biblical text should have used the word eifo rather than ayekkah.  The latter term connotes an inquiry about state of mind, not venue.  Where is your head at?  What have you become?  Now that you’ve eaten from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, who are you, Adam?

Three little words . . . but hardly a simple question.  Who I am today may not be the same as yesterday and surely different than tomorrow.  I am different in front of the congregation than in front of my children; different with my colleagues than with my congregants.  And as we surely know, there is a self we only reveal when completely alone, one that we might be ashamed if anyone — even a loved one — were to see.  As for the realm of the unconscious self, there may be still deeper levels of identity of which we are scarcely aware or entirely clueless.  Who are you?  To answer the question takes a lifetime and then some; though it surely has an answer, it may well be that only God fully knows it.

Within seconds a smartphone in the palm of my hand can find out the height of Mount Everest to the nearest foot or tell me the difference between a Brooklyn egg cream and a Manhattan egg cream (chocolate vs. vanilla syrup).  Not surprisingly, then, the enormous difficulty in grappling with the world’s simplest, oldest and most important question doesn’t sit well with our PDQ-if-not-sooner, 4G mentality.  Google the question “Who are you?” . . . and your first hit will be a YouTube video of The Who playing their 1978 song of the same name!

The night before last I watched the Vice-Presidential debate.  Much of it was the predictable mud-slinging.  But then, with a few minutes remaining, moderator Martha Raddatz asked the following: “I want to talk to you very briefly, before we go to closing statements, about your own personal character. If you are elected, what could you both give to this country as a man, as a human being, that no one else could?”  I held my breath, for this was a kind of “Who are you?” question, an opening for honest self-reflection, a moment of openness and sharing.

Or not.  Predictably, both candidates declined the offer to transcend the world of the sound-byte.  Congressman Ryan’s responded:  “What you need are people who, when they say they’re going to do something, they go do it. What you need are, when people see problems, they offer solutions to fix those problems. We’re not getting that.”  When Raddatz asked Vice-President Biden the same question, she added, “ .  . . I’m going to keep you to about 15 seconds here.”  Really?  15 seconds to answer “Who are you as a human being?”  Not surprisingly, Biden began by complaining that Ryan received 40 seconds to answer . . .

I know all about elevator speeches.  You should be able to compress a message or a pitch into 30 seconds.  But human beings aren’t products to be sold, they aren’t mission statements or advertisements. Martha Raddatz’s question was a great one, but the fact that she expected the candidates to answer it in 15 (or 40) seconds points to the fact she was fishing for a sound-byte, not a real response.  That the candidates didn’t bat an eyelash in tackling the question and that neither remotely addressed it really isn’t so surprising, either.  Perhaps the only shocking thing is that few people seemed to pick up on the profundity of the question, the ridiculous manner in which it was posed, and the fact that both candidates side-stepped it.  Have we become so anesthetized, so immune to life’s most demanding query?

A tale is told about one of the Hasidic masters, Rabbi Naftali Tzvi, better known as the Ropschitzer Rebbe (1760-1827).  Late one evening, the Rebbe was walking through his village when he met up with the night watchman patrolling the quiet streets of the town.  “Who are you? For whom do you work?”  asked the curious rabbi.  The watchman answered and then inquired the same in turn.  The words struck the rabbi like an arrow shaft.  “I am not working for anybody just yet,” he barely managed to say.  After a long silence in which the two continued to walk side by side,  Rabbi Naftali asked the watchman, “Would you be willing to come and work for me?” “I should like to,” the man replied, “but what would be my job?”  “To accompany me through my day and to ask me now and again, ‘Who are you?  For whom do you work?’”

Unlike the Ropschitzer Rebbe, we may not have a night watchman to ask us that all-important question.  But surely in the occasional moment of stillness we can hear the distant echo of God’s question to the first human being.  “Who are You?”  Think carefully.  Now take a lifetime to answer.

There’s an old joke about a camper who, having experienced each Saturday night the magic of a lakeside havdalah, is saddened that he’ll no longer be able to participate in the ceremony after returning home.  “I’d love to do havdalah with my family each week,” he says wistfully, “too bad we don’t have a lake in our backyard!”

Parents often ask me about the “secret” of prayer at Ramah.  Why are kids so enthusiastic about a camp that requires 50 minutes of daily prayer and more than 2 ½ hours of worship each Shabbat morning?  There must be something special going on – couldn’t we import Ramah’s secret ingredient and utilize it to the benefit of our own synagogue’s worship?

Havdalah and Kabbalat Shabbat at camp are truly inspirational moments.  Some of the magic comes from the beauty of the setting, some from the sound of hundreds of voices joining together in song.   The counselors in charge of daily services, moreover, do strive to spice up weekday davening with fun and creative elements.

But if you really want to know the truth, there is no secret recipe.  Indeed, worship at Ramah is highly regimented in many ways.  Boys over the age of bar mitzvah have to wear tallit and tefillin, and may not remove them until the last note of Adon Olam.  All page announcements are made in Hebrew, while none of the liturgy is recited in English.  There are new melodies, of course, but a good chunk of the liturgical music is familiar to me from my own days as a Ramah camper more than thirty years ago.  Creativity is welcomed, but only to the extent that it does not interfere with the recitation of the structured, traditional liturgy, which remains the backbone of Ramah-style davening seven days a week.

What makes worship at Ramah different is the totality of communal experience.  I have no doubt in my mind that, if campers were given a choice between soccer, basketball, sleeping late, or praying, the vast majority of them wouldn’t choose worship.  Walk around camp during services, however, and the place is a ghost town – the basketball courts are empty, the canoes are beached, the paths are silent.  Every person is at a service because davening at Ramah is not an elective, but rather an expected and integral element of daily life.

Woody Allen once said, “Seventy percent of success in life is just showing up.”  That certainly is part of Ramah’s success.  When an entire group is present for any activity, worship included, it generates a sense of belonging, of bonding, and of community that simply can’t exist when only a handful show up.  Take two identical Shabbat services – fill half the seats at one and pack the house at the other, and you’ll discern a palpably greater sense of connection at the latter.  Davening at Ramah  works, not primarily because each service is deeply inspirational or innovative, but because there is a pervasive sense of belonging.  Ramah reminds us that often the way to connection with God travels by way of connection with community.

This observation was echoed recently by Synagogue 3000, a study of more than 1,200 Reform and Conservative synagogues around the country, which concluded: “Surprisingly (perhaps), among both Reform and Conservative congregations, more innovative, joyful and innovative services (at least, according to the leaders’ perceptions) attract no more worshippers than do the more “routine” sorts of services.  In short, with respect to generating higher attendance at services, the underlying interest of the “consumer” may matter more than the attractiveness of the “product.”

This isn’t to argue against the importance of innovation and creativity – quite to contrary – but it does point to the truth that novelty alone will never pack a shul week after week.  The most powerful reason for going to shul remains a sense of inner obligation, a need to stand up and be counted, a palpable sense of gravitational pull to be a part of the Jewish community.  If you were to ask the campers at Ramah why they come to services,  most would answer it’s because they don’t have a choice.  Yet with that 100% rate of attendance comes a sense of communal affiliation that creates a momentum all its own.  Sensing the value doesn’t emerge from why they walk through the door, but through what they experience once they’re present day after day, week after week.

Our challenge isn’t figuring out how to bring home a lake . . . but rather how to duplicate that sense of going to shul just because it’s Shabbat, knowing that all one’s friends will be there for the very same reason.

When Susan and I arrive at Ramah Darom each summer for our two-week stint on staff, we encounter a small ritual of welcome I have come to appreciate deeply.  After we check-in with the camp office and find out where we’ll be staying, a staff member meets us at our room to unlock the door.  There’s nothing unusual about that, of course . . . except for the fact that we don’t hold on to the key; in other words, the door remains open for the duration of our stay at camp.

This is true of every bunk and every staffer’s room — Ramah is an absolutely keyless community.  At home it would be unthinkable to leave the house without locking the door and arming the alarm.  At camp, however, I think nothing of leaving my wallet, smartphone and laptop unattended all day long, confident that, when I return at day’s end, they’ll be right where I left them.  Do the campers and staff members possess more integrity than the general population?  Very likely.  Still, all it would take is one dishonest person and a few hours to dismantle the entire structure upon which this trust is built.  Yet year after year, we arrive at camp, unlock our doors, and take it for granted that no one will violate our privacy or pilfer our belongings.  Why do we readily trust people at camp when we take so many elaborate precautions in every other facet of our lives?

The answer is as simple as it is profound: the power of community to create its own expectations.  Because a sense of security is deeply embedded within the cultural fabric of camp, the cardinal sin may not be theft per se, but a breaking of the social contract that allows us to relax our vigilance and trust our neighbors.  Given the absence of that sentiment in virtually every other area of life, the Ramah community generates a set of ethical norms that people generally uphold, if only because it would be unthinkable not to.

Camp is an idyllic place; those who come here are part of a self-selected group living in some degree of isolation from the world outside.  Yet I can’t help but think there’s a lesson to be learned.  Perhaps any community could — if it really wanted to — create a set of  expectations  absolutely vital to the collective and individual identity of its membership.   If we were to adopt Ramah’s approach to community-building, what would Shabbat look like at the Jacksonville Jewish Center?  How would we approach synagogue philanthropy or the gift of our time and selves as shul volunteers?  As a congregation what are the values so integral to our existence that the breach of them would be unthinkable?

When I leave camp I will return to the practice of locking my door, yet carry home with me a belief that we can leave our hearts open  to the infinite potential we have as a community to ask more and expect more of ourselves and each other.

I’m not much of a gambler, but I’d be willing to bet that those reading the title of this post are thinking Karen is a woman’s name . . . which it obviously is.  What most of us may not realize is that the term also refers to the third largest ethnic group in Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar in southeastern Asia), numbering approximately 7.5 million.

Until a few weeks ago, I had never heard of the Karen.  I certainly knew nothing about the ethnic fault lines within Burmese society or the violent clashes over the past two centuries between various factions within the country.   And if someone had told me that over a period of several decades some 200,000 Karen had been driven from their homes and villages as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing, only to wind up in refugee camps in Thailand, I would have stared blankly: Karen who?

Last night, a group of 12th graders in our Siyyum program joined me as we traveled to a modest apartment complex off Phillips Highway, just north of Emerson.  There we met members of the Kwae family, Karen refugees granted political asylum in the United States . . . one of the lucky few among the world’s refugees (little known fact: only 1% of all refugees are granted asylum by the world’s nations).   The meeting between ourselves and the Kwae family was the culmination of many months of discussion and research among our 12th graders, who were charged with the task of designing a project of tikkun olam (social action) within the Jacksonville community.  Our conversations led us to World Relief, an international organization that guides the resettlement of refugees around the globe.   Each year in Jacksonville alone, the local affiliate of World Relief helps to acclimate hundreds of newcomers to our city, and a world that is utterly and frighteningly unfamiliar.

Imagine never flying on a plane before.  Imagine landing in a country where you can neither speak nor read the language.  Imagine encountering indoor plumbing, a supermarket or a washing machine for the very first time.   You and I can’t . . . but members of the Kwae family can and have.

Through World Relief, these refugees attend English classes, learn how to navigate public transportation, open a bank account, and find a job.  Their children enroll in local schools, and these families slowly begin to travel the road toward social integration in the tapestry of America, whose very fabric is woven from successive waves of immigration.

Over the course of the coming weeks our 12th graders will help the Kwae family by extending a helping hand and making them feel welcome.  We will teach them how to type and use a microwave; we’ll help them practice their English, and take them for a visit to the zoo and the beach — two places they have never been.  We will play with their children, ages 5, 3 and 1, and if we are successful, they will feel a little less like strangers in a strange land.  As the first synagogue group in Jacksonville to work with World Relief I’m proud of our 12th graders, and you should be, too.

I can see myself in the reflection of these refugees’ lives.  The Karen people come from a vastly different background than my own, yet there are shared echoes of experience.  As the grandchild of immigrants who passed through Ellis Island with thousands of others, I find myself thinking about  the challenges my grandparents faced as new arrivals more than 90 yeas ago.

Equally important, as Jews having just completed our annual celebration of freedom at Passover, it is vital we remind ourselves that the story of the Israelites didn’t end with their crossing of the Sea. Time and again in the desert they expressed a preference for the certainty of enslavement over the insecurity of freedom. True liberation is about so much more than the mere absence of slavery; it requires a readiness to face the vicissitudes of an unpredictable and complex world.   Against the background of our ancestors’ Exodus from Egypt, we can better appreciate the spirit of a Burmese family and their courageous leap of faith into the unknown.

There is an apochryphal story told about Susannah Heschel, a Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.  According to this urban legend, during the 1980s she was lecturing about Jewish feminism  in a Miami synagogue when an elderly rabbi in the audience stood up and said, “A woman belongs on the bimah like an orange belongs on the seder plate.”  To show solidarity with the aspirations of women who wanted more access to leadership roles in Jewish life, Heschel and other feminists began putting oranges on a seder plates at Passover.

In actuality, Heschel came up with the idea as a result of meeting Jewish activists who placed crusts of bread on their seder plates to symbolize the marginalization of women and the exclusion of gays and lesbians from the Jewish community.  While she thought the idea to be a powerful one conceptually, as an observant Jew there was no way she was going to put hametz on her seder table!  Instead, she opted to use an orange (actually, a tangerine the first year).  Says Heschel, “Everyone at the seder got a section of it, and as we ate it we would spit out the seeds in solidarity with homosexuals — the seeds represented homophobia.”

Just recently I heard a suggestion to place an apple on the seder plate to symbolize the unfair and unsafe labor practices used in the manufacture of Apple computers in China.   As we approach a holiday termed by our sages, z’man heiruteinu, the season of our freedom, we need to reflect on what freedom means to us as Jews in the early years of the 21st century.  To what extent are we accessories to oppression by dint of our material acquisitions?  In a consumer-driven, global economy is it even possible to shop without unwittingly supporting some transgression against the environment or the rights of workers in third-world countries?   What does freedom mean when our behavior contributes to the ongoing enslavement of others?

Dr. Abraham Joshua Heschel (Susannah’s father) once wrote, “The most commanding idea that Judaism dares to think is that freedom, not necessity, is the source of all being.  As a free being the Jew must accept an enormous responsibility.  The first thing a Jew is told is: You can’t let yourself go; get into harness, carry the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven.  He has been given life and death, good and evil, and is urged to choose, to discriminate.  Yet freedom is not only the ability to choose and to act, but also the ability to will, to love.  The predominant feature of Jewish teaching throughout the ages is a sense of constant obligation.  We are not taught to feel accused, to bear a sense of boundless guilt.  We are asked to feel elated, bred to meet the tasks that never end.  Every child is a prince; every man is obliged to feel that the world was created for his sake.  Man is not the measure of all things, but the means by which to accomplish all tasks.”

At services the first morning of Passover, I will talk about the ways in which we choose to enslave or liberate ourselves by our decisions as consumers.   By living in the world, it may not be possible to avoid all taint of unwitting collusion in unethical labor practices; on the other hand, it is both cynical and spurious to maintain that it’s an all-or-nothing proposition.  Though very challenging, it may just be possible to eat the apple on the seder plate . . . without choking on the seeds.

In the meantime, you may want to check the link for Goodguide.com found on the right-hand side of this page; it offers food for thought as to one way way in which we can link consumption to conscience.  This year we are enslaved by what we don’t know about the purchase we make, next year may awareness help us — and others —  to achieve greater freedom.  Hag sameah v’Kasher, a joyous and meaningful Passover to one and all!

Over the years I’ve given hundreds of charges to b’nai mitzvah.  While I strive to make each one uniquely meaningful, there is something especially wonderful — and daunting — about speaking to your own child on the bimah the morning of his bar mitzvah.  My thanks to Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, whose wisdom inspired my words to Avichai.

P.S. That the New England Patriots decisively defeated Tim Tebow and the Broncos this past Saturday night does not change the message in the least — on the contrary, it strengthens its meaning.

Avichai,

The day before yesterday USA Today reported a poll in which 43% of respondents answered that Tim Tebow is the beneficiary of divine intervention.  While those surveyed didn’t explain what they meant, I assume they believe that because Tebow frequently prays, does righteous deeds and gives God a lot of free publicity, the Almighty rewards him with completed passes and yardage.

I’m not sure that God works quite that way.

Tebow himself would be the first to say that people have it backwards; being a talented quarterback is not God’s reward, but a means to an end.  I think Tim Tebow and I would both agree that God puts us on earth for a reason.  And should Tom Brady and the Patriots squash the Broncos tonight, it won’t mean that Tebow didn’t take advantage of enough conversions on the field, religious speaking, or that Bill Belichik prayed harder.

There are coincidences in life; I’m not prepared to say that every single move we make is shadowed by fate.  Judaism certainly believes in free will.  But I do think some things are bashert, that there are invisible lines connecting us to others which are part of some larger agenda.  We almost never get a glimpse of the hand pulling us, pushing us, sometimes even tripping us.  But once in a rare while, if only for a second, we sense that we’re part of something far larger than ourselves.

Were it not for a conversation your mother struck up with a total stranger in the Ladies Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she would not have found out about the job at St. Ann’s School where she and I first met . . .  if she had gone to the bathroom five minutes later you might not be here today!  If it hadn’t been for your great uncle Ismar’s death in Japan just after World War II, which made Johanna Lubliner, your great-grandmother, determined to re-unite the family in America, my dad might have remained in Palestine, in which case I’d never have been born . . . and you wouldn’t have, either.  For me to speak to you today on this bimah, countless things had to happen over a period of many years – one single difference in the chain of events, and neither of us would be here.  But we are here and that matters.

Avs, it doesn’t matter to God whether or not you believe in God’s existence.  What is absolutely critical is that you know that God believes in you.

Let’s suppose Providence assigns us a part to play – maybe it’s not the part you think you auditioned for; maybe you’d like someone else’s role.  Me?  I sometimes think I should have been a power hitter for the Yankees, but God somehow said, “Look you’re going to be a rabbi, you want the part or not?”

If we choose to play our role to the best of our ability, if we really make it our own, it won’t matter why we didn’t get the part we wanted, but were never supposed to have; we’ll be having too much fun just being ourselves. On the other hand, if we end up pretending to be someone else, we’ll end up being a second-rate actor in a “B” movie of our life story.   It took me a very long time to understand that.

You are left-handed. Your grandfather was a professional trumpet player.  You love basketball and are the youngest player on the JCA Select Team.  You are forgetful.  You are incredibly creative.  You are the son of a rabbi.   These and a billion other things don’t define who you are.  But they are part of you and your resume.  Somehow, they will prepare you for whatever job God has in mind for you.

And that’s the secret of Tim Tebow.  Because he believes that God believes in him, Tebow puts everything into being the best he can be.  Your job in life is not to be a rabbi’s son, anymore than Tim Tebow’s true purpose on earth is to lead the Broncos to a Superbowl.  Win or lose, he’ll live with gratitude and a sense of purpose and blessing.  You see, if you believe that God believes in you, you will always find the inner strength to believe in yourself, and the strength to make even the rough times opportunities to grow.

If God believes in you, then Ima and I would never dream of doing less.  And we will always love you very, very much!

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty.  You thought it would be quite simple; it is extraordinarily complicated.  You thought it would be terrible; it is merely squalid and boring.  You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day.  Mean disasters happen and rob you of food.  You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a litre of milk, and are boiling it over the spirit lamp.  While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give the bug a flick with your nail, and it falls, plop! straight into the milk.  There is nothing for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.  You discover what it is like to be hungry.  With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into shop windows.  Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles.  You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.  This — one could describe it further, but it is all in the same style — is life on six francs a day.  It is the suburbs, as it were, of poverty.

–George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

Though nearly 80 years have passed since the author of Animal Farm and 1984 chronicled his own experiences with life at the margin, Orwell’s observations about poverty are no less true today than when he first set them down on paper. Those of us blessed with the freedom to fill our shopping carts from any supermarket shelf we choose aren’t likely to think about food stamps very much.  It’s even more probable that we don’t realize the significant constraints placed on those for whom food stamps is the difference between eating and going hungry.

For five days Rabbi Olitzky, Hazzan Holzer and I opted to live on a food budget equivalent in cost to what we would have received were we eligible to receive food stamps.  According to the guidelines of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) of the US Department of Agriculture, the governmental agency that oversees food stamps, a one person-household earning an annual net income of more than $10,896 would be ineligible to receive funding through SNAP! What would a person’s life be like if s/he netted, say, $11,000 per year?  Yet as far as the Federal government is concerned, this individual would be deemed “too well off” to receive nutritional assistance . . .

As for those eligible for SNAP, assistance for a family of four translates into a maximum of $668 per month: $167 per person @ $5.56 per day, or $1.86 per meal.  It is certainly possible to live on five dollars and change a day.  One way of doing so is to frequent the fast food chains where over-processed, sodium-filled and fat-drenched dollar menus invite consumers to obesity, high blood pressure and dangerous levels of cholesterol.  If you must live on just a few dollars a day for food, so-called “convenience food” is more than the occasional treat or lunch grabbed on the go.  It is a way of life for those lacking the time, transportation and money to shop and cook for their families.  It’s no coincidence that inner city neighborhoods are filled with fast food joints of every description.

If you’d prefer to shun the path of fast food, the full service supermarket is often an unattainable destination.  Generally located as they are in more genteel zip codes, they require access to a car.  For example, were you to live in the New Town neighborhood of Jacksonville and wanted to shop at a real supermarket without having a car at your disposal, you’d have to ride public transportation for an hour in each direction, changing buses at least once.  As for toting your bags, you’d be limited to whatever you could shlep on and off the bus.  Sadly, those who could most benefit from the competitive pricing and numerous choices of large food retailers are the ones who find them least accessible.  Instead they are forced to shop at local bodegas, convenience stores where the options are always limited and the prices invariably higher.  Ironically, buying inexpensive food costs more if you are poor!

Being able to shop at Publix on San Jose Boulevard I was fortunate enough to have more purchasing power.  I split my money between dried beans, rice, barley and pasta, and opted to focus on fresh fruits and vegetables.  My good luck included a special on cantaloupes — two for three dollars, a pound of raw kale for a dollar, ten pounds of potatoes for five bucks.  With no more than $28 for five days, however, fresh meat and fish were out of the question, as were snacks of all kinds.  I was able to afford a package of hekhshered cheese, and yes, I splurged on instant coffee — my one indulgence.  Forget about the organics I normally prefer to buy when possible . . . as for Kashrut, there was simply no way to afford the vast majority of hekhshered foods in the kosher aisle.  A package of pareve cookies at $6 a pop was more than the equivalent of an entire day’s worth of food!

These are the questions I found myself asking throughout the challenge . . . What will it take to build supermarkets in poorer neighborhoods?  Why should so many of the healthiest items be the ones least obtainable on a fixed income?  How can we imbue food stamp programs with a deeper appreciation of what it is to nourish one’s body and soul?  What things can the private sector do to supplement SNAP and add some variety, color and joy to the dinner tables of those who live at the periphery?  How might we regularly include awareness of those who are needy on our own shopping lists?  Why do I have to eat the same thing over and over?

The food stamp challenge was a humbling experience, one that made me ashamed of the abundance that I so often take for granted, the leftovers that get wasted in my home, the times when I peruse my overstocked pantry but don’t find anything I care to eat at that moment.  I cannot begin to imagine what life would be like over the long-term if the decision to buy my child a cake for his birthday might require that I skip lunches for a week, or if I were compelled to rely on dried beans and rice day after day.  Kashrut notwithstanding, faced with the grinding despair of near poverty over the long term, I, too, might eventually succumb to life in the fast-food lane.  If I did, could you blame me?