Rabbi Noah Farkas Sermons

My great grandfather, my Zaddie Morris, may he rest in peace, was a tie maker. He worked in Manhattan and lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side. He would come home every night to his wife Esther and their five sons, and soak his hands in rose oil to keep them soft and smooth, so he wouldn’t scratch the Italian silk of his craft. Every Friday morning, he and my Bubbie Esther would wake up their boys from the single bed they shared many hours before the dawn. She needed that bed, warmed by a night’s sleep, to give room for the five small braided challot she placed under to blankets to rise. In the afternoon, after the boys got home from school, Bubbie Esther would have five freshly baked challot, sitting on the table, along with a few vegetables, maybe a potato or two and two chickens cut into small pieces. The four oldest boys, my Zaddie Milton, may he rest in peace, among them, would each take one challah and the small care package of food and take it to the other boroughs of New York City, where they delivered the Shabbat meals to the rest of the family. You see, Zaddie Morris was the only one who found a job, it was the 1930s and the Great Depression had hit my immigrant family very hard. His wages supported his whole family, from his brother in Brooklyn to his sister in the Bronx. Two chickens were all Bubbie Esther could afford, for five families. And so it was with us. I wouldn’t be standing here today in this wonderful community, if it weren’t for the hard work that my Zaddie Morris put in, with his perfectly smooth hands, or the way Bubbie Esther kneaded the challah with her callused hands on cold winter mornings. And I feel blessed for that.

I can’t help but wonder what my Zaddie Morris would think about our world today. Certainly he would marvel at the internet, cell phones, and even television. More poignantly, he wouldn’t recognize our food today. As a culture who loves food, we Jews know how to eat. But, what would my Zaddie think about sushi, pad thai, Top Ramen, breakfast burritos, Tofurkey, fakon – fake bacon, microwavable steak, or even a microwave; how about fast food restaurants, vending machines, or entire magazines, TV programs, and even cable networks dedicated to all-things food. Could he have imagined a world where there’s a show that pits contestants against each other to cook a five-course gourmet meal in under an hour all with a secret ingredient? Or the show dedicated to building the most bodacious wedding cake, or a competition of the quintessence of baked delight: The cupcake. Not just for toddler parties anymore, this delectable dainty is now the zenith of the culinary world, piled high with frosting, candy, and even flecks of gold. If you travel to a hotel in Las Vegas, right now, you too can savor the flavor of the Decadence d’Or, basically a chocolate cupcake, for the low cost of $750. I don’t think he’d recognize a dessert that cost more than his mortgage.

In my Zaddie’s day, if he wanted a strawberry milkshake, he would go to an ice cream store and take cream, strawberries and milk and shake them together. Today, our food really isn’t food. Here are a few ingredients of a strawberry milkshake from a local fast food restaurant: Amyl acetate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, diacetyl, ethyl methylphenylglycidate… and 40 other ingredients I can’t pronounce, none of which say milk or strawberries. The choices we have made as a nation created an abundant food economy, almost $1 trillion in food production, but to get there we created a more efficient, industrialized food system – one that separates eaters from growers; consumers from the land, and those who have the greatest access to food from those who do not. And we’re suffering for it.

Like the story of the teacher who brought fresh food to class. Holding a cauliflower aloft, she asked the class, “Do you know what this is?”, and not a single student of this second grade class could identify it. Holding up a pepper, he asked, “Where does this come from?” One industrious student answered, “From the grocery store!” Right! And before that? No answer.

Or the story of the 4th grade Jewish Day School class here in Los Angeles, where the teacher asked the students about the holiday meal they ate last night. Each child, in turn, answered except for one. The teacher asked the boy again. No answer. Believing he was insolent and disrespectful, she sent the child to the back of the room for the rest of the class. When finally confronted by the teacher at the end of the lesson, she yelled at him and said, “Why did you not answer me when I asked what you had for dinner last night?” The boy, holding back tears, simply answered, “Because it wasn’t my turn to eat.”

Food is important to us as a Jewish culture. We all know the old yarn, “They oppressed us, God saved us, Let’s eat.” We know that you can’t have a bris or baby naming without food, you can’t have a wedding without food, and you can’t have a shiva minyan without food. You can’t make kiddish on Shabbat without food. We’re not just the people of the book; we’re the people of the kishkes! At the center of it all is our central food ethic, kashrut. More than milk and meat, kashrut symbolizes everything Jewish. We look at our food and say if it is kosher or not. We look at our Torah’s and ask if they are kosher or not. We look at our mikva’ot, and ask if they are kosher. Even when someone does something a little nefarious, we say, “That doesn’t sound kosher.” Kashrut is the bridge that blends our food ethics into the rest of our lives. It’s what makes something not only good and right, but Jewish.

But who have we become in order to eat our food? We are all dieting. We spend our money and resources perfecting cupcakes with gold leaf. We don’t know what’s in our food. We pay slave wages and create unhealthy working conditions to those who bring us our food. Our children don’t know where vegetables come from, or worse: they eat toothpaste for dinner because mom and dad have to ration the food. Who have we become? Can we really say that this is kosher?

I want to draw three portraits today, highlighting the absurdity and perfidy of our food system, with hopes of outlining an ancient solution to this very modern problem. Let’s take a trip to the grocery store, shall we? As I drive on Ventura Boulevard, on my way to the grocery store, I pass billboards and buses usually depicting a pretty-looking woman wearing pants twice her size, saying, “I lost 180 pounds without dieting!” I pass three plastic surgery clinics all advertising the latest in lap-band technology and gastric bypass surgery, “Ensuring a more beautiful you.” We are an abundant country. Every parcel of open land is cultivated as farmland, allowing us to produce more food than any other country. Our grocery stores are full to the brim with food. We can’t help ourselves and overindulge taking what we want, when we want it, because it’s already there right in front of us. But this abundance is not without its consequences. We all want to diet and lose weight, because there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who will die this year because of what their food has wrought on their bodies. More Americans will die this year from heart disease, diabetes, and other diet-based diseases than violent crime and car accidents combined. Who have we become?

Yet, nearly 50 million of us don’t know where our next meal is coming from. That’s the highest rate of food insecurity since my Zaddie’s lifetime. In California, there are over 6,000,000 people who are food insecure. In L.A .County, once considered the hunger capital of the United States, 17.5% of all Angelinos, are hungry, and 20% of all children are hungry. Here in Encino, in this neighborhood, our congressional district, there are 105,000 people who are guessing about their next meal and in the district next door another 124,000 people. Of all of the hungry in our community, approximately 1 in 4 makes too much money to qualify for government food assistance programs. That means they’re too rich to get government help and too poor to make ends meet. These folks are caught in the middle and hide in plain sight, in our day schools, in shuls, in our community centers. The hungry are not just living in south LA. They are right here, they are us.

I’m reminded of the section of our Talmud where Rabbi Yehudah, enters the shul and sees two young people playing soccer with a loaf of bread. Upon seeing this he becomes angry. Barking out his words, Rabbi Yehudah curses the people for wasting food, causing a plague to fall upon Israel. At that moment, his students beg him to walk to the other end of the market where he sees the poor of the city swarming over a small pile of dried dates, clambering to feed themselves. Rabbi Yehuda’s face draws long and he prays for rain, a symbol in the Talmud for God’s compassion.6

Like Rabbi Yehudah, we walk through our community and only see our end of the market. We can’t see the disparity between what we have and those who are hidden from us do not have. But once we take a wider view, once we see our world through God’s eyes, we can see the absurdity of a world that is at the same time overfed and underfed. We have to say, “That’s not kosher.”

Once we walk into our supermarket, we see perfectly aligned fruits and vegetables and beautifully marbled meats arranged in exact rows under plastic. But behind that simple, colorful display is a world of hurt. There is a long distance from the field to the fork, and along that food way many, many hands are involved in food production. Immokalee is the tomato capital of the United States. Between December and May, as much as 90 percent of the fresh domestic tomatoes we eat come from south Florida, and Immokalee is home to one of the area’s largest communities of farm workers. Since 1970, their wages have dropped to almost nothing, and living conditions are something out of a Steinbeck novel with workers living in the backs of trucks or in converted shipping containers without electricity or running water. Who have we become?

In 2008, the kosher meat plant in Postville, Iowa was raided by the FBI, the DEA, and ICE. They found nearly a 1000 violations of labor practices, arresting some 389 undocumented workers and another score of under-age workers. They found supervisors detaining workers after hours, demanding bribes for promotions, and even denying medical treatment for injured meat cutters. The Rubashkin’s label, who oversaw the plant and before the raid produced 40 percent of the meat Jews eat in America, never apologized for their labor practices, never felt what they did was wrong, and certainly never claimed that their food was not kosher. How can this be? Is this what needs to happen to provide brisket for our tables? We have to say, “That’s not kosher.”

Turning away from the produce section of the grocery store, we see rows and rows and rows of brightly colored boxes, bottles, and packages, each claiming that they hold within them, some form of food. Processed food makes up to 60% of American diets. There are over 6,000 chemicals used to preserve, emulsify, freeze, dehydrate, rehydrate, flavor, texture, and color processed foods. What we know to be food really isn’t food anymore. One of the oldest processed foods in America is Margarine. In many parts of the world, the market share of margarine and spreads has overtaken that of butter. It’s made from margaric acid, a byproduct of certain vegetable oils. Now, Jews love margarine. It’s been a staple in my parent’s house every Friday night for Shabbos dinner. How else are you going to cook for a fleishig meal without margarine? We love margarine so much that in 2008, there were demonstrations because of a margarine shortage on Passover.9 Jews were lining the streets looking for margarine for their seder tables. But margarine is the most politically correct unhealthy food you can buy. Everyone knows that a hot dog is bad for you, and that Soda is bad for you too. But despite claims to contrary, margarine can raise your cholesterol and damages the walls of your blood vessels, the oils that make the base are rancid to begin with and they are mixed with nickel to catalyze the emulsification. It wasn’t until 15 years ago, that margarine was allowed to be dyed yellow in order to compete with butter. My friend, a food activist, once did an experiment. She placed a stick of margarine in the back yard and a stick of butter in back yard. After six hours the butter was crawling with ants, the margarine - nothing. After a day the butter melted and was eaten. The margarine, on the other hand, – not even a fly would land on it. A week went by and the stick of margarine still sat there untouched by nature. That’s because margarine isn’t food. It’s an industrial product that’s made to look like food. Ants won’t eat it, worms won’t eat it, and we shouldn’t eat it. We have to say if our food isn’t food, no matter what it is, “That’s not kosher.”

Each one of these problems: the absurdity of hunger in our abundant culture, the rights of workers who grow, harvest, and cut our food, and the obscurity of ingredients in what we eat, challenges our humanity, our health, and our Judaism. In this crazy world of hunger and abundance, where the disparity between those who have and those who don’t grows wider everyday: where our kids think that vegetables are grown under cellophane in a produce market, or where strawberry milkshakes are not made of strawberries, where 1/5 of our children will go hungry tonight, where our food system is breaking the backs of workers, and where it’s killing us through obesity and disease. We can no longer tolerate simply servicing the outcomes of a broken system; we have to fix the system. We can’t keep eating while others starve. We have to fix the system. We just can’t keep trading our mortality for our expediency. We have to fix the system.

All generations take old questions and grapple with them anew. Rav Kook, the first Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel, wrote, “The task of the Jew is to make what is old, new, and what is new, holy.” Jews of our-time live in a multi-cultural nation where we borrow from all others freely. In America, since my Zaddie’s time, the freedom we all share allows us to redefine and remix our culture over and over again. As an evolving religious people, what anchors us in a sea of change is the natural drive to seek authenticity and alignment between our actions and our values. This applies to eating too. When it comes to putting food on our tables, we should ask: What’s really in it. Who worked to bring me this food? How many hours and miles did it travel? Did anyone or any animal suffer for me to eat? And most importantly, who is not sitting at the table with me tonight? These are the authentic questions that in our time we must ask when we go out to eat or choose where to buy our meat and vegetables. We want to sow our values into all of our choices, including the values of health, justice, the environment, and our own spiritual conscience.

Looking back, we can then say with a whole heart, that when we throw off our blindness to the disparity of access to fresh, wholesome food we can say it’s not only unethical, it’s not kosher. If we look at the system that kills bio-diversity, distances our children from the land, while shaving years of their life expectancy, we don’t only say that’s not right, we say it’s not kosher. We see that half our food is wasted and we say that’s not kosher. We see the suffering of a veal calf or a fryer chicken, and we say that’s not kosher. We see the suffering of the harvester of our food but who can’t even feed his own family and we say that’s not kosher. We see the poor, the stranger, and the widow outside while others eat a $750 cupcake. We say that’s not kosher.

It is treif to close our eyes to a hungry child.

It is treif to deafen our ears to the cry for healthier food.

It is treif to remain silent when so much of system is broken.

We must open our eyes and see what is unseen. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught that Jews don’t just look at things, we look through them. We look at a Torah and contemplate its depths and history. We look at our world with amazement, because of the depth of knowledge that is sown into the nature’s template. We look at moments in time, not for the fact of their passing, but for value they give us to transform ourselves into better people. He called this, “depth theology.” We need “Deep Kashrut.” We cannot just look at our food; we have to look through our food. Beyond the material nature of the thing to its ingredients, to its history, its depth, and to its ability to empower or impoverish the hands that brought it from the field to the fork. By integrating our values together, we renew our whole selves. Suddenly, eating a loaf of bread is not mundane activity. When we look through our daily bread to its depths, it becomes a willful act of spiritual audacity, truly warranting the heart and mind to give blessings and gratitude. By experience the depth of our food, by giving sight us this new way of seeing, we make the old new, and make the new holy.

This type of seeing draws the contours of a new Kashrut for the 21st century. This most ancient of mitzvot, can have deep and abiding spiritual value. 1,000 years ago, it was Maimonides who said, that the purpose of kashrut is to “purify the Jewish soul.” Let us take his words and renew them on this day of renewal, by opening the eyes of blinded eyes and see that all of our actions have consequences. Let us see those who are pushed to margins. Let us see how our food can kill us. Let us see who we have become, and let us say that we will not continue on this path. Baruch Ata Adonai, pokeach evrim. Praised are you Adonai, Ruler of All, who opens our eyes.

We have to create the opportunities to make those who are hidden and bring them into plain sight. Here at VBS, we reopened a food bank three years ago to work with SOVA. We are on track this year to feed 500 families this year. We launched an organic garden, to teach our children about the origins of their food, and whose produce our Day School kids use to feed the hungry. This garden was just awarded the prestigious “People’s Gardens” status by Michelle Obama. Our Feeding the Hungry program is on track to serve nearly 3,000 meals this year. And our Imagine LA initiative is lifting an entire family off the streets and out of poverty. For those who have participated and lead these initiatives, I thank you, the people who are helped thank you, and most of all the Jewish people thank you for everything that you’ve done. I’d definitely say, “That’s kosher.”

Beyond VBS, the movement for a new sense of food, a new Kashrut, is already starting in homes and gardens across the city, by rabbis, teachers, and activists. This movement represents the rising tide of emerging Jewish identity in the 21st century. It is growing on the human scale by planting, teaching, and seeding a new food movement that recognizes an integrated Jewish food ethic. Nationally, an entire ecosystem of organizations is emerging. Locally, a group of us who work on these issues call ourselves Netiya. It means planting and growing in Hebrew. It comes from the second chapter of Genesis, when God planted a garden in Eden and placed humanity in it to watch over the bounty. It is the ultimate act of Divine/human partnership that seeks to cultivate the spirit, ingenuity, and will that will lift us up, and lift up those around us. Netiya is gaining strength daily. Already over 20 local schools and synagogues including VBS are members. We are planting gardens, teaching courses on food and nutrition, and working with the Veterans Affairs Administration to feed and teach many of their disabled residents. Netiya is creating partnerships between Jews and non-Jews to buy local organic produce for our families. Netiya is partnering with the Jewish Free Loan Society to give out Netiya Green Loans to individuals and institutions to amortize the cost of building gardens.

If you feel the absurdity of this brokenness of our food system like I do. If you want to know what you put in your body like I do. If you know that our religion is spiritually real and alive enough to speak to these issues like I do. If you want to integrate your values together to create an authentic, meaningful, and spiritually alive Jewish life like I do. If you see the unseen in our community like I do. Then join this growing movement of Jews that seek to align our hearts with our tradition, and our tradition with our values.

Here’s how. Take a minute to look at the ingredients of your food. The simple rule is, the less the better. If you don’t recognize or can’t pronounce an ingredient, chances are it’s not so good for you. Plug into a local farmer’s market or buy a share of a local farmer’s yield. You can connect here to our program if you wish. You can plant your own garden and donate the produce to a local low income community or shelter. You can glean your fruit trees and do the same. You can eat less meat. You can choose to pay a penny more for local and organic produce. You can insist that your family function is catered with local sustainable produce. You can ensure that leftovers are donated. You can join a community of others who are taking an ancient kashrut and making it new, and taking our food choices and making them holy. After the holiday, come speak with me about joining this community, to feed the hungry, to volunteer in our food bank. Or join the larger conversation on the Netiya Facebook page. Together we can grow a more restorative, just, and environmentally friendly food system, a food system that we can truly say is kosher.

Today we stand at the turning, when one year gives way to the next. We stand as witnesses to our lives, the culmination of our choices of deeds of days gone by. From the small tenement on the Lower East Side, to a large ballroom in Encino, we stand as witnesses to our fathers and mothers, our forefathers and foremothers. Their dreams are now our choices. And we stand as witness for our children, and dream for them the world perfected. We gather ourselves together with resolve at the beginning of this New Year, to grow together, and work for a better future.

Shanah Tovah.