Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

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Category: ethics

Putting local food on your plate … when you can

July 31, 2011 /

I’ve just recently returned from a Summer vacation in Ireland (hence the lack of blogging for a while).  As I so often do when I’m away, I took advantage of eating local foods whenever I could. Its part of the joy of visiting another place to not only sample the regional cuisine, but to look for locally grown ingredients in the food too – its always the freshest and the flavors are almost always vastly superior.  In Ireland that included eating some of the juiciest, sweetest strawberries I’ve had in a very long time, from a local Kerry farm.  And it included the joys of eating fish that had arrived at the dock of the very town we stayed in (Dingle) the very day we were eating it.

Arriving back in Connecticut, its the heart of the Summer farm produce season.  The tomatoes on our own deck taste so much better than anything available in the supermaket, and the fresh basil and parsley is now in abundance.  Living on the second floor of an apartment, we’re not able to grow very much more of our own food at the moment, but we are not short of local places to buy.  There are farmer’s markets every week, plus local farms (especially in Easton) where you can go straight to the source.  There are also independent small stores near our home, like A and J Farm Market in Southport or the Double L Market in Westport.  Some people plan ahead and sign up to CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) programs where they receive a weekly or bi-monthly delivery of fresh produce from a farm either delivered to their home or to a local pick-up point.  Its probably too late for this season, but you can learn more about these at local harvest (which also provides info on local farms and farmers markets in States across the country).

Buying local food is seldom the cheapest option, because we’re usually dealing with small scale producers that cannot compete with huge agribusiness.  But I find that the intensity of flavors and overall quality makes me much more appreciative of what I’m putting inside of me and, subsequently, I eat less and more healthily.  It also encourages more creativity at mealtimes with meals based on what is in season and what was coming from the farms this week.  At eatlocalchallenge.com they have a top 10 list of reasons to eat local.

There’s a lot of attention in the Jewish community these days to expanding our consciousness about food ethics.  I was reminded by a Jewish Youth Worker who I met at the URJ Kutz Camp this Summer who was from London that I’ve been teaching about Eco-Kashrut since the early ’90s.  (It turned out, as we introduced ourselves, that she realized that I had been her Religious School teacher when she was 10, 20 years ago, and this was one of the things she remembered about my classes!).  I was inspired by teachers like Rabbi Arthur Waskow at The Shalom Center, who had been writing about it even earlier than that.

Today inspiration comes from organizations like Hazon and programs for Jews to learn about sustainable farming in the context of Judaism at places like the Adamah Fellowship program at Isabella Freedman Center or the Kayam Farm at the Pearlstone Retreat Center in Baltimore.  Many Jewish organizations and schools expose their children to Teva, which provides residential courses for youth to learn about Jewish environmental awareness and sustainability.

The CCAR Press (the publishing body for the Reform movement’s Rabbinic association) recently released ‘The Sacred Table: Creating a Jewish Food Ethic‘, edited by Rabbi Mary Zamore.  It is a wonderful collection that takes spiritual consciousness and ethics around issues of food from many different angles, offering a contemporary lens through which we can all think more deeply about the consequences of our day-to-day food decisions.  At B’nai Israel we are looking forward to welcoming Rabbi Zamore at our Shabbat author’s series next Spring.

‘Reform Judaism like Radicalized Islam’ – Why Beck got it so very wrong

February 22, 2011 /

Those who have read this blog before know that its not my usual mode to add my commentary to the wonderful world of political punditry.  While my congregants can probably guess what TV channels I mostly tune in to for my daily dose of news (ok, I’ll confess – its usually BBC World because how else am I going to get a daily dose to try and preserve my ever-diminishing British accent!), I don’t use (or rather, abuse) my pulpit in ways that make it a soapbox for my personal, political views.  That’s not what a place of worship is for.

But…. when I listened to the excerpt from Glenn Beck’s radio show posted on salon.com  that is rapidly being re-tweeted all over Twittersville as I type, I decided that this one was blog-worthy.  Why? Because the accusation that Rabbis can speak of nothing that politicians vote on without being accused of being ‘political’ and not truly ‘religious’ is such utter ridiculousness that it cannot be left to stand.

Now, the tweet making its away up the charts is eye-catching (that’s why I used it in my blog heading today) but somewhat misleading.  If you listen to the full context of the quote from the radio show, Beck explicitly says that he is not making the likeness between Reform Judaism and Radicalized Islam on the basis of fundamentalist or violent behaviors.  Rather, he is saying that neither of them are expressions of Religious faith as much as they are politically motivated movements.

What Judaism and Islam both have in common as faith traditions is that their codes of law and practices were never confined to ritual practice and belief.  Both were conceived of, in their origins, as entire social systems.  Jewish law from the earliest centuries speak of the obligations of a community providing a particular minimum of teacher/student ratio in the classroom.  It speaks of the obligation of a communal pot to ensure that doctors are paid for their medical services even when an individual cannot themselves afford the medical care they need to keep them alive.  It speaks of ethical business practices, ethical ways of collecting charitable funds, and how to figure out ways of distributing those funds when the community’s need is greater than the contents of the fund.

While, as American Jews, we live in a country where there is a constitutional separation of church and State, Judaism as a faith tradition was not originally conceived with such a separation as part of the cultural context in which it operated.  This means that when Jews talk about practicing Judaism, they might be talking about their Sabbath observance or their Passover Seder, but they might just as equally be talking about their social activism on behalf of the needy.

They might be talking about why they, as individuals, feel called to lobby their political representatives to preserve a woman’s civil legal right to an abortion because those who wish to take away that right would actually be preventing Jews from dealing with these women’s health issues in ways that are congruent with Jewish law.  Jewish law is absolutely explicit – if an unborn child threatens the health of a woman, the woman’s well-being always takes precedence.  Reform Rabbis who advocate on this issue don’t wish to prevent someone else acting on the basis of their faith in a different way; but they do object to a different religious understanding of this issue impinging on our rights as American citizens.

They might be talking about environmental policies because Jewish ethical teachings about environmental conservation go back to Genesis, and the rabbinic extension of Bal Taschit – do not waste – has modern day, practical applications that lead us to encourage our government to take steps to help our society better take care of our precious earth.

And so, yes, Reform Rabbis like myself are among those who will speak out on issues such as these because our Religious tradition has wisdom to share that guides our values and lives today.

For someone as deeply uninformed about most things as Beck to claim to know what Reform Judaism is and what it stands for, and on what basis Reform Jews engage with matters of social policy, is simply ridiculous.  But more than that; when he brings up the notion that people of faith have nothing to offer on any issue that is ever dealt with by the legislature and that doing so nullifies their claim to be ‘religious’, he is perpetuating a fallacy about the role of religiously-informed values that guide the lives of individuals.

Jewish Religious living and Jewish values that do not address what it means to live together as a community and as a nation, what it means to take care of each other, what it means to preserve civil freedoms, what it means to challenge those who whip up fear and hatred among neighbors, is no Judaism that I care to associate with.  If Judaism is reduced to the performance of ritual and the recitation of rites alone and is not also about how we live our lives as human beings, with each other, as best as we possibly can, then it is a Judaism without heart or soul.  That’s not Reform or Conservative, Orthodox, Reconstructionist or Renewal… that’s just Judaism.
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

Eating Jewish – Values we can all believe in?

November 18, 2009 /

Please take a look at this wonderful article in this week’s ‘The Jewish Forward‘ by Jay Michaelson,
‘Magen Tzedek: Model of the Jewish Future or Show Without an Audience?  


‘Magen Tzedek‘ is the name given by the Conservative movement to a seal on food that  ‘… would certify conformity not to the ritual particulars of kashrut, but to the deeper and more profound requirements of Jewish social justice law.’


It’s an excellent article and I commend it not specifically for how the Magen Tzedek seal seeks to emphasize the ethical values of Judaism (although I think it is an important and meaningful contribution to Jewish food consciousness), but because Jay raises some incredibly thought-provoking questions about the commitment of non-Orthodox Jews to obligate themselves to live by a specific code that raises our consciousness about the food we eat, how it is delivered to us, the treatment of the workers who helped to produce it, and the environmental and health consequences of certain kinds of food choices. 


Rabbi Eric Yoffie introduced the question of how Reform Jews engage with a range of Jewish food ethics in his Biennial address just a couple of weeks ago, and you can read more about the URJ initiative, ‘Just Table, Green Table’ here.  That initiative is less specific than the Magen Tzedek seal – it does not lay out one specific path to conscious and ethical eating, but does call upon all Jews to actively engage and think about how they eat as an aspect of what it means to walk a Jewish path through life, guided by the wisdom and ethical values that are grounded in our own tradition.


Jay points out that, in the USA, many of those who choose to purchase kosher food are not Jewish.  They make this choice because of an assumption that a religious seal on food means that the food is healthier – perhaps it conforms to higher ethical standards too.  Unfortunately, that is not always the case, as was evident in the travesty of ethical and criminal breaches that took place at the Postville meat processing plant in Iowa, owned by the Rubashkin company, primarily with regard to the treatment of employees.


But Jay asks: ‘Imagine if Jews were known in America to be the super-ethical people instead of the super-ritual ones. We’re the people who won’t eat a hamburger unless the workers at the restaurant are paid a fair wage. We’re the ones who consider environmentalism to be a matter of religious concern. Because doing the right thing matters to God.’  


As Jay points out, this is a Judaism that can thrive and survive not because of endogamy, but because Judaism offers meaningful ethics, values and practices that appeal to a wide range of people.  And that’s a Judaism that I want to be contributing my part to.  How about you?
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

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