Our parsha opens with the slightly strange statement that quote “The life of Sarah was 100 years and 20 years and 7 years.” Which the French 12th c commentator Rashi explains as ‘all the years were equally good,’ an interesting comment because either it means that Sarah lived a good life and every year was a good year, or, more tragically, that she lived 7 years which added up to the same quantity of goodness of her 20 years, and 20 years that collectively added up to 100 years of good - meaning, Sarah had 100 pretty lean years.
For those of us who have had our eyes on the news recently, I think the idea of recently lean years has been incredibly relatable. Americans have been subjected to the longest government shutdown in US history, clocking in at 43 days. The reason for the shutdown was that the majority in congress wanted to remove $1 billion dollars in federal subsidies to lower and middle income families for health care, leaving them to pay a much higher rate for heath care. Estimates say this is likely to lead to about 2 million people losing their health insurance. But the majority was just 53 senators, so the Democrats filibustered. 43 days later, the resolution to the shutdown, of course, was 8 Democrats caving to end the filibuster and passing a federal budget without the Obamacare subsidies.
During the shutdown, Federal employees missed two paychecks. Most of them were furloughed at some point, since it’s not very nice to show up to work day after day if they aren’t actually going to pay you. And air traffic controllers began to call out, leading to a temporary reduction in flights that was an inconvenience to some. But the most significant story that took place during the shutdown was the pause in federal SNAP benefits, the Federal governments Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program was halted. That meant that most of the 42 million Americans that depended on funds to put food on the table received no payments at all for 43 days. In Pennsylvania, where 2 million people rely on SNAP every month, the governor chose to draw $5 million from the state’s disaster fund and use it on aid to food pantries, who bore the brunt of demand from hungry people when their benefits were cut off.
It is a great relief that the government is open again and that SNAP has been restored. But as I mentioned, the reason the food benefits will be restored is that congress cut a deal to strip some Americans of financial support for medical care. This is the same country that spends $883 billion on its military every year, which is 3 times as much as the next largest country in the world spends. So if the question is ‘can we afford to help people with $1 billion in subsidies for health insurance’ the answer is ‘yes, we can probably afford to spend $300 billion in health care subsidies without batting an eye.’
There’s a root problem here, though, and one that I slightly discussed a few years ago when I gave a dvar torah about the medical devices gemach that I started here. And that is that food pantries and medical device lending libraries exist in the richest nation on earth, and what a crying shame that is.
There are two reasons for this problem.
1) We as a country are about as close as any civilization has ever come to being able to eradicate hunger and poverty and provide health care. We have the collective wealth to solve the problems. We just don’t want to.
And 2) wealth in this country is unevenly distributed, radically so, and the problem is getting worse. In other words - lots of working people aren’t earning enough in this economy to get by. Our government has the immense regulatory power and the ability to decide on a whim that washing machines from Belgium will receive a 50% tariff, but at the same time it doesn’t have the moral or political will to even raise the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.
On that second point, the current US economy is actually in a very odd state right now, and one that economists are now developing new terms around. The odd state is that wealthy people, the top 10% of earners, are doing just fine in this economy. They’re spending more than they used to, they’re earning more than ever. Meanwhile, the bottom 40% of wage earners in the economy are seeing their earning power reduced through inflation and stagnant wages. The new term going around about this state of affairs is that we are in a quote ‘k shaped economy’. It’s k-shaped because if you look at the left most upright line in the letter k, that’s your vertical axis line for the graph. The wealthy in this economy are the upper limb of the letter k - their income and affluence extends upward as time goes on. The lower limb of the letter k, the one that is directed downwards as time goes forward and the one that started lower to begin with, that’s the low and middle income in this economy. To paraphrase Robert Frost, two paths diverged in the woods, and the rich are on one, and the poor are on the other, and economists do not think we as a society are making enough of a difference to resolve that or make the one that points in the wrong direction less travelled by.
The state of the poor in America, and the state of the economy in America are deeply Torahitic concerns. Deuteronomy 15:4 famously tells us “There shall be no needy among you—since your God Adonai will bless you in the land that your God Adonai is giving you as a hereditary portion.” And by this the Torah means that the Jew is called to eliminate poverty and want both in the land of Israel amongst citizen and foreigner alike, and in their own communities outside the land of Israel. The moral goal, challenging and illusive as it may be, is that the Jew is tasked with ending hunger and poverty. The Sefer HaHinuch, the 13th century Spanish legalist who made a count of all 613 mitzvot, declares this to be mitzvah number 439, and that the mitzvah is to provide for the poor according to what they need quote bsimcha ubatov lev - “happily and with a joyous heart.” He also explains according to the rabbis in a very matter of fact way that it is an almost natural Jewish tendency to rebalance the scales of an economically unjust society when he writes “Never have I seen or heard of a city where there were wealthy Jewish individuals and they did not create a fund for tzedakah.”
Part of the problem of this k shaped economy is a modern problem of our virtually untaxed super rich - the oft mentioned triumvirate of Mark Zuckerbergs, Jeffrey Bezos, and Elon Musk, who seem far more committed to sending three people to Mars or building a robot that can drive a taxi than they are committed to eradicating child hunger in the United States. In an earlier era in America, our superrich - the Carnegies and the Rothschilds and Rockefellers were known as prolific philanthropists. Today, we do indeed have Bill Gates out there doing amazing things, but we also have those other three guys I mentioned and several hundred other billionaires standing idly by.
Jewish law is not typically interested in American tax policy, since a non-Jewish country can do what it pleases. Judaism was, however, adjacent to great and immoral civilizations throughout time, and could not help but notice that the choices that society or that government made were sometimes morally inadequate, if not outright morally corrupt. In the magnum opus of the great Conservative rabbi Solomon Schechter entitled ‘Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology’, Rabbi Schechter examines how the Talmudic rabbis lived amidst a Roman culture and government, and were often called to write critiques of it as amoral and wicked. The rabbis wanted to construct a Kingdom of God, but it was the antithesis of the Kingdom of Rome. They often referred to these two ideals by using the allusion of Rebecca’s twin sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob, the learned one, was Israel, and Esau, the violent one, was Rome.
Schechter writes “The antagonism between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Rome, which is brought about by the connection of the former with that of Israel, suggests also a most important truth: Bad government is incompatible with the kingdom of God.” He continues on to say quote “there can be little doubt that the rabbi looked with dismay upon a government which derived its authority from the deification of might. The rabbis held the Roman government to be thoroughly corrupt in its administration; Esau preaches justice and practices violence.”
One of the rabbinic ways to attack Rome was through biblical commentary. In last weeks parsha of Vayera, we get the story of Abraham and God arguing over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which if it isn’t my favorite story in the Torah, it might at least be the one I’ve written about more than any other. One of the challenges of the story is that the Torah never explicitly tells us what the sin of Sodom was, choosing instead to say
כִּי־רָבָּה וְחַטָּאתָם כִּי כָבְדָה מְאֹד
“Great is their sin, and very severe.” Right, but what was it?
The Torah and its commentators are left to extrapolate the sin from context. So when Abraham and two companions who may or may not be angels go to Sodom to rescue Lot, and the townspeople pound on the door demanding Lot give up the travellers to an angry mob for some manner of perversion, the rabbis decide that Sodom’s sin was that it was a manifestly unjust city, and particularly unjust to travellers and foreigners. I’m just going to say that again with mild emphasis, then pause, and keep moving. The sin of Sodom, a wicked society, was injustice and mistreatment of foreigners. (pause)
Anyhow, the rabbis craft a series of stories, called midrash, to elaborate on the many sins of sodom. They tell a story of a society of financial corruption in which there was a bridge toll and a penalty for wading in the water to avoid the bridge toll, and that the society was so unjust that a woman washing her clothes in the river would be charged as if she was a toll dodger. There’s a story of the traveller who was struck with a rock by a resident and bled. The traveller took his assailant to court, and when they pled their case to the judge, the judge would demand the victim pay the assailant, since the rock thrower had provided the victim with a service by giving him a bloodletting, which was occasionally a form of medicine 2000 years ago.
But the story that strikes me as relevant to us is the sodom story of the poor traveller seeking bread. The midrash tells us of a poor traveller who came to town seeking bread. He would knock on a door asking for food, and everyone would give him a silver coin instead. But they refused to give him bread, or even sell it to him. Day after day, he went around asking for bread, and instead, he was given a coin by everyone in the town. Finally, he went to the town square, collapsed, and died. And one by one, everyone in the town came and retrieved their coin they had given him. It’s a powerful story that implies that people pretended to do good only to selfishly reclaim what was theirs in the end. It’s a story of callous indifference that is also pretending to care about others. But mostly for me, it’s about a society that ultimately says ‘I have my own problems. I can’t be bothered to involve myself in yours.’ To the rabbis, to the Torah, to Solomon Schechter, this is the antithesis of a Jewish society, and one that we cannot abide.
It’s an easy sermon to stand up and diagnose the injustices of our current society, and one that, if I wanted to give it, I could give a different version of every week, but that would be pretty depressing, wouldn’t it, and perhaps even a bit condescending, since I think many of you are well aware of all of the problems I’ve just outlined and also the rabbinic attitudes towards them. But every once in a while it’s important to remind ourselves that the way things are is not the way things are supposed to be, and that it’s the people of God who must remind themselves and redouble their efforts to straighten the crooked and lift up the bent and the fallen.
We can’t individually alter the trajectory of the economy, or personally feed all the hungry in this country, or wave a magic wand and grant health care for all. But we should act in the ways that we can, and we can vote for officials with values of justice and equality and Torah and morality. And we can speak with our neighbors about our values - Jewish values - reminding them that economic inequality is a concern of the Torah, and that our tradition envisions nothing less than a society where everyone has enough.
On an immediate micro-scale, your food pantries need you. Every food pantry in this country has just absorbed a massive influx of the hungry, and their shelves are bare, and their bank accounts empty. It is nice to give them the six extra cans of kidney beans on your shelf, but the thing they need most and can convert into food the most is money. So if you can give the Greater Pittsburgh Food Pantry five dollars after shabbat, give em five dollars. If you can can give Squirrel Hill Food pantry $18 dollars, give em 18 dollars. If you can give $100 or $1000, give $100 or a $1000. And if you can give $10,000, give em $10,000 - and then let Robert and Paul know because they’d like to invite you to the synagogue gala thats happening next week.
Because he is such a beautiful and elegant writer, and also because he is one of the founding fathers of Conservative Judaism whose intellect and action defined who we are as Conservative Jews today, and because he ends on a high and hopeful note, I will give the final word to Rabbi Solomon Schechter.
“The kingdom of God is inconsistent with a state of social misery, engendered through poverty and want. It is a graceful world which God has created, and it must not be disfigured by misery and suffering. It must be returned when the visible kingdom is established.” Shabbat Shalom.
Our parsha opens with the slightly strange statement that quote “The life of Sarah was 100 years and 20 years and 7 years.” Which the French 12th c commentator Rashi explains as ‘all the years were equally good,’ an interesting comment because either it means that Sarah lived a good life and every year was a good year, or, more tragically, that she lived 7 years which added up to the same quantity of goodness of her 20 years, and 20 years that collectively added up to 100 years of good - meaning, Sarah had 100 pretty lean years.
For those of us who have had our eyes on the news recently, I think the idea of recently lean years has been incredibly relatable. Americans have been subjected to the longest government shutdown in US history, clocking in at 43 days. The reason for the shutdown was that the majority in congress wanted to remove $1 billion dollars in federal subsidies to lower and middle income families for health care, leaving them to pay a much higher rate for heath care. Estimates say this is likely to lead to about 2 million people losing their health insurance. But the majority was just 53 senators, so the Democrats filibustered. 43 days later, the resolution to the shutdown, of course, was 8 Democrats caving to end the filibuster and passing a federal budget without the Obamacare subsidies.
During the shutdown, Federal employees missed two paychecks. Most of them were furloughed at some point, since it’s not very nice to show up to work day after day if they aren’t actually going to pay you. And air traffic controllers began to call out, leading to a temporary reduction in flights that was an inconvenience to some. But the most significant story that took place during the shutdown was the pause in federal SNAP benefits, the Federal governments Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program was halted. That meant that most of the 42 million Americans that depended on funds to put food on the table received no payments at all for 43 days. In Pennsylvania, where 2 million people rely on SNAP every month, the governor chose to draw $5 million from the state’s disaster fund and use it on aid to food pantries, who bore the brunt of demand from hungry people when their benefits were cut off.
It is a great relief that the government is open again and that SNAP has been restored. But as I mentioned, the reason the food benefits will be restored is that congress cut a deal to strip some Americans of financial support for medical care. This is the same country that spends $883 billion on its military every year, which is 3 times as much as the next largest country in the world spends. So if the question is ‘can we afford to help people with $1 billion in subsidies for health insurance’ the answer is ‘yes, we can probably afford to spend $300 billion in health care subsidies without batting an eye.’
There’s a root problem here, though, and one that I slightly discussed a few years ago when I gave a dvar torah about the medical devices gemach that I started here. And that is that food pantries and medical device lending libraries exist in the richest nation on earth, and what a crying shame that is.
There are two reasons for this problem.
1) We as a country are about as close as any civilization has ever come to being able to eradicate hunger and poverty and provide health care. We have the collective wealth to solve the problems. We just don’t want to.
And 2) wealth in this country is unevenly distributed, radically so, and the problem is getting worse. In other words - lots of working people aren’t earning enough in this economy to get by. Our government has the immense regulatory power and the ability to decide on a whim that washing machines from Belgium will receive a 50% tariff, but at the same time it doesn’t have the moral or political will to even raise the federal minimum wage, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009.
On that second point, the current US economy is actually in a very odd state right now, and one that economists are now developing new terms around. The odd state is that wealthy people, the top 10% of earners, are doing just fine in this economy. They’re spending more than they used to, they’re earning more than ever. Meanwhile, the bottom 40% of wage earners in the economy are seeing their earning power reduced through inflation and stagnant wages. The new term going around about this state of affairs is that we are in a quote ‘k shaped economy’. It’s k-shaped because if you look at the left most upright line in the letter k, that’s your vertical axis line for the graph. The wealthy in this economy are the upper limb of the letter k - their income and affluence extends upward as time goes on. The lower limb of the letter k, the one that is directed downwards as time goes forward and the one that started lower to begin with, that’s the low and middle income in this economy. To paraphrase Robert Frost, two paths diverged in the woods, and the rich are on one, and the poor are on the other, and economists do not think we as a society are making enough of a difference to resolve that or make the one that points in the wrong direction less travelled by.
The state of the poor in America, and the state of the economy in America are deeply Torahitic concerns. Deuteronomy 15:4 famously tells us “There shall be no needy among you—since your God Adonai will bless you in the land that your God Adonai is giving you as a hereditary portion.” And by this the Torah means that the Jew is called to eliminate poverty and want both in the land of Israel amongst citizen and foreigner alike, and in their own communities outside the land of Israel. The moral goal, challenging and illusive as it may be, is that the Jew is tasked with ending hunger and poverty. The Sefer HaHinuch, the 13th century Spanish legalist who made a count of all 613 mitzvot, declares this to be mitzvah number 439, and that the mitzvah is to provide for the poor according to what they need quote bsimcha ubatov lev - “happily and with a joyous heart.” He also explains according to the rabbis in a very matter of fact way that it is an almost natural Jewish tendency to rebalance the scales of an economically unjust society when he writes “Never have I seen or heard of a city where there were wealthy Jewish individuals and they did not create a fund for tzedakah.”
Part of the problem of this k shaped economy is a modern problem of our virtually untaxed super rich - the oft mentioned triumvirate of Mark Zuckerbergs, Jeffrey Bezos, and Elon Musk, who seem far more committed to sending three people to Mars or building a robot that can drive a taxi than they are committed to eradicating child hunger in the United States. In an earlier era in America, our superrich - the Carnegies and the Rothschilds and Rockefellers were known as prolific philanthropists. Today, we do indeed have Bill Gates out there doing amazing things, but we also have those other three guys I mentioned and several hundred other billionaires standing idly by.
Jewish law is not typically interested in American tax policy, since a non-Jewish country can do what it pleases. Judaism was, however, adjacent to great and immoral civilizations throughout time, and could not help but notice that the choices that society or that government made were sometimes morally inadequate, if not outright morally corrupt. In the magnum opus of the great Conservative rabbi Solomon Schechter entitled ‘Some Aspects of Rabbinic Theology’, Rabbi Schechter examines how the Talmudic rabbis lived amidst a Roman culture and government, and were often called to write critiques of it as amoral and wicked. The rabbis wanted to construct a Kingdom of God, but it was the antithesis of the Kingdom of Rome. They often referred to these two ideals by using the allusion of Rebecca’s twin sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob, the learned one, was Israel, and Esau, the violent one, was Rome.
Schechter writes “The antagonism between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of Rome, which is brought about by the connection of the former with that of Israel, suggests also a most important truth: Bad government is incompatible with the kingdom of God.” He continues on to say quote “there can be little doubt that the rabbi looked with dismay upon a government which derived its authority from the deification of might. The rabbis held the Roman government to be thoroughly corrupt in its administration; Esau preaches justice and practices violence.”
One of the rabbinic ways to attack Rome was through biblical commentary. In last weeks parsha of Vayera, we get the story of Abraham and God arguing over the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which if it isn’t my favorite story in the Torah, it might at least be the one I’ve written about more than any other. One of the challenges of the story is that the Torah never explicitly tells us what the sin of Sodom was, choosing instead to say
כִּי־רָבָּה וְחַטָּאתָם כִּי כָבְדָה מְאֹד
“Great is their sin, and very severe.” Right, but what was it?
The Torah and its commentators are left to extrapolate the sin from context. So when Abraham and two companions who may or may not be angels go to Sodom to rescue Lot, and the townspeople pound on the door demanding Lot give up the travellers to an angry mob for some manner of perversion, the rabbis decide that Sodom’s sin was that it was a manifestly unjust city, and particularly unjust to travellers and foreigners. I’m just going to say that again with mild emphasis, then pause, and keep moving. The sin of Sodom, a wicked society, was injustice and mistreatment of foreigners. (pause)
Anyhow, the rabbis craft a series of stories, called midrash, to elaborate on the many sins of sodom. They tell a story of a society of financial corruption in which there was a bridge toll and a penalty for wading in the water to avoid the bridge toll, and that the society was so unjust that a woman washing her clothes in the river would be charged as if she was a toll dodger. There’s a story of the traveller who was struck with a rock by a resident and bled. The traveller took his assailant to court, and when they pled their case to the judge, the judge would demand the victim pay the assailant, since the rock thrower had provided the victim with a service by giving him a bloodletting, which was occasionally a form of medicine 2000 years ago.
But the story that strikes me as relevant to us is the sodom story of the poor traveller seeking bread. The midrash tells us of a poor traveller who came to town seeking bread. He would knock on a door asking for food, and everyone would give him a silver coin instead. But they refused to give him bread, or even sell it to him. Day after day, he went around asking for bread, and instead, he was given a coin by everyone in the town. Finally, he went to the town square, collapsed, and died. And one by one, everyone in the town came and retrieved their coin they had given him. It’s a powerful story that implies that people pretended to do good only to selfishly reclaim what was theirs in the end. It’s a story of callous indifference that is also pretending to care about others. But mostly for me, it’s about a society that ultimately says ‘I have my own problems. I can’t be bothered to involve myself in yours.’ To the rabbis, to the Torah, to Solomon Schechter, this is the antithesis of a Jewish society, and one that we cannot abide.
It’s an easy sermon to stand up and diagnose the injustices of our current society, and one that, if I wanted to give it, I could give a different version of every week, but that would be pretty depressing, wouldn’t it, and perhaps even a bit condescending, since I think many of you are well aware of all of the problems I’ve just outlined and also the rabbinic attitudes towards them. But every once in a while it’s important to remind ourselves that the way things are is not the way things are supposed to be, and that it’s the people of God who must remind themselves and redouble their efforts to straighten the crooked and lift up the bent and the fallen.
We can’t individually alter the trajectory of the economy, or personally feed all the hungry in this country, or wave a magic wand and grant health care for all. But we should act in the ways that we can, and we can vote for officials with values of justice and equality and Torah and morality. And we can speak with our neighbors about our values - Jewish values - reminding them that economic inequality is a concern of the Torah, and that our tradition envisions nothing less than a society where everyone has enough.
On an immediate micro-scale, your food pantries need you. Every food pantry in this country has just absorbed a massive influx of the hungry, and their shelves are bare, and their bank accounts empty. It is nice to give them the six extra cans of kidney beans on your shelf, but the thing they need most and can convert into food the most is money. So if you can give the Greater Pittsburgh Food Pantry five dollars after shabbat, give em five dollars. If you can can give Squirrel Hill Food pantry $18 dollars, give em 18 dollars. If you can give $100 or $1000, give $100 or a $1000. And if you can give $10,000, give em $10,000 - and then let Robert and Paul know because they’d like to invite you to the synagogue gala thats happening next week.
Because he is such a beautiful and elegant writer, and also because he is one of the founding fathers of Conservative Judaism whose intellect and action defined who we are as Conservative Jews today, and because he ends on a high and hopeful note, I will give the final word to Rabbi Solomon Schechter.
“The kingdom of God is inconsistent with a state of social misery, engendered through poverty and want. It is a graceful world which God has created, and it must not be disfigured by misery and suffering. It must be returned when the visible kingdom is established.” Shabbat Shalom.
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