Day 5: JCPA Executive Director, Rabbi Steve Gutow updates us on his experience with the food stamp challenge
This food stamp challenge is different than I imagined. I thought that, because it would happen between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it would enhance my spiritual life and bring me to new heights…..Rather, I have discovered that it is, indeed, a yicchy way to have to live. The food choices are limited; coffee is non-existent; the world seems constricted and small.
Before I began, I wondered if I would become less empathetic and discover that a food stamp diet is not so bad…. However, after 5 days on approximately $1/meal, I can attest that it is simply horrible. I am in day 5 feeling as if it is day 50 realizing what limits this diet places on life’s fulfillment were it to be a constant. To grow up on this over-starched way of being limits our humanity. Physically, it is not healthy; emotionally it is constricting, sort of like I imagine one feels when they are way over-sedated; and spiritually, it feels like living in a dim light wondering about where and how the presence of G-d ever shows its beautiful face.
The press conference yesterday was phenomenal. I enjoyed writing and giving my remarks (click here to read a copy of the transcript). Several members of Congress, great colleagues in Hadar Susskind, Melissa Boteach, and Jared Feldman, terrific work done by Rabinowitz and Dorf, our public relations folks, and a lot of press. I challenged the press to do their part. Hunger and poverty are not going to end because a couple of hundred people around the country are taking the challenge but because a few million people simply decide that the richest country in the history of the world must not tolerate the state of affairs in which tens of millions live in a nutritionally debased way and have no health insurance at all. That will take all of us including the press.
The challenge is for us to wake up every morning and ask ourselves ‘what can I do today?’ Gaining a little empathy is good; raising awareness about the problem is also important. But empathy and awareness-raising are means to the end of ACTING to end poverty in America.
It might be too high a mountain to end poverty for the whole world but to not end it here in America is unconscionable. The question we should challenge ourselves with is ‘why the apathy?’ What is wrong with us? Why don’t we look in the faces of the needy who live in our midst and say: “G-d is there in that face; it could well be me; how can I change this?’
I just got back from volunteering at DC Central Kitchen, a truly inspiration place, where they not only prepare 4,000 meals a day for those who are hungry in the greater-DC area, but provide job training, support and hope to help people pull themselves out of poverty. Joining me were Melissa, Congressman Keith Ellison, a Muslim democrat from Minnesota and a lot of fun to chop vegetables with, and Ellen Vollinger from the Food Research and Action Center. Chopping onions and cucumbers under the vigilant eye of Dot, a graduate of one of the DC Central Kitchen’s programs, hearing Carolyn’s story of salvation….she is a woman who seven years ago lived on the streets and now runs the volunteer program for the kitchen….and listening to Mike, the executive director, explain the overview of what the kitchen does, was inspirational. These are people who wake up every morning and make the world a bit better for those in need. They ‘talk the talk’ and ‘walk the walk’. This has been a good way to enter day 5. I see in just the work we did at the kitchen, the tears caused by the onions, and the spirit generated by the great hearts and souls of the people who make that kitchen function---I feel and see that spark of hope that could possibly affect and intrude in all of our lives—making us just a bit better and a bit more able to respond to the challenge of poverty in America. As I feel that spark, I, at least for the moment, think maybe this is the right time of year for the challenge; maybe I do feel that extra ray of spiritual focus that I hoped the food stamp challenge would bring to these holy days.
