Parshat Lech Lecha and Global Hunger Shabbat

“It is in our lives, and not our words, that our religion must be read.” I thought a great deal about this quote from Thomas Jefferson as I prepared this Dvar Torah. I have been given the honor of delivering this Dvar Torah for Parshat Lekh Lekha to speak for a few moments about the American Jewish World Service’s Global Hunger Shabbat. But before I get to this week’s parasha, I want to make an odd confession.

As a rabbi, I have an ambivalent relationship to sermons, or Divrei Torah, if you’d prefer. And while we’re on the subject, I’ll make a second bizarre confession: I have an even more ambivalent relationship to Divrei Torah about social justice. To be clear, I like giving Divrei Torah, and I care about social justice (hopefully, everyone is breathing a sigh of relief right now). In truth, the reason I am ambivalent about each of these core aspects of my rabbinate and my Judaism is simple: Most of the time, I have no idea if anyone is really listening.

You see, I could give you a Dvar Torah about the statistics of a social justice issue, speaking eloquently about “prophetic Judaism” or “taking us from a world as it is to a world as it should be.” And sadly, if not ironically, most of us will sit here and listen to this Dvar Torah, and agree with everything I said, because who is really against making the world a better place? And when the Dvar Torah ends, and after I get a few Yasher Koahs, we will all go home, and act like it never happened. For me, I worry sometimes that giving a Dvar Torah about social justice is a cliché, an expression of universal ideas that everyone agrees with, whose shelf life is basically nothing.

Of course…this is an over-­‐simplification, and my ambivalence does not, in any way, overshadow my passion for teaching Torah or spreading justice in this world. But if we are going to talk about hunger, a topic of such seriousness, I think it’s important that you know where I am coming from, so that we can deeply think together about where to go together.

If you recall, God’s calls of “lekh lekha” to Abram is predicated on God’s promise that Abram will become “a great nation,” and that Abram will be sent to a land in which he can build a large, prosperious nation. As a result, it was not lost upon me that one of the first things we learn after God calls Abram to leave Haran is that, “There was a famine in the land,” [i] this same land that God says Abram will be shown.

Nahum Sarna, in The Jewish Publication Society’s commentary on Genesis, notes that each of the patriarchs was affected by a famine in some way. However, Sarna points out that, “In reality, famine due to natural causes, as distinct from the threat of famine, is not common in the Bible…[Instead, these famines] generated a heightened sense of God’s protection and a more intense awareness of God’s mysterious workings.”[ii]

In the Bible, God brings famine to shape events, to take a character from Canaan to Egypt, or to simply remind the characters that God controls the destiny of humanity, not man. In this sense, if a character is hungry, they are hungry because that’s the way that God wants it. So if hunger comes in the Bible to draw our attention to God, what does a hunger that comes not from God, but from us, from the work of our hands, teach us?

In describing the hunger in the wake of the destruction of the temple, Megillat Eikhah states that, “better off were those slain of the sword than those slain by famine,”[iii] implying that hunger is a gruesome death, worse than stabbing someone or shooting them in the head. And regarding those who allow someone who is starving to die, the Wisdom of Ben Sira tells us,“A small bit of bread may be life to the poor; one who deprives them of food sheds blood.”[iv] Therefore, hunger and famine of the human kind teaches us that when we let someone go hungry, no matter how far away, we have played a part in their slow, painful death…and I am not saying that for rhetorical effect.

To be clear: When we let someone go hungry, we are a small accomplice in a world that has plenty, yet allows people to suffer and die. And yet, this Dvar Torah would be a cruel joke if we left it at that, because we are not marking Global Hunger Shabbat at Kehilat Hadar to feel guilty; we are marking to think about how we can put one foot in front of the other, hear the cry of “lekh lekha,” and make a difference.

Of course, as Jeffrey Sachs notes in The End of Poverty, the hardest part about taking tangible steps to reduce poverty and hunger is “getting the first foothold in the ladder,” [v] the very challenge I mentioned at the beginning of this Dvar Torah. What do we do so that we really hear the words that the Torah is teaching us, and yet not allow ourselves to shy away from action when speaking about billions of people, people who die every day? How does one get their foot in the door?

I’d like to suggest that if we are to think about how each of us can get our foot in the door of truly making a difference in fighting global hunger, we might learn from Abraham, and of the vision he set forth in his journey from his house to the land that God would show him. In reality, we might learn from the lesson of Abraham as one man. In one of his visions for a redeemed kingdom of Judah the prophet Ezekiel states, “Son of man, the people living in those ruins in the land of Israel are saying, ‘Abraham was only one man, yet he possessed the land. But we are many; surely the land has been given to us as our possession.”[vi]

“Abraham was only one man, yet he possessed the land,” says the prophet. Rebbe Nahman of Bratslav comments on this phrase that “Abraham was only one man” with the following passage: "Abraham served God solely by way of being one. For he thought to himself that he was the only person in the world, not at all looking at the people of the world…just as if he were the only person in the world. This is [the meaning of] “Abraham was one.” [vii]

Imagine being a person called to do something impossible, something so enormous that it requires leaving everything, to spend your entire life approaching a summit that may never be achieved in your lifetime. Amidst these odds, what would compel someone to take on this impossible challenge? The belief that you are the only person who can.

Regarding this Rebbe Nahman states, “Anyone who wishes to enter into the service of God can only enter by way of this aspect that he should think that there is nobody in the world except for him alone.”[viii] If you are to even approach tackling the impossible, it requires, frankly, that you be a little crazy. I imagine people said the same about Abraham, from time-­‐to-­‐time…

And so this Shabbat, rather than give you a statistic about hunger, rather than tell you to support AJWS in their mission to fight global hunger (though as a sidebar, you totally should…), I am going to tell you this: Believe that you are the only one in this world who can stop hunger. Believe that every dollar you give, every direct-­‐service experience in which you can participate where you see the faces of global poverty, and every word you can speak in advocacy of those who need you, who need us, is coming from the only person in the world who can do it. Believe that you are the one.

If you don’t believe me…consider the reality that the difference between who is born in the most backbreaking poverty and who is born into the greatest wealth and prosperity is essentially luck. When I traveled with AJWS to Mexico this past January, my first trip to the Global South, my favorite text was not a Jewish text, but a cartoon. This cartoon showed two storks starring at a wheel, a wheel that would determine the fate of a child coming into this world. Some children were sentenced to famine, some famine and disease, some to famine, disease and war, others to a middle class life with Starbucks, others to a middle class life without Starbucks, and a single sliver of the wheel to a life of plenty. I loved this cartoon because it reminds me that my good fortune (and though I am not in the category of the richest 1% of the world, I am pretty close) is essentially an accident. I could just as easily be in the bottom billion, the person living on a dollar, or less than a dollar, a day. I am one lucky man. And if I was one unlucky man, what would I think about that one person, somewhere else on earth, who could help me, but chose not to?

Part of the reason that I am giving this Dvar Torah today is that, by this time tomorrow, I will (b’ezrat Hashem) be somewhere on the road between Staten Island and Fifth Avenue, running the New York Marathon, with the first team ever organized by AJWS. When people ask me how it feels to run this much…I frequently say, “It hurts!” However, if I want the pain to go away, all I need to do is stop running and go home. But what if the pain could not go away? What if what hurt me was something deep, something longer lasting? The hunger that God creates in the Torah is sent to teach us all something, yet the hunger that we create in our world simply hurts . . . it hurts not because it destroys the bodies, and kills people, but because hunger says something strikingly terrible about humanity, that we have created a world of plenty where so many still remain left behind.

I can’t do everything, but I can do something…and so can you. This Shabbat, and this weekend, I ask you to take the time to be an Abraham, to believe you are the only person who can make a difference, and then put one foot in front of other, and go and do it. The world is waiting…and there is no one left to do it but you and me.

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