The other day I ventured out of the house to our local supermarket in Greenfield to stock up on essentials – one of the few occasions I go anywhere these days. While checking out, I overheard the manager talking to an assistant manager and two staff members. They were discussing something that happened earlier in the day: “Another” shoplifter had been caught stuffing groceries into a backpack.
I immediately remembered a moment in the same supermarket a year earlier – walking in to find a gaunt and tired-looking woman handcuffed in a Pittsburgh police cruiser. Inside, the manager and assistant manager quietly explained to a police officer that the person in question had stolen items from the store and that it was not their first time.
It is easy to see that these are not isolated cases. Food theft is the symptom of a much bigger problem for an America in crisis – a crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but it was long before that too.
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According to the Jewish hunger organization Mazon, one in eight Americans struggle with hunger. That is 41.2 million people, including 12.9 million children and 4.9 million senior citizens. These numbers are from before the pandemic.
Now that the travel and hospitality sector of our economy has frozen, unemployment has risen. And as we know, the impact of the pandemic recession has hit lower-income people harder. Their jobs were the first to leave. Their savings were little or no, and their debts were initially higher. Mazon now estimates that approximately 80 million Americans are now starving or food insecure.
We live in an America with the largest and most expensive military in the world. A nation that counts eight of the ten richest people in the world among its citizens. Yet millions of people go to bed hungry every night. In our own city of Pittsburgh, we’ve seen miles of lines of food banks. And as I’ve seen with my own eyes, some of my neighbors have even reduced themselves to stealing.
This is unacceptable. We have to do better – as individuals and as a nation. Our Torah tells us “Olam Chesed Yibaneh” – a world of goodness must be built. In the Hashkiveinu prayer that we recite every night, we ask God to “protect us and remove pestilence, sword, hunger and grief from us.” God has provided us with abundant food and wealth so that everyone in our land can be adequately fed if only we can distribute it to everyone. And yet we fail here in the 21st century because of this most fundamental task of humanity. The easiest thing we can do as a society is to make sure everyone has enough to eat. And this assurance should definitely be given.
In Parshat Vayigash we come to the conclusion of the story of Joseph and his brothers. Joseph read Pharaoh’s dreams of seven fat and seven lean cows and devised a plan to feed all of Egypt during a time of great famine. So revealing was Joseph’s vision that Pharaoh made him Grand Vizier of all.
So complete was the famine that it stretched as far as Canaan, forcing Joseph’s estranged brothers to come into Egypt with outstretched hands and beg for food. “Our father said, go and get us some food” (Gen 44:25).
And Joseph takes care of his estranged brothers as he cared for the rest of Egypt, saying, “I will take care of you – for there will be five more years of famine – so that you and your household and all that belongs to you, not wanting to suffer ”(Gen 45:11).
We are not powerless. We can do the same.
We can donate and volunteer locally at the JFCS Squirrel Hill Food Pantry and Great Pittsburgh Food Pantry. And we should give generously when we can. But that’s not enough. We must work to create an America where it is considered a right rather than a privilege to eat enough, as it was in Joseph’s day. To do this, we need the advocacy of food – to work within the state and national framework to advocate that a just, loving nation starves all who are hungry, rather than reducing it to despair or theft. This takes more than just local pantries – it takes national efforts.
A good place to start would be to expand SNAP, the USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. For every meal provided by a grocery bank, SNAP offers nine meals. The best way to defeat hunger in America is through food advocacy – changing the way our food distribution system works and making it work for everyone. These are the things the Mazon Jewish organization is dedicated to. Mazon is our current Joseph.
The Torah tells us that we will always be poor: “Because it will never cease to have people in need in your country.” But it also tells us that the answer to this reality is that we “give our hand to the poor and open to needy people in your land ”(Deuteronomy 15:11).
Hunger is a crisis. This need not be. Indifference to hunger is the real crisis. If we can overcome our indifference as a nation, we can also overcome hunger. PJC
Rabbi Mark Asher Goodman is the rabbi of the Brith Sholom Jewish Center in Erie, Pennsylvania. He lives in Pittsburgh. This column is a service of the Greater Pittsburgh Rabbinic Association.
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