A Place and Its People: Justice in the Farm to School Movement

Below you will find a guest blog from Audrey Baker. She prepared and delivered it as the November 16, 2016, keynote address to the Syracuse Food Justice Symposium--Youth Engagement in Urban Agriculture.  It is not my practice to publish others' work, but this is an extraordinary piece of writing and thinking. I publish it with Audrey's permission, interspersing many of the images that appeared on her accompanying slides, and it is my honor to do so. You will find Audrey's brief professional biography at the end. (Disclaimer: Audrey is my daughter.)

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A Place and Its People: Justice in the Farm to School Movement

I’d like to ask you all to close your eyes and listen while I read a common version of the Haudenosaunee (how-dee-no-SHOW-nee) people’s daily Thanksgiving Address.

I’m reading this to honor the history and the ecology of the place where we’ve come together today, and with respect for the first people:

We gather our minds together to send greetings and thanks to all the Animal life in the world. They have many things to teach us as people. We see them near our homes and in the deep forests. We are glad they are still here and we hope that it will always be so. Now our minds are one.

With one mind, we turn to honor and thank all the Plant Foods we harvest from the garden. Since the beginning of time, the grains, vegetables, beans, and berries have helped the people survive. Many other living things draw strength from them, too. We gather all the Plant Foods together as one and send them a greeting of thanks. Now our minds are one.

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You can open your eyes.

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When I started to think about what to say to you all today, I first wanted to get to know more about the place. And I’ve never been here before.

If we’re going to talk about the value of school gardens, farm to school programs, urban agriculture, and food or ag-based education, we need context. It matters where we are. We’re obliged to the seasons, the soil, the history, and the people—not to mention the politics.

At its essence, the movement to bring our children back to the earth and empower them to feed themselves with dignity, is about recognizing how to know and appreciate a place. In fact, educators often refer to our whole field of work as “place-based learning.”

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Recently, in Ithaca, where I live, I’ve been attending vigils and prayer circles for Standing Rock, where the largest indigenous people’s movement in history is currently underway to fight the Dakota Access Pipeline. Leaders from the Onondaga Nation have been guiding the vigils, and speaking of the desecration of the waters in Standing Rock in relation to the Onondaga waters here in Syracuse. So, when I thought about speaking today, and this place, I started with the water.

Onandaga Lake

In this church, which sits in Syracuse, in Onondaga County, we are less than three miles away from Onondaga Lake. The lake and its watershed are at the center of the original Haudenosaunee territories. It was on the shores of Onondaga Lake, many centuries ago, that five nations who had long been at war came together under the Great Law of Peace. Since then, Onondaga has been the capital of the Haudenosaunee confederacy, also known as the Iroquois. Theirs was the first representative democracy in the West.

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When we talk about a food system, or the land or the people involved, we are implicitly talking about the water, too. It’s all one system, in one place.

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The Watershed

As recently as 200 years ago, wildlife still teemed in and on the shores of Onondaga Lake and Creek. The watershed was a source of plentiful wild human foods for thousands of years. Fish made up at least one-third of the Onondaga people’s diet. The waters were home to many different animals who also ate the fish and the plants, and could be hunted as game. The clean, rich soil around the lake would filter groundwater as it moved into the lake. Onondaga settlements along the creek and lake grew crops such as the Three Sisters (corn, beans, and squash), and the people could swim in the lake and drink its water.

Today, Onondaga Lake is profoundly contaminated. It’s been called the most polluted lake in the country. Multiple illegal land takings by state and federal government and unchecked industrial development have led to the continuous discharge of sewage and industrial waste into the Lake and its watershed. Fishing and swimming were banned decades ago because of the lake’s extreme toxicity. And while there has been some remediation by industry and upgrades to sewage system infrastructure, and the Onondaga Nation is fighting for the rights of their land and water, the lake remains heavily polluted and is one of many designated EPA Superfund sites within the original Onondaga territory.

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While this is all very depressing of course, I’m actually bringing it up here because I believe that our movement represents hope. We work with the children. (Or, we are the children). We provide opportunities for them to connect to the earth—to the soil, the creatures, the plants, and the water—by connecting with their food and an appreciation of where it comes from.

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When I was first involved in a youth garden project, I had just finished a year studying the federal policy climate around local school food and school gardens.

I began this research after discussing resource inequities with my history of physics professor, of all people, during office hours. It was 2008. The recession had hit, I was about to graduate college, and there was growing awareness of economic, social, and environmental crises.

Finally, our conversation landed on school gardens.

The Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act was up for renewal, and the Obama administration had just taken office. I was jazzed up about the potential to effect change at the national level, but then realized how removed the people in power—in D.C.—were from those communities they were trying so hard to create change for.

The kids were always just statistics.

Play with Your Food summer program

So I designed a one-time summer program called Play With Your Food, straight out of college. I had no idea what I was doing. Cooperative Extension housed the program, and another local nonprofit funded it.

I reached out to everyone I could and started networking. My dad, a longtime landscaper, came to Ithaca for a day and helped me set up a fully mulched community garden plot. My friends and colleagues helped me put up a fence and keep it maintained. I had never gardened before.

One day each week, for six weeks, a group of eleven year olds would start the day at the garden, then explore or sell produce in the community, and cook a meal in the Cooperative Extension kitchen.

I remember the first time they all walked through the garden’s fence door and looked around. Standing stock still. Faces that said: No. Way.

Then we went over to the lettuce plants, which were already big and beautiful. We were making salads, shishkabobs, and mint lemonade in the garden that day.

I snapped up a lettuce leaf and took a bite. One of the kids started making puking noises.

Iron Chef Battle

But by the end of the summer, they owned it. Two teams faced off in an Iron Chef battle and they planned multi-course menus, harvesting from the garden, and comparing ingredients for cost and quality at Wegman’s.

They made good food. They could also discuss gardening, nutrition, nutrient cycles, business, and marketing, with confidence. These young people were aware of their part in Ithaca’s food system.

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Grow Pittsburgh Edible Schoolyard

From then on, I was sold on the transformative potential of this hands-on, food-based learning. I worked for a year in Pittsburgh running two school gardens. I helped start school garden programs in Ithaca, and worked for nonprofits engaging kids with food in schools and prisons. Finally I reached out to Ithaca’s school food director and began a Farm to School partnership that continues today.

It doesn’t pay well and it’s often beyond frustrating, but this work has been my calling.

And, for the record, it depends entirely on building, and maintaining, relationships.

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So, we’re here today, in this place, for the sake of food justice.

But what does that mean? And is it possible to begin to address food justice without also tackling environmental and economic injustices?

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The Fifteenth Ward of Syracuse

In the 1950s, many African Americans in Syracuse lived in the Fifteenth Ward in the east side neighborhood. In the 1960s, the majority were displaced from their homes, without recourse and despite large protests, by a slew of development projects. Discriminatory housing practices and white flight led to increased segregation and many of these families moved to the Southside neighborhood, where poverty and food insecurity are ongoing problems today.

In 2000, the residents of Southside formed a Partnership for Onondaga Creek, to oppose the county’s new plans to mitigate combined sewer overflows and its implied environmental racism.

The group was repeatedly rejected from participating in negotiations, until the Onondaga Nation began to advocate alongside them. Both of these groups have been marginalized and displaced from their homes, while their watersheds and foodsheds are destroyed by the development agendas of the ruling class.

Neither groups’ claims of injustice have been fully legitimized in the eyes of the state over time. They have been systematically disenfranchised. But our cities’ built infrastructure and urban planning processes are central to the potential for food justice to play out in a place.

Brady Farm

Today, the Brady Faith Center operates a community farm in the Southside, just two miles or so Southwest of here. Neighborhood residents grow and harvest crops they want to eat, and Brady Farm also works with some nearby schools.

According to Jessi Lyons, who manages the farm, however, there’s no funding within the schools to support field trips and so only schools within walking distance can easily visit.

And the funding climate is bound to get worse in coming years, not better.

So how will our movement continue to grow?

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Last year in Tompkins County, Ithaca City Schools discovered high lead levels in the water. Since then, the district has banned the use of running water for drinking or preparing food. All water is now brought into the schools in plastic containers, and we can no longer wash fresh farm produce in the district’s central kitchen or any of the cafeterias.

But we’re resilient. In Ithaca, we recently partnered with a food hub that now orders, washes, and processes locally grown produce for classroom snacks, serving over 1,200 students two days each week. We expand the program to schools with high numbers of low-resource families, which include both rural and urban schools. We’re exploring ways to apply this food hub model to school meals as well, and to scale up in Tompkins and other counties over time.

Many classrooms receiving these snacks also visit the Youth Farm Project for farm field trips where they plant seeds, explore the compost, and meet the chickens before harvesting ingredients for a fresh snack they prepare and eat on site.

The Fresh Snack Program

One second grade teacher at a rural elementary school—located in a food desert and with over 75% free and reduced lunch participation—reported that when the Fresh Snacks were first served in their school, students wouldn’t try them. A few months later they began to risk just one bite. By the end of the school year they had learned they enjoyed most of the foods, but commented that they were different than the vegetables and fruits they got at home. Two of her students, who most resisted the snacks at the start of the year, told her together, just nine months after the program began in the school, “we love carrots and salad!”

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Children have the power to recognize that where they live and attend school are not only defined by political and institutional boundaries, but also defined by a food system, a watershed, a home for animals and plants, an ancient place, and a sacred place.

Our cities and our school districts are part of this reality. The water is not a separate issue from education, or from school food. What’s more, such institutions present us with a great deal of power to create change.

But that will require all of us to recognize and fight against the corporate profit motives that dictate our industrialized food system at every level, and fight for ways that children and families can truly connect with and appreciate their food sources every day.

It will require all of us to fight against abusive government policies, and fight for the inclusion of systematically oppressed peoples in community food system leadership, because they understand the needs of the land, the animals, and the people better than I or others like me—the privileged, and the comfortable—ever will.

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Around the country, over 42,000 schools and 23 million students are engaged in some sort of farm to school program, including school gardens, compared with only a handful just 20 years ago. These programs provide fresh, whole food choices for cafeterias, classroom snacks, before- and after-school programs, early childhood centers, and summer meal sites.

School gardens, agriculture in the classroom, and field trips to farms and food processors are the hands-on educational components of Farm to School that can be integrated in subjects like science, math, and social studies.

According to the USDA, Farm to School programs and increased consumption of fruits and vegetables can help to mitigate the serious health threats caused by obesity, which as we all know has been on the rise for decades.

The comprehensive benefits of these programs extend beyond nutrition and human health. The CDC now supports the link between school nutrition and students’ academic performance. And when students experience the connection between the earth, our food, and our health, they understand the food system as a resource for social and environmental progress.

Farm to School programs have exploded in New York State as well. Almost half of the state’s school districts report to participate in Farm to School, involving over 750,000 students and 1,333 schools.

Farm to School

The rapid growth in Farm to School programs has come because our movement recognizes the necessity of an approach that combines grassroots, community-based planning with strategies that give the movement power in policy arenas.

The National Farm to School Network has been instrumental in this growth. The Network grew as a coalition of state and federal agency leads and has become increasingly powerful in policy, while also operating as a community-based support system. The USDA and many state governments, appropriate millions of dollars in grant funding for local food infrastructure and farm to school programs each year.

However, government Farm to School funding only became a reality once the Obama administration took office. Under the new regime, this funding is most likely going to disappear. And yet we must remain resilient. We must continue to build and bolster community food systems. And we must continue to have a strong, loud voice in policy and politics, including at the district, municipal, and state levels.

But, it is the youth in our communities today who will engage with policy in the future.

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Youth Farm Project

Each summer at the Youth Farm Project, 25 teens from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds learn to lead, work in teams, and of course grow food, as farm employees paid through Ithaca’s youth employment funds. During this time, the teens are immersed in an anti-racist food justice curriculum in which they play games to break down stereotypes, meet community leaders, process their crops for school meals, serve food at a soup kitchen, and visit other farms. They have conversations with local leaders from Black Lives Matter, and student groups leading a wetland protection project, in the same week that they work in crews to weed long rows of carrots and harvest tray after tray of cherry tomatoes. These young people will continue to protect our land and water, and fight for justice.

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But, the young people know:

This work isn’t easy, and it’s about to get much more difficult. Already, teachers have no time in their days with which to add new programming. Already, school food service departments have only $1.00 per meal to spend on ingredients. Already, districts can’t afford to replace pipes that contaminate the water with lead.

And yet, even as legislative support ebbs or even disappears, we all have to continue to make our work more impactful, more systemic, and more sustainable.

At the same time, we have to be more inclusive and more aware of injustice than ever before. We have to help our students understand how the seeds they plant on the windowsill in March and spritz with water each morning not only grow into tomato vines and spaghetti sauce, but also give them real power—to be independent, caring, and strong in the face of oppression; to honor and respect the interconnections of land, water and animals; to feed their neighbors in hard times; and to become caretakers of the earth.

The future of our planet and its people—especially those places and people that have been oppressed—depend on us, quite literally, to live and teach this truth.

It sounds dramatic; but in today’s political climate it’s time to own the educator’s—and the parent’s—roles in a revolution.

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So as we move into a new privatized policy era, how can we nevertheless grow the movement? How can we institutionalize food justice through our education system, while maintaining a community based approach?

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Traditionally, Haudenosaunee chiefs would recite their creation story every year. The process could take up to twelve days. For the past one hundred years, however, only a few remaining elders know how to recite it, and it is rarely, if ever, recited in full today.

In the reading of their creation story, in which personified stars and planets begin to literally build a food system from the raw earth and its waters, the elders refuse to tell their communities what the meaning of the story might be, or the answers to the questions it brings up about humanity. Those listening must think for themselves, discuss the story, and create the meaning.

This is what we all have to do, as our creation story continues to unfold. So, while I encourage you to answer these questions for yourselves, as a community, I’ll leave you with a few ideas.

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For starters, we do have momentum coming out of the Michelle Obama era. There are thousands of stories and detailed research. We can ride the moment.

Despite the paucity of resources in most districts, our school system presents an enormous opportunity to effect change. While grassroots community work that encourages dignity, leadership, and empowerment among community members is likely the most important work we have as a food movement, we must also gain power in our institutions. This requires working with them—including government, industry, and education.

The school system has the advantage of being an institution designed for our youth. Yes, it is a top-down institution. The Common Core State Standards are in many ways de-localizing education even more than before, and assessment requirements further reduce teachers’ flexibility in the classroom. The newest USDA Dietary Standards in many ways reduce the flexibility school food service programs have in menu design.

Yet, with each federal mandate comes an opportunity.

If we design farm field trips and school garden programs to meet Common Core standards and intersect with a STEM curriculum, hands-on food learning can potentially reach more students than ever before. We can organize and advocate more easily for state support of hands-on food learning in schools.

Similarly, if food service programs source farm fresh produce to meet their weekly requirements of orange/red, green, and starchy vegetables dictated by the USDA, we can actually be more specific about how to approach farmers, work with food hubs, and design cafeteria promotions around menu items. We can also make the case for Farm to School programs more readily to legislatures and funding bodies.

And though I barely touch on animal foods in schools, if you’re interested, the organization School Food FOCUS is doing amazing work to combine the buying power of major city school districts to afford hormone and antibiotic free meats.

In Tompkins County, we are strategizing for how best to make the case to district administrators to prioritize school food and hands-on food learning. This is a great challenge, but we can organize.

And I encourage you to join me as I begin a journey to become more familiar and involved with local government and policy.

I also encourage you to support the Syracuse school district’s new food service director as best you can as she navigates the rough waters of highly regulated budgeting and menu planning, while also trying to incorporate food grown here, in this place, by its people. It is no easy task.

The National Farm to School Network website is full of amazing resources to help all of us do this work. Curriculums, evaluation planning templates, educational materials, data and statistics, how-to guides about procurement and programming, policy outlines by state—you name it, you can find it there.

As we work with the system to create systemic change, we have to also remain constantly, intentionally aware of the inequity and injustice built into our system at every level, and to reverse it as best we can. People who have been disenfranchised by government and industry must lead the way in systemic change, as the rest of us support them on the sidelines with our privilege.

Even as racists and climate change deniers take over the federal government as we speak.

Making this possible is our challenge and our task as educators, as parents, as public health practitioners, and as caretakers of the land.

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Audrey Baker

Audrey Baker is the Farm to School Coordinator at the Youth Farm Project in Ithaca, NY; works in accreditation and evaluation to help develop the new Master of Public Health program at Cornell University; and engages with other organizations through her consultancy FeedBack Consulting. After being introduced to the local school food movement through federal policy research, Audrey began to develop and manage school gardens in Ithaca, NY and Pittsburgh, PA. She now works with community partners to increase fresh, local food access in Tompkins County, NY through school meals and snacks.

Audrey earned a Master of Public Administration from Cornell University, where she focused on institutional food systems.

She provides the following credits, thanks and references:

• Introduction: Myth of the Earth Grasper. John C. Mohawk
• Haudenosaunee Guide for Educators: Smithsonian.
• Perreault et al.: Environmental injustice in the Onondaga lake Waterscape 
• www.water-alternatives.org   Volume 5 | Issue 2 Perreault, T.; Wraight, S. and Perreault, M. 2012. Environmental  injustice in the Onondaga lake waterscape, New York State, USA.  Water Alternatives 5(2): 485-506
• National Farm to School Network : www.farmtoschool.org
• Locally Grown: Farm-to-School Programs in New York State
• New York State Comptroller, October 2016
• Jessi Lyons, Brady Farm
• Katherine Korba, Cornell Cooperative Extension of Onondaga County

 

 

Justice, Humanity and Faith

I delivered this as the d'var Torah (sermon, or "words of Torah") at Temple Beth Israel in Waltham, MA on Saturday, August 22, 2015.  The Torah portion was Shoftim.

“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.”

-Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., June 25, 2015, majority opinion in King v. Burwell, regarding health care subsidies

“Much progress remains to be made in our nation’s continuing struggle against racial isolation. The court acknowledges the Fair Housing Act’s continuing role in moving the nation toward a more integrated society.”

-Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, June 25, 2015, majority opinion in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, regarding housing discrimination

“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

-Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, June 26, 2015, majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, regarding marriage equality

 “This case concerns an endeavor by Arizona voters to address the problem of partisan gerrymandering — the drawing of legislative district lines to subordinate adherents of one political party and entrench a rival party in power…. The animating principle of our Constitution is that the people themselves are the originating source of all the powers of government.”

-Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, June 29, 2015, majority opinion in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission, regarding partisan redistricting

In the course of four days in June, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down in rapid succession these rulings for equity—in health access, in housing access, in marriage access, in political access. 

Do you know the feeling, when seeing something of great beauty, that you are at once filled up by it, yet oddly hollowed as it leaves room for little else? That is the best I can describe how I felt for at least a week after these rulings—physiologically altered by the knowledge of them, filled by them.  The intensity has receded, but the sharp reminder of my awe at the power of justice remains acute.

Two weeks ago, my mother, Toni Wolfman, asked me about the theme of my upcoming d’var Torah.  I remarked that it would be the week of parasha Shoftim, with its extraordinary line, “Tzedek tzedek tirdof” – “Justice, justice, shall you pursue,” offering the opportunity to bring the recent Supreme Court decisions into my comments.  Toni told me that she had seen posters featuring that quote on the walls in Justice Ginsberg’ s chambers.  The two of them, along with—when they were alive—my father Bernard Wolfman and Justice Ginsberg’s husband Marty Ginsberg, have shared a friendship for many years.

Toni also directed me to a speech that Justice Ginsberg delivered in 2002 upon receiving the Albert D. Chernin Award from the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.  Justice Ginsberg said:

On walls of my chambers, I have posted in two places the command from Deuteronomy—“Zedek, Zedek," "Justice, Justice shalt thou pursue." Those words are an ever present reminder of what judges must do "that they may thrive." There is an age old connection between social justice and Jewish tradition. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg… once said: "My concern for justice, for peace, for enlightenment . . . stems from my heritage."

In saying “that they may thrive,” Justice Ginsberg paraphrased the next few words of the biblical sentence, which in full states “Justice, justice shall you pursue that you may thrive and occupy the land that Adonai your God is giving you.”

At first reading, Shoftim might suggest rigidity in the legal system—twice stating that there may be no deviation “either to the right or to the left,” describing first how the people must adhere to the law and then how a king must do so. Yet the parasha firmly endorses the framework of an interpretive and evolutionary system of justice, one dependent upon human observation, intellect and judgement, and responsive to changing times.  Regarding “matters of dispute in your courts,” criminal or civil, the parties must present their cases to “the magistrate in charge at the time” and, upon a verdict, “act in accordance with the instruction given and the ruling handed down.”  This establishes the authority of judges to weigh matters and determine what is just in current society.

Similarly, this parasha makes room for governance by and for the people:  “…you shall be free to set a king over yourself…,” it states.  But there are parameters that God sets forth for any such king, constraints that seem intended to ensure a combination of objectivity and relevance. The king must be a kinsman, and thus govern from a native knowledge of, and perhaps loyalty to, his people.  The king cannot have such wealth that he risks condescension to those he leads, as the Torah states that “he shall not keep many horses…. And he shall not have many wives…nor shall he amass silver and gold to excess.”  And “he will not act haughtily toward his fellows.” So not only must one who governs be by and for the people; he must truly be of the people.

Recently, I heard a re-cast of a 2014 CBS interview with John Mellencamp.  A couple of years ago, at age 62, he learned that as a newborn he’d had ground-breaking, life-saving, 18-hour surgery for spina-bifida.  He was one of three infants receiving this new surgery in 1951 and the only one to live to adulthood.  One died during the operation, the other at age 14.  So Mellencamp got together with the surgeon who had saved his life, 97-year-old Dr. Robert Heimburger.  This is how Mellencamp recalled that meeting in his interview: "Basically we talked about faith, 'cause I have very little faith in anything." Mellencamp said that the doctor "just kept grabbing my hand and saying 'John, you need to have faith.'" And so now he says he’s "trying to find faith in something."

I’ve also always found faith—belief in something amorphous--to be one heck of a challenge.  And while sometimes I can grab onto the feeling of God, the fact or lack of faith in such a being can seem irrelevant, having little to do with how I act in this world. But as I heard Mellencamp recall his conversation with Dr. Heimburger it coalesced for me with my study of Shoftim and my reaction to this summer’s Court decisions.  I realized that the promise of justice gives me faith in humanity.  I understand that not every Court ruling will sit well with me; and some—to my mind—simply defy any understanding I have of justice.  Yet the promise is always there.  I’m acutely aware that in this same summer we have witnessed people gunned down, stabbed, and burned, and churches destroyed—in some cases in the name of patriotism and God—tempting us to fall into despondency. Yet our human-built and human-administered system of justice—which, transcending mere promise, has shown that it can burst forth with rulings that in four days fundamentally shift our society to one demanding greater equity and greater access—instead moves me to have faith in humanity. That may sound trite or simplistic, but I’m speaking of the power and desire that can live in and emerge from us—mere people—to shift the world in better directions.

Our text itself endorses and even mandates destruction and dispossession in the name of God and nationalism.  Yet it holds forth the promise of a system of justice and governance with the flexibility to mature over time and thus profoundly change civilization.  And it places faith in judges and leaders—people—to make that happen.  I share that faith in humanity.

But that’s not enough.  Perhaps this is what forms that basis of my difficulties with faith—ambivalence and even skepticism regarding faith.  It’s too easy to stop there, because we believe that something, someone, some power will take care of things.  Even the power and promise of justice, and even the fact of justice done well, does not take care of things.  We do.

While the knowledge of our Supreme Court’s rulings on equality may have filled me, their impact hits a ceiling, and my faith in humanity means little, unless they catalyze us to act.  The rulings give us a framework and an opportunity.  Let’s seize it.

A dozen years ago, when my son had some extra time, I decided it was a great opportunity to expose him to a variety of volunteer activities.  He responded with frustration at the meager impact of a few hours here and there in disjointed activities for small outreach organizations.  He said that he wanted to be involved—whether through activity or donations—only in large systemic change, so each contribution would by virtue of expanded infrastructure and efficient leverage of resource achieve greater influence.  While I still find value in individual contribution, in building upon small and even singular activities, and in exposing children to participation through exposure through manageable activities—I’ll concede that it wasn’t for Isaac.  What did appeal to him was joining a group of youth who formed a grant allocation board within Jewish Family & Children’s Services in Philadelphia.  Each researched, visited, reported on and issued recommendations for organizations to fund, and the group then voted for one to receive a significant grant—to which the children themselves in part contributed.  And, the fact is, Isaac was correct—when we function collectively, when we build infrastructure, when we achieve scale, we can extend the impact of each individual actor and each dollar.

I share this to illustrate why I said, a moment ago, that the rulings offer a framework and stimulus for us to act. Not me.  Not you.  Not him. Not her.  Us.  So I want to know how we as a community will respond at this catalyzing moment for impacting issues of equality.  Not how one of us addresses access to food for poor people, or how another of us addresses access to education and employment for people with mental illness.  These are important efforts that should continue.
But as a community and as an organization, how will we organize to singularly and amply commit our collective time, funds and infrastructure to  turning the promise of one of the rulings--for equity in health access, in housing access, in marriage access, or in political access—into  substantive effect?

Two days ago we marked, on the Gregorian calendar, the fourth anniversary of my father’s death.  He was a person for whom the pursuit of justice, and the practical societal implementation of its promise, informed just about everything. Even my name reflects that.  I’ve spoken today to honor my father, to celebrate the impact of a system built on justice, and to urge us to do justice by going beyond faith—to organize as a faith community, and as an institution—in a structured, ongoing, strategic, all-hands-on-deck manner to influence equity at scale. 

For my grandson

I think often of tikkun olam—repairing the world.  There are some big, sweeping, important ideas related to this Jewish precept.  Such as social justice and caring for the earth, as just a couple examples.  My personal commitment to tikkun olam, however, is on a smaller scale: a daily, analytical decision-making approach to the options that face us each day, whether discreet or far-reaching. I suppose that I can measure success in my personal pursuit of tikkun olam by the frequency with which I consciously go through this process when the opportunity arises.  As I recently said to some colleagues, deciding on the right thing isn’t just about whether our reputation is at stake, or whether others ever will know the ramifications of our choices.  What defines me is what I know about myself and the decisions I’ve made.

In Judaism’s 10 Best Ideas, Arthur Greene points out in his chapter on tikkun olam: “The account of creation in Genesis reaches its climax when God sanctifies the Sabbath. That passage ends with a verse that says, if read literally, ‘God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, for in it God rested from all the labor that God created to do’ (Gen. 2:3).”  This suggests to me that God’s work was not simply to create the world, but to create a world in which we would have a creative role.  For that creative role to have meaning, the world as “finished” by God must be imperfect. Hanging out there is the notion of the future messianic era, but it is not for us to await such perfection—rather, it is our responsibility to move the world ever closer with our restorative contributions.  This is tikkun olam.

In a discussion about Greene’s chapter, a member of my congregation talked about tikkun olam in connection with the legacy each of us passes down and leaves behind. This put me in mind of a recent dialogue on Facebook.  My daughter Audrey wrote:

While I'm so thrilled by the news in NY re: fracking ban and what it might mean as a precedent for environmental justice, my emotions are conflicted. It is hard to reconcile the joys of local sustainability victories with the sorrows of far-off tragedies... to care about future generations close to home without equal care for distant populations. I realize nobody can tend to the whole world or place it all on his shoulders, but I can't help thinking of the mothers of those young children in Pakistan when I see all the celebratory talk about the fracking decision, since they're both bombarding my digital world at the same moment in time.

Audrey is pregnant, her due date just nine days from when I am writing this.  She was recognizing the tension between joy and sorrow, the chasm that often yawns between our personal priorities and the world condition, and the questions tragedies raise about the world into which we choose to bring a new generation.  I responded to her:

It is an extraordinary blessing to be able to find joy in our lives even while we feel and cry for the deep sadness that may be at the same time in our own lives and in others'. Last night, I wanted joyfully to watch the news over and over to see the images of … Alan [Gross, my good friend Estelle’s cousin] finally being released from captivity in Cuba, and yet that interspersed with the excruciating news and images--from which we cannot and should not hide--in Pakistan. When we are expectant parents, we can't help but ask ourselves: what kind of world are we bringing this child into? The answer is--has always been--both kinds, and we have the opportunity to raise one more child to add to the vast majority of people who are so very good and, we can only hope and teach, to do his part to make it better.

Yesterday, my daughter told me of the exhaustingly busy day she’d had making the final preparations for the baby.  Cleaning, organizing, putting the car seat into place, packing the hospital bag, buying the last basics.  The next day, she said, she would rest.  How very much that sounds like “God rested from all the labor that God created to do.” Just substitute “parent” for “God.”  She was finishing with the act of creation that would come before the ongoing creation there will be to do, in the birth and raising of this new human being.  And all day, Audrey told me, as she accomplished these things she could not get out of her head the traditional tune of Adon Olam, the closing prayer of the Shabbat morning service.

Audrey did not have the words in mind, but these are the first stanzas of Adon Olam:

Before creation shaped the world, eternally God reigned alone;

but only with creation done could God as sovereign be known.

When all is ended, God alone will reign in awesome majesty.

(Translation from  Siddur Sim Shalom, The Rabbinical Assembly, fourth printing, 1999)

Adon Olam (sovereign of the world) defines, by calling attention to them, the gap that falls between these states of God's singular existence, which we collectively must fill with tikkun olam (repair of the world). This is how we ensure that “God… [is] known.”  I can think of no better tune for Audrey to have had running through her mind as she took care of the last details before that ultimate moment of legacy—bringing one more person into an imperfect world to help with the work of making it better.

This essay was inspired by a discussion and learning session, led by Rabbi David Finkelstein, at Temple Beth Israel in Waltham, MA.

Joy

Yesterday, I cleaned all the windows in my house, by myself, inside and out, in less than an hour.  It seems disproportionate, but this made me feel almost giddy with joy.  As I sprayed and wiped, sprayed and wiped, I thought about what it had taken in our 3-story + attic + basement Victorian with about 45 windows, most of them 7 feet long.  We couldn’t do it ourselves, it took a crew at least a full day, sometimes a second, and it was too expensive to do as often as we would have liked.  Thinking back on this, rag in hand, I smiled ear-to-ear.  Joy.  While cleaning windows.

Everything in our home is something we have consciously decided to own and use.  With the exception of the guest room, we spend a lot of time in every room in our home.  (And the guest room rarely goes empty for very long.) When our children were young, we used all the rooms in our last home as well.  But when we became empty nesters, we didn’t even need to open the heat registers on the second floor.  The house lacked the amount of activity that made it fully a home.  We fit our new home; it fits us.

In our last home, we had a stand-up attic stuffed floor-to-ceiling and wall-to-wall, and a basement much the same.  Now the items we’d held onto, just because we could, have homes with people who might use them.  We donated what our family had outgrown but others might still enjoy, and we discarded what no one could want (my college notebooks, anyone?).  In our new home, we never have to slog through the morass of our past belongings to find what we need right now.  How wonderful that feels!

We also felt joy when we moved into our big home 25 years ago, two young parents and their 2-year-old leaving their starter home for the place in which they could grow as a family.  On settlement day, though it would be a few weeks before we moved in, we took a picnic dinner to the December-chilled, empty house, turned on the heat, and sat on the dining room floor around the heat register to enjoy our dinner.  We were in heaven.  After moving in, I marveled that we put less time into straightening up a large house rather than more, because the extra room meant we weren’t tripping over toys.  This became the home where our two children and their friends found the nooks and crannies for hide-and-go-seek, where we hosted huge open-houses, terrific birthday parties, and extended family dinners.  Where we had the room to volunteer for an organization providing housing for people while they or their loved ones sought medical treatment at the world-class hospitals in our area (we and our children gained so much from sharing our home and lives with people from Siberia, China and all over the US).  We fit our home; it fit us.

Recalling our starter home, joy comes flooding back again.  My husband and I, married a year, each night after work attacked the institutional green on every wall and ceiling (what were they thinking when they chose that color?) of the little one-story Cape, armed with brushes and rollers--buckets of paint as the ammunition. We had such fun, sinking our energy and hopes for the future into weeks of making the place our own.  It was the perfect size for us to learn the ropes of homeownership, to bring home our first child from the hospital, to experiment with growing a few fruit trees and a compact perennial garden as we tested the capacity of the small property.  We fit our home; it fit us.

Yesterday, cleaning my windows, all of this came to me, with the three homes we’ve owned representing the joy of each stage in our three decades of married life.  The people, relationships and experiences that developed and intertwined within the homes have been the true source of our joy, of course.  Whatever our challenges, setbacks, struggles and sorrows along the way, we have been and remain extraordinarily fortunate.  

As we shopped for our current home, while we sought a smaller space we also wanted the perfect spot for the grandchildren we hoped eventually to welcome (the rec room, the protected back yard, the park and playground a few steps down the road).  And now our daughter who began life in our starter home 27 years ago is expecting her first child.  The joy continues.

Discomfort

Delivered as the d'var Torah (sermon, or words of Torah) at Temple Beth Israel, Waltham, MA on March 29, 2014.  It deals with the week's Torah reading, Tazria, Leviticus 12:1-13:59.


I raised my hand for this particular d’var because I’d never prepared one for Tazria before.  For that matter, no one ever had offered me Tazria.  When you think about it, there may be good reason for that.  What would they say to me?  “I’d like to honor you by asking you to deliver the d’var for the portion about bodily fluid excretions and skin disease?”

Tazria can make people uncomfortable.  But I’m not sure it’s the blood and scaly skin to which we react, so much as how the notions of impurity and its consequences sit with our contemporary sensibilities.

Is discomfort such a bad thing? It’s easy to imagine that it was discomfort—anxiety about life-threatening childbirth, the loss of life-giving and life-sustaining fluids, persistent and spreading disease—that led to the requirements and proscriptions we find in Tazria.  They may not, in our eyes, be perfect solutions. But I believe we can set our customary lenses aside to see that the Israelites took a hard, analytical look, rather than putting on blinders or rose-colored glasses when faced with something uncomfortable.

This has been on my mind since I read in the March 19 Boston Globe that there has been an uproar over the staging of shows with outdated themes—ones that cause us discomfort—in local high schools.  The article by Don Aucoin reported on the “collision between the past and the present, a frequent occurrence in theater as a dated canon meets an increasingly diverse population. The very plays and musicals that outwardly seem like a good fit for high schoolers—because of their tunefulness and large casts and overall buoyancy—are often the most problematic in their depictions of nonwhite characters.”

Do racial stereotypes bother me?  Certainly.  But as a student of literature, the premise of the article also disturbs me.  Enough, in fact, that I posted this response to the article online:

Mr. Aucoin reached the 12th paragraph before acknowledging the key fact that plays are part of our body of literature.  Will we ban Jane Eyre from high school English classrooms, citing its depiction of mental illness, or will we use it as an opportunity to teach more deeply about how the woman in the attic is portrayed?  I hope the latter, and I expect the school theater department to take on the same responsibility. When we stage a school play, I want to believe that we do more than put kids on stage in costume, with lines, tunes and dance steps memorized.  I trust we are seizing the opportunity to teach the literature and what it tells us about society then and now, both to the students participating in the production and to their audience.

 

It is in part because of the discomfiting madwoman that we should teach Jane Eyre and because of the negative stereotypes in Thoroughly Modern Millie and South Pacific that we should bring them to high school stages.  And talk about the discomfort.  And help to develop a generation that can find better solutions.  The fact is, we all know that we have not fully addressed the issues that generated those stereotypes, and if we ignore them we never will.

Given the age of the Torah text we’re here to discuss, it’s interesting to be talking about the outdated sensibilities of musicals from the 1940s through 1960s. Some of us may react strongly to Tazria’s view of women needing separation after childbirth—with the period of impurity doubled for the birth of a girl in comparison with the birth of a boy.  But instead of letting our discomfort turn us away, if we instead read more closely we could conclude that Tazria was in some ways light years ahead of the musicals from 50 or 60 years ago.

More often read as a double-portion with next week’s Metzora, Tazria does not speak only of ritual impurity and the resulting separation from community.  It also—and Metzora still more—addresses purification and reintegration.  It acknowledges that we differ from each other.  As women and men.  As the ill and the healthy.  As those with skin that looks different from what we consider normal.  But it also confirms that we are one community and the goal is to develop a means to bring us back together.  Tazria confronts us with difficult implications.   But we can learn a great deal about the desire for an integrated community of equals and we can take lessons, good and bad, for continuing to try to achieve that goal.

Again reading closely, we might find an extraordinary sensitivity to the needs of those who may, to modern minds, appear to receive unfair treatment.  In a life packed with requirements and expectations, fundamental both to daily survival and to religious life, when childbirth was regularly life-threatening, it may be a gift to delay re-entry after giving birth and afford the mother time with her child and for herself.  For a person with visible signs of disease on his skin, it may be a blessing to embrace a process, a priest’s oversight and the potential for healing and reintegration, rather than fear unfettered shunning and chaos.

In The Book of Jewish Values, Rabbi Joseph Talushkin writes that the Torah teaches us to break negative patterns. “If you have been hurt,” he explains, “learn how not to hurt. Were you taunted with an ugly nickname as a child?  Were you mocked because of your lack of athletic ability? Have you ever lost out on a job opening because of discrimination? Were you pained because someone spread a malicious rumor about you? Think of how you have suffered, and how you can ensure that those who have contact with you don’t suffer in a similar way.”

This is what it means to face our discomfort.  Look closely at the sources of our pain and sadness so we can bring something better to others.

Look closely at the hardships of giving birth and suffering disease with no protections in place, so we can ensure others have some protections.

Look closely at the negative stereotypes in the vast body of literature available to us, so we can build a better society.

In other words, find learning moments and teaching moments.

Last year, Rabbi Laura Geller wrote on Tazria-Metzora in The Jewish Journal. Her opening read:  “Most people try really hard to avoid having their bar or bat mitzvah on the Shabbat when we read Tazria-Metzora. I know this not only because I am a rabbi, but because this was my bat mitzvah portion.” She goes on to say, “When I was 13, I didn’t understand about human weakness and frailty. I didn’t understand our need for rituals that can support us and help us transform shame and guilt into wholeness again. …  I didn’t know that I would be called upon to create new rituals to help people navigate difficult and complicated transitions. Nor did I know that sometimes it would be necessary for me to intervene in situations where people needed to be quarantined, taken out of the community because they were dangerous to themselves or someone else. … But I know it now.”

In other words, Rabbi Geller came to understand that by looking beneath the discomfort that Tazria raises we can find guidance (and perhaps someone could have helped her begin to learn that when she was becoming a bat mitzvah).

Sometimes, it is enticing to ignore the things that make us squirm, and just move on.  Sometimes, it feels righteous to raise Cain over exposing our children to negative stereotypes. But these would be missed learning opportunities, missed teaching moments.

As I began, I quipped that perhaps I’ve never before been offered the d’var for Tazria because talking about bodily fluids and skin disease hardly seems like an honor.  But that is taking the parasha only skin deep, which does our tradition a great disservice.

Shabbat Shalom.

Place

Va-yetzei begins by quickly letting us know from where Yaacov has departed—Beer-sheba—and where he’s going—Haran.  This single sentence proves to provide the framework for the much lengthier description of the place that comes in between.

What is that in-between place?  At first, we don’t know.  It’s just “a certain place,” and “this place.”  A seemingly any-place where Yaacov happens to stop for the night and use a stone for a pillow.  But it becomes so much more.  It transforms from a wayside camp to the setting of a holy vision.  Yaacov wakes from his extraordinary dream of an encounter with God and calls the place “awesome,” “the house of God” and “the gateway to heaven.”  Yet still, it seems to have no name.  Not until after Yaacov has transformed his pillow stone into an anointed pillar, until after he as renamed the site Bethel (house of God), do we finally learn that it had formerly been the city of Luz.

Did the spiritual experience itself turn the forgotten place into sacred space?  Not entirely.  It was with the aesthetic transition of a randomly chosen stone pillow to a thoughtfully fixed commemorative monument that Yaacov declared the name and made the transformation complete.

In the current Temple Beth Israel newsletter, you’ll read about a new initiative for this sacred space.  We hope to gather momentum and commitment to attend to the aesthetic stewardship of our sanctuary, building and grounds.  Some may wonder whether investing ourselves in the beauty of our space diminishes us; are we frivolous to worry about how the sanctuary looks, or whether the front hall conveys both an inviting and an inspiring welcome, rather than how the liturgy and d’var Torah move us? 

In Philadelphia, I grew up in the only Frank Lloyd Wright designed synagogue.  Brad and I raised our children there.  Between the two of us over the years, we became involved at many levels—in the school leadership, in the Rabbi search committee, in the house committee, in strategic planning, in religious and social programming, in social action, in the religious committee, and I could go on.  The physical facility also grabbed us.  Brad transformed the grounds, both to align the landscape with the
unique beauty of the building and to develop the first of his gardens—ultimately acres in the community—to help supply the synagogue’s food pantry.  I chaired an event, the Landmark Ball, to mark the designation of the building as a national historic landmark.  We became founding supporters of the Beth Sholom Synagogue Preservation Foundation, a 501(c)3 established to help support the facility needs, complete with an interactive visitor center and Frank Lloyd Wright design store.

Some perceived any emphasis on the architectural significance of the building as discordant with the synagogue’s religious mission. Stealing volunteer and donor resources from what’s really important in the life of a congregation.  Conflating the space and the spirituality of the activities that happen within it.

But perhaps Va-yetzei teaches us that this very conflation yields just what we require.  Yaacov models to us that the spiritual and the visual intertwine in the establishment of sacred space. 

Abraham Joshua Heschel said : The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.”  I believe that beauty contributes to our sense of wonder.  We accept and even expect to bring this wonderful beauty into our sacred liturgy through music.  Why not into our sacred space as well?

In The Book of Jewish Values, Rabbi Joseph Telushkin gives us another take on the intersection between aesthetic beauty and spiritual elevation.  He relates this Sukkot story from Israeli Nobel Prize laureate S. Y. Agnon:

[S]hortly before Sukkot in his Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot, [Agnon] ran into one of his neighbors, an elderly rabbi from Russia, at a store selling etrogim. The rabbi told Agnon that he regarded it as particularly important to acquire a very beautiful, aesthetically perfect etrog. Although he had limited means, he was willing to spend a large sum to acquire this ritual object.

How surprised Agnon was a day or two later, when the holiday began and the rabbi did not take out his etrog during the synagogue service. Perplexed, he asked the man where the etrog was. The rabbi told him…:

“I awoke early, as is my habit, and prepared to recite the blessing over the etrog in my Sukkah on my balcony.  As you know, we have a neighbor with a large family, and our balconies adjoin. As you also know, our neighbor, the father of all these children next door, is a man of short temper. Many times he shouts at them or even hits them for violating his rules and wishes.  I have spoken to him many times about his harshness but to little avail.

“As I stood in the Sukkah on my balcony, about to recite the blessing for the etrog, I heard a child’s weeping coming from the next balcony. It was a little girl crying, one of the children of our neighbor. I walked over to find out what was wrong. She told me that she, too, had awakened early and had gone out on her balcony to examine her father’s etrog, whose delightful appearance and fragrance fascinated her. Against her father’s instructions, she removed the etrog from its protective box to look at it. She unfortunately dropped the etrog on the stone floor, irreparably damaging it and rendering it unacceptable for ritual use.  She knew that her father would be enraged and would punish her severely, perhaps even violently. Hence the frightened tears and wails of apprehension. I comforted her, and then I took my etrog and placed it in her father’s box, taking the damaged etrog to my premises. I told her to tell her father that his neighbor insisted that he accept the gift of the beautiful etrog, and that he would be honoring me and the holiday by so doing.”

Agnon concludes:  “My rabbinic neighbor’s damaged, bruised, ritually unusable etrog was the most beautiful etrog I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
In this story, an act of spiritual beauty emerged from the tradition of bringing aesthetic beauty into our ritual.

***

As a newcomer to Temple Beth Israel, I’ve found spiritual beauty in abundance.  In the genuine kindness and community. In the lovely chanting and the inspiring d’vrei Torah from our clergy and fellow congregants.

When I was checking out the options in my new community, I first went to the TBI website.  Here I got the impression of a ritually rich traditional congregation with progressive values and forward thinkers.  But, to be honest, when I first walked in…I wondered.   It wasn’t that I was looking for another architectural masterpiece. I saw a place whose building was fine but whose level of aesthetic stewardship might suggest disconnection and stagnation rather than spiritual engagement and progression.  And if I hadn’t persisted past that first impression, I may never have discovered that we have the transformative community that moves us beyond simply a place…to a sacred space. 

As a marketer, I knew we had to better manage that first impression, aligning our aesthetic appeal to our heart and soul, to help our congregation compete for growth.  Fortunately, when I raised my concerns they were heard as opportunity rather than complaint.  With Rabbi Nathan’s support and involvement, a number of us are exploring ways to move forward; and as many of you have noticed Brad already has begun to make his mark outside.

As I read Va-yetzei, I see what we are doing not only through my marketing lens but, in some small measure, through Yaakov’s eyes.  I realize that we need to solidify our identity by placing our stone—anointing our place with the attention to beauty that helps us to experience it as sanctified space.

I delivered this d'var Torah at Temple Beth Israel in Waltham, MA on November 9, 2013.