In my childhood, Shabbat never felt complete without Stella D'Oro cookies. For the uninitiated, these are dry cookies whose chief (or only) advantage is that they are parve (dairy free) and therefore can be eaten for dessert after a meat meal. I was especially partial to the Swiss Fudge flavor, which featured a dollop of chewy fudge in the middle of an otherwise-bland cookie-if you nibbled away the outside first, you could enjoy a few bites of pure fudge at the end.

I have since stopped eating meat and have learned to bake, thereby eliminating the need for parve supermarket cookies, but still have a soft place in my heart for Stella D'Oro. I was therefore upset to hear recently that workers at the cookie-maker's Bronx factory went on strike this past summer, and even more upset that this strike has attracted (as far as I can tell) virtually no notice in the Jewish community.

In 2006, Brynwood Partners bought Stella D'Oro from Kraft Foods. As soon as the contract of the existing 136 workers ran out in the summer of 2008, the new management demanded that the workers accept pay cuts of up to 26% and begin contributing to their health insurance plan. The workers scheduled to bear the brunt of this pay cut would be the women who package the cookies. (Brynwood has classified certain jobs-mostly those held by men-as "skilled" and thus subject to smaller paycuts.) The workers walked out in August.

The Jewish community has already demonstrated an ability to change Stella D'Oro policy. A few years ago, the company decided, for financial reasons, to start using dairy ingredients in the aforementioned Swiss Fudge cookies. Jews around the country rose up as one and demanded justice. Faced with the possibility of losing its primary (or only) customer base, Stella D'Oro quickly reversed the decision to dairy-fy the cookies, and returned to purchasing parve fudge filling.

Will we harness this same economic power to save the livelihoods of 136 Bronx families?

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Liberal Jews, myself included, love to quote biblical verses about the care of the poor, the widows, the orphans, and the strangers. We feel good knowing that our tradition demands ethical behavior, and point to these verses as evidence that ritual practice is not the end all and be all of Jewish life.

But how many of us actually take these verses seriously?

This week’s parashah lays out some of the basic principles for agricultural tzedakah:

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not pick your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen fruit of your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the stranger: I the Lord am your God. (Leviticus 19:9-10)

These laws, known as pe’ah (the corners of the field), leket (fallen produce), along with shikh’cha (forgotten produce) serve as precedent for later laws of tzedakah. While the Torah does not specify the minimum amount that an individual must give to tzedakah, the rabbis mandate giving at least ten percent of one’s income.

Immediately after presenting these laws of tzedakah, the Torah continues, “You shall not steal.” (19:11). At least one classical commentator, Abraham Ibn Ezra, understands this juxtaposition to mean that failure to give tzedakah constitutes stealing.

Jewish law prohibits “gozel ‘aniyyim”—stealing from the poor. Ordinarily, this prohibition refers to cases in which a person who is ineligible for tzedakah takes from communal tzedakah funds, thereby leaving insufficient money for those who are actually in need.

In one teshuvah (legal opinion), the contemporary scholar, Rabbi Eliezer Waldenburg (aka the “Tzitz Eliezer”, 1915-2006) uses the category of gozel ‘aniyyim also to forbid spending money set aside for tzedakah to fulfill another mitzvah, such as writing a Torah scroll.

Earlier this week, I wrote about Peter Singer’s controversial suggestion that only money donated to anti-poverty programs should be eligible for tax deductions. I suggested that, while the IRS cannot reasonably get involved in determining what counts as poverty relief, that individual Jews should dedicate our tzedakah money—meaning ten percent or more of our income—to ending poverty. We can argue endlessly about how best to eradicate poverty, but should at least be able to justify to ourselves that ten percent or more of our income is contributing to the creation of a more equitable world.

In today’s economic climate, we are asked constantly to contribute money to one mitzvah or another. On top of all of these solicitations, we try to save enough money to survive a job loss or salary reduction, and to prepare for our families’ future. But the obligation to give tzedakah is not a luxury reserved for good times. Nor can we count every donation, regardless how worthy, as tzedakah. Taking the prohibition against gozel ‘aniyyim seriously means setting aside ten percent no matter what for bringing about the end of poverty.

It’s easy to feel good about quoting verses mandating care of the poor. Will we also commit ourselves to not stealing?

In the course of just a few days, incidents of swine flu have been reported from as far away as New Zealand, and as close as a few blocks from my Manhattan apartment.  The WHO is warning of an international pandemic, and health professionals ranging from school nurses to emergency room doctors are undergoing a crash course in identifying the symptoms of the disease.

Because the disease seems to have originated in Mexico, some conservatives have seized this opportunity to demand that the United States close the border with Mexico. According to the World Health Organization, such measures would be ineffective in stopping the spread of the disease. Even though the disease seems to have entered the United States via American tourists to Mexico, there is a real chance that immigrants will be stigmatized as the bearers of disease.  To cite just one anti-immigrant commentator:

The recent outbreak of Swine flu in Mexico and over 40 cases in the United States exposes yet another aspect of mass immigration into the United States.  Such outbreaks of diseases stem from cultures that lack personal hygiene, personal health habits and standards for disease prevention. . . .

Why?  Short answer: culture and customs.  The Bird flu spreads across Asia because people live and sleep with their chickens, with their pigs, with their livestock.  It's their culture.  They live in such compacted numbers that they cannot move toward healthy paradigms.

Blaming immigrants for introducing disease into the United States is not a new phenomenon. In Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the “Immigrant Menace” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1994), Alan M. Kraut traces the ways in which various immigrant groups, including the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Haitians, have been accused of spreading diseases ranging from typhoid to polio to tuberculosis to AIDS.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, tuberculosis was often known as the “Tailor’s Disease” or the “Jewish Disease.” Because the disease spreads quickly among people living in cramped quarters, poor immigrants living in tenements were more likely to contract TB than wealthier Americans were.In 1908, Dr. Manly H. Simons, the medical director of the US navy had this to say about Jews and disease:

The poorer classes of Jews are very unsanitary; they work and live in dirty and badly ventilated quarters. . . as a type, Jews are beginning to show mental and physical degredation as evidenced by the great variability of development, great brilliancy, idiocy, moral perversity, epilepsy, physical deformity, anarchistic and lawless tendencies." (qtd in Kraut 145)

The Jewish community responded by establishing hospitals to care for Jewish patients with TB and with other communicable diseases. At the time, most hospitals admitted only patients with physical injuries, and would not treat anyone with a communicable disease. Wealthier patients would not enter hospitals, but instead would receive private medical care at home. Jewish hospitals opened their doors first to Jewish patients with contagious diseases, and then to any patient with such an illness. These hospitals not only treated sick people of all ethnic backgrounds, but also helped to reduce the stigma of disease and to alleviate fears of an immigrant-borne plague.

Will swine flu be the TB of the twenty-first century? I certainly hope not. I hope that this disease, like many public health scares before, disappears quickly befor reaching pandemic status. And whatever happens, I hope that the anti-immigration folks fail to turn today's Mexicans into yesterday's Jews.

I recently returned from a whirlwind, thirty-two hour tour of LA, during which I spoke with students and faculty of Hebrew Union College and of the American Jewish University, with alumni of the Progressive Jewish Alliance’s Jeremiah Fellows program, and with a number of other community members.  Using my book as a starting point, we ventured into wide-ranging conversations about Judaism, social justice, power, the role of rabbis and other community leaders in justice work, and the most effective means of social change.

The question that arose most frequently concerned the most effective means of making change. Many of us have experience primarily with one mode of action: we may volunteer in a local service project, give money to tzedakah, write letters about policy issues, participate in an organizing effort, or speak publicly about issues close to our heart.

Even those of us who may take part in multiple means of social change often find ourselves debating the relative merits of various modes of change: people devoted to organizing and advocacy look down at those doing service for focusing only on the immediate need, without trying to solve the problem in the long run; people who do service dismiss organizing as too slow to address current issues; those who do hands-on work find check-writing too passive; those who focus on tzedakah point out that most organizations need money more than volunteers. And on and on.

There is, of course, no answer to this endless debate. Without organizing, the most passionate speeches will do little good; without these passionate speeches, few will feel moved to action. Without policy change, we will never end hunger, homelessness, or exploitatio; without direct service, people will go hungry and without shelter until policies change.

I decided to name my book There Shall be No Needy because I wanted a name that was aspirational. I wanted to push us, as a community, to think broadly about our responsibility to create a world without poverty or other forms of suffering. But those who recognize the biblical reference will remember that, in the book of Deuteronomy, God makes this promise--that there will be no needy in the land, and almost immediately follows up with a warning to give tzedakah when asked, as the poor will never disappear. 

I read this apparent contradiction as a challenge to maintain our focus both on the long-term goal, and on the short-term alleviation of suffering. If we put all of our efforts toward policy change, people will starve while we negotiate politics. If we put all of our efforts toward meeting immediate needs, we will never achieve a more just world. 

A friend of mine, also a rabbi, tells the story of taking a group of high school students to volunteer at a homeless shelter. At the end of the evening, one of the students turned to him and said, "this was such a fantastic experience! Every kid should get to volunteer at a homeless shelter." 

When we become so focused on either meeting the immediate needs of a homeless person, or on our own feeling of self-fulfillment through teh volunteer experience, we have lost sight of the promise that "there shall be no needy" and of the obligation to work toward this ideal. On the other hand, when we turn down our noses at service as providing only a band-aid solution, we ignore the second part of the biblical text, which reminds us to care for each and every person who asks for help.

What's the best way to create social change? An impossible question to answer--we might have to start by doing everything.

Several years ago, an acquaintance stole my identity and opened several credit cards in my name. I learned of the theft only when she ceased to be able to pay even the minimum amount due, and I became the unhappy recipient of several daily calls from menacing collection agents. 

In the process of sorting out the resultant mess, I learned more than I wanted to know about the dangers of credit cards. I discovered how quickly fees add up when bills are not paid, and how eager credit card companies are to raise rates for delinquent customers. From one company's diligent and helpful inspector, I heard unfortunate stories about financially-desperate parents who take out credit cards in the name of a minor, only to learn later that they have inadvertently ruined their child's credit rating. From reading the credit card bills attributed to me, I was reminded how quickly small and necessary expenses—such as food and gas—can add up to unmanageable debt. In the end, I did not press charges against my acquaintance, both because I did not want to send one more person into our broken criminal justice system, and because I recognized her act as a desperate attempt to care for her family on an insufficient income. The fact that she would spend several years paying back the credit card companies seemed punishment enough.

Most people who get into credit card trouble are not doing anything illegal. And, while some use credit cards to buy luxuries that they can ill afford, many others rely on credit cards to buy food, pay medical bills, and manage other daily expenses when there is little cash on hand.

Even I, who am always careful to pay my credit card bills in full and on time each month, am mystified by much of the small print on the back of my statements, and the periodic letters I receive informing me that some obscure condition or another has changed in a way that only an accountant could understand. I was shocked, for instance, earlier this year to learn from a financial advisor that the company that issues one of my credit cards had begun imposing an annual fee; though I had read every one of the letters I received from this company, I had missed this crucial detail buried somewhere in the legalese.

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