Not Another Dark Holocaust Poem: Chava, Miriam, Auschwitz

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Not Another Dark Holocaust Poem: Chava, Miriam, Auschwitz

It is tempting to dredge up ashy metaphors for your last days on earth

To remain riveted, horrified, impaled by thoughts of what it must have been like

Torn away from the comfort of a beautiful room, in your beautiful clothes, your ordinary Jewish lives

Turning away from the gathering gray clouds; the rumors, the stricken faces, the sinking fears pulling you into a reality too dreadful to be faced

And then, too late;

for Chava, for Miriam, too late

 

But wait, here is where I stop being able to go with you, onto that train, towards the sorting desk: live or die,

The barracks, the showers, the endings. Instead I carry you in my arms into the present

Into my music, quilting, cooking, tikkuning, praying and I feel you here in the invisible connections

Great-aunts with large breasts, recipes, laughter, wisdom, sewing machines, struggles: loving life, loving me.

Rabbi Morton (Morty) Leifman: In Memoria

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Morty Leifman was a man who believed to his last day that what went on inside those gates at JTS was a crucial part of American Judaism. Yet he was not Pollyannaish or uncritical – he could be devastatingly serious and cutting and would put his career on the line for something, or someone, he believed in. But through it all he remained a consummate believer in Conservative Judaism. When we sometimes expressed our doubts about that he heard us and responded in a serious and honest manner, always with a grin and a twinkle in his eye. He had his own way of being subversive. But even in some of the darker moments inside those gates, I don’t think Morty ever considered leaving them behind. That was his spiritual home.

Mustard Seeds and Mountains

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For a while now I have been haunted by the notion that in our modern day seeds are sown not just for food. They are now used as emblems of power or blessings of resistance. In one such instance, we find the Ponca Nation dotting the Nebraska landscape in the path of the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline with sacred Ponca red corn seeds.

Food Politics

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Tikkun has convened a forum on Food Politics that take stock of the successes and dangers of contemporary food politics. The essays that follow touch on Jewish veganism, indigenous peoples’ resistance to big agribusiness, the hidden externalities of low food prices, the sexual politics of meat, and much more.

Food as Medicine: Vermont Youth Grow Food for the Hungry

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The harvesters appear as they stand, dressed in their Vermont Youth Conservation Corps uniforms—short-sleeved green button-down shirts with a VYCC patch over the shoulder—lifting totes full of vegetables to be hauled to the far end of the row and onto an old pickup. I follow behind a Nepali girl named Anjou, who wears sandals, her arms adorned with bangles.

Misogyny and Misery on the Menu

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We don’t realize that the act of viewing another as an object and the act of believing that another is an object are actually different acts, because our culture has collapsed them into one. Through images, misery is made sexy. Advertisements and other representations are never only about the product they are promoting. They are also about how our culture is structured, what we believe about ourselves and others. Advertisements appeal to someone to buy something. In this, they offer a window into the myths by which our world is structured. Ads advance someone over something. All of these images, and a panoply of others, accept the sexualized object status of women while presenting the consumable nature of domesticated animals.

Ghosts

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I place animals into three categories. The first category could be called “pets,” or “companion animals.” We know them well: dogs, cats, small domestic animals with whom we share our lives, even our food and our beds. The second category we know as “wildlife”: the charismatic megafauna we see on the covers of National Geographic, whose beauty and strength we revere from a distance but whose lives have little to no bearing on our own. We donate money to organizations that save them; we put photos of them up on our walls.

Food Justice: Are We Solving a Problem or Reimagining a System?

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The term “food desert” captured the public imagination from the moment it entered the conversation. From Main Street to the White House, it provided an evocative shorthand for the messy realities of poverty and dwindling economic opportunity affecting rural and urban communities across America. While criteria for what qualifies as a food desert vary, it is primarily defined by long distances from or low concentration of healthy food retailers in urban and rural areas, each of these imagined to diverge from some ideal number.

The Scent of the Field

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My sister is married to the son of a cattle rancher whose property is near Spokane, Washington. Well aware of my attraction to the countryside, she urged me to spend spring break with her and her family. Sensing an antidote for my sedentary life as a professor, I leapt at the chance. The Belsby ranch sprawls over 9,000 acres in Washington. Besides sprouting hay, alfalfa, a bit of winter wheat, and the odd cluster of apple, cherry, and plum trees, the ranch gives the Belsbys their living through its animals—some 700 head of cattle and two endearingly out-of-place geriatric water buffalo, old gifts from a rancher friend. Inside the house itself, calving paraphernalia was everywhere: sacks of milk powder slumped on the floor; syringes and vials of probiotics cluttered every surface; drying esophageal tubes hung from the backs of chairs; and rinsed bottles, recently separated from their plastic areolae, dripped into the sink and onto counters. Outside the house, vistas are expansive, and the openness of the landscape invites gales of wind and a nourishing sun that bestows its blessings all day. The men and women who work there are hearty and hale; the cows content; and the dogs, with huge bales of bound hay to leap over, livestock to bark at, and bubbling springs to quench their thirst, are in their own terrestrial paradise.

The True Cost of a Cheap Meal

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Externalized costs are negative effects of producing or consuming a good that are imposed on a third party and not accounted for in the sticker price of an item. Among food products, there is no greater discrepancy between printed cost and true cost than with animal products. When we take a closer look at meat, dairy, and eggs, externalized costs become apparent in four primary areas: animals, health, social justice, and the environment.

Judaism and Veganism: Time for a Reunion

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We have a Torah that clearly and repeatedly establishes the ideal of veganism and that calls upon us to show great concern for the comfort and well-being of animals. Yet most Jews continue to blithely consume meat, dairy, and eggs as if the welfare of animals were irrelevant.

Food Justice as God’s Justice

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Eating is so profound and all-encompassing because it takes us deeply and intimately into the world. I say “intimately” because with each bite we literally take the life and death of other beings into our bodies. This is both a wonderful and a terrifying thing. Eating brings us as near to another creature as is possible—so close that we become one flesh—while also bringing that creature’s life to an end. And it’s not just us. Everything that lives eats, which means that the whole world is a place of membership and intimacy, but also life and death. Which raises the question: How do we become worthy of receiving the life and death of the creatures that become our food? Or put a slightly different way, if eating is the embodied action of intimacy with other creatures, how do we stand before these creatures without shame? I ask this because one of the most helpful ways to talk about justice is to say that we are in just relation with others when we can stand before them without shame, knowing that in our action we have sought their well-being.

Two Stories about American Food

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Each meal is a moral statement. What other elemental, biological act involves such a public expression about ourselves and our relationship with the world? What we put in our mouths literally shapes who we are. We are what we eat. But we are also how we eat: the content and process of our consumption help define us.