Tzedek – The embodied Torah of Justice

Fasting for SNAP

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With some hesitation, this morning I joined with the mayor of Grand Rapids and a group of about 35 people from various faith traditions in a sunrise to sunset fast (drinking only water) that will last until SNAP benefits are restored. My hesitation came about because of some skepticism about whether a small group of people in West Michigan can really make a difference in Washington, DC. I agreed to join the effort because of Isaiah in a passage we read on Yom Kippur:

No, this is the fast I desire:
To unlock the fetters of wickedness,
And untie the cords of the yoke
To let the oppressed go free;
To break off every yoke.
It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to clothe him,
And not to ignore your own kin.

Isaiah 58:6-7

I proposed that fasting is not the end goal. Fasting is a tool to draw attention to real human needs. Fasting is a tool to get the president and the leadership of the senate to do what they need to do to work together to reopen the government and return to one of its primary responsibilities, taking care of the vulnerable of our society. Food, clothing and shelter are basic human needs. We fast to remind our leadership in Washington to do their jobs!

I invite you to join me and this request among your friends and family. Below is the mayor’s initial call for action and a website set up to gather support. I pray that SNAP benefits are restored and that this fast ends soon.

Rabbi Krishef

https://www.fastforsnap.com/

Brothers and Sisters,

As you all know, SNAP benefits are on the brink of being unfunded and indeed are already not funded as of today. This will affect approximately 30,000 Grand Rapids residents. SNAP is used for roughly $300,000 in purchases a day in GR. As of this writing, the State’s ameliorating response seems to be a $4.5 M statewide infusion of food banks. That scales to about $100K for Grand Rapids, or 1/3 of daily SNAP use. While a federal district court judge has ordered funding to be used for another 2 weeks of SNAP, the Trump administration seems to be saying only that it is “looking into” complying. 

While I am working on avenues for real city aid, and will keep working on and monitoring this, and while many of our charitable groups are working to respond, the scale is huge, and the gap too pressing for a full “substitute” for SNAP. I am coming to the conclusion that more is needed, and a public response by faith leaders and others is needed to focus urgency on restoration of food to the community in need

Faith communities have a long history of observing fasting. Jesus’ first act of ministry was a fast. Every year, our Jewish community demonstrate the power of fasting during Yom Kippur, as do our Muslim brothers and sisters during the month of Ramadan. And, as Gandhi and others proved, the political power of fasting- which is after all personally directed and non-violent, but powerful, nevertheless.

In this spirit, I intend to begin fasting for stable funding for SNAP. My political advisors pointed out to me that committing to a fast with a group of committed persons making the same testimony of concern would make the action more visible, powerful, corporate, etc. It is also less easy to dismiss the acts of a group (See “Alice’s Restaurant” for the proof text on this).

I would ask you all:

  1. consider joining in a public pledge to fast until stable funding for SNAP is restored
  2. Help build out a broader group of participants- in your congregation, community of care, etc.

I think the best fast in this context would be limited to a fast that is not life threatening- no food from sunrise to sunset, only water. The purpose is to make us urgent to work on responses, to take the pain of our SNAP brothers and sisters on ourselves in some sense, and to not “pass by on the other side of the road”. 

Peace and Love. David LaGrand, Mayor, Grand Rapids, MI

Divre Harav – April, 2025

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We’ll sit around the table in Mid-April and tell the story of Israel’s oppression in Egypt and subsequent redemption by God. And we’ll talk about a series of 10 punishments God sent on the entire Egyptian people until their leader finally let us go, despoiling the Egyptian on the way out of town, and trapping their army in the sea to drown.

Is this revenge or is it justice?

The Torah (and associated Midrash) portray the plagues as carefully measured punishments against that which the Egyptians worshipped as gods; the money taken from the Egyptians as reparations for many years of slavery, and drowning the army as a measure for measure justice for drowning Israeli baby boys.

Sitting around the table, it’s hard to imagine the Egyptians as innocent victims of Pharaoh. They are the overseers, the enablers of the oppressive, vicious, enslavement of the people who once saved them from famine. The Haggadah contains a passage in which several rabbis almost gleefully imagine multiplying the ten plagues – there were not just ten, there were 10 plus 50 more on the way out! No there were a total of 240! No, there were 300 plagues! The suffering is multiplied over and over, as if the plain sense of the Biblical story isn’t enough to achieve justice.

In the 2009 film “Inglorious Basterds,” director Quentin Tarantino gives us a Shoah revenge fantasy, in which a young Jewish refugee witnesses the slaughter of her family by the Nazis, and arranges a gathering of prominent Nazi officers for a movie premier at the theater she operates, coordinated with a ruthless band of Jewish guerrilla soldiers planning to blow up the theater.

Both the seder and the film play with the Jewish trope of being powerless against evil. We are not in fact powerless. In the seder, God is on our side, fighting for us. In the film, we’ve learned to take up arms and fight back. But the line between justice and revenge is blurry. We don’t defeat the enemy by hurting them exactly as much as they hurt us. We need to burn them to the ground, drown them, blow them up, punish them so thoroughly that they only have enough strength to lay down their whips and chains, shower us with gold and silver, and and wish us well on our way out of town. And the brave among them follow behind us because they see our way of life and the power of our God as far superior to Egyptian gods and civilization.

In the Bible, the stories attribute Israeli victories to God. Revenge and justice both belong to God, and human armies are God agents. Real life, however, and the fantasy of film. is messy. We don’t have a voice of God telling us exactly what to do. Instead, we have a collection of pundits and military analysts and politicians and soldiers acting, we hope, with integrity and sense of justice, not revenge. And when they mess us, sooner or later there will be a commission of inquiry to tell us how they erred and what we can do in the future to prevent such disasters.

And we pray: Next year in Jerusalem of God, Jerusalem of Peace!

Hebrew word(s) of the Month:

  • zedak – justice
  • nekama – revenge

Psalm 130

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“Yours is the power to forgive.” (130:4)

You control one of the greatest superpowers, the power to forgive. Be not stingy nor overly generous with forgiveness. Forgiving too quickly missed the opportunity help the other person appreciate how hurtful his or her actions were, and learn how to repair the damage. Withholding forgiveness is more damaging to you than the other person, because it keeps your hurt alive while the other person has moved on. You have the superpower of forgiveness. When used wisely, you can profoundly change both your life and the other’s.

Psalm 109

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“Do not keep silent.” (109:1)

Our Torah is a Torah of love and justice. In 1963, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy: “Please demand of religious leaders personal involvement, not just solemn declaration. We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate Negroes. Church and synagogue have failed. They must repent. Ask of religious leaders to call for national repentance and personal sacrifice … The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.”

A leader cannot be silent. A leader must speak forcefully and unequivocally when the situation demands.

Psalm 94

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“Rise up, judge of the earth.” (94:2)

To call upon God to judge and punish the guilt and exonerate the innocent is not to abrogate our responsibility to support a just society. However, the teaching from Pirke Avot (1:6), “Judge every person with the assumption of merit,” the Rabbinic equivalent of of the principle of “innocent until proven guilty,” ought to rein in our zeal to condemn and punish. When you are angry because you think someone perpetrated an injustice against you, imagine yourself in their place before judging them (Pirke Avot 2:4). Ask yourself: might you be misreading their intent or lack thereof? Might they be distracted by a stressful situation unknown to you?