Love At Kiddush Time by Rabbi Sandra Kviat

Fishballs, crisps, gherkins, hummus, challah, bagels with smoked salmon, copious amounts of cake. The kiddush, the Jewish communal snack time, is an integral part of a service and a powerful part of community life.

Now imagine this situation, which arose in one of our sister communities; in a middle sized, suburban shul, members noticed that two people regularly came to the kiddush and stuffed plates of food into their bags. They  did not attend the service, were not members, and it was not known whether they were Jewish. 

What would you do if this situation happened in our community? If a person came to the kiddush and did not just eat, but took whole plates of food as well? How would you react? 

The members of that particular community were not happy about the situation and intervened. The rabbi did not think this was the best way, but had to take into consideration both the feelings of the members as well as figuring out what to do with this person. When I did an informal straw poll about this situation the answers were divided into two categories, between concern for the well-being of the person and the well-being of the community. We can call the arguments the ‘Gleaners argument’ and the ‘Community argument’.

For most of the people that I asked, their first concern was for the person; what must their situation be like that they would have to take food from a buffet to survive? And how could they help this person? This reaction is heart warming and echoes so many of our ethical guidelines about helping the poor and the stranger. It also echoes a short but powerful dictum in the Torah; When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not wholly reap the corners of your field, neither shall you gather the gleaning (that which has fallen on the ground) of your harvest (Lev 19.9). It rests on the idea that the poor have a right to a portion of what you earn, and you have a responsibility to help people who are destitute. 

In our situation we could consider the person at the kiddush as a gleaner - someone who has so little that they are allowed to get their food and income from the corners of our income or our table. Gleaning is not a tax, where you give a portion and they passively receive it. Gleaners were allowed to walk after the main harvesters and pick up anything that was left on the ground, as well as actively harvest the corners of the field, once the main part of the field had been harvested by the owner.  On the one hand this made it less of a hand out, and more of a hand up, an opportunity to actively help yourself. On the other hand it also exposed the needy to the scrutiny of others. If we transferred the dictum to our situation, then once the kiddush was over, the person should be allowed to ‘glean’ the leftovers. The question is how we would interpret the corners in the kiddush situation? Would it mean the active participation in taking the food, not just waiting for someone else to decide, or literally - only taking from the dishes at the corners of the table, or something else?
We also have to consider the members’ feelings - it was not a case of having too little food at the kiddush, this particular synagogue does a big kiddush, and there are always leftovers. The community also makes regular donations to food

banks, like many other communities do. So what is the difference between donating to a food bank and having a person taking plates of food in the synagogue? Is it disrespectful, is it stealing, or is it that we are uncomfortable with poverty and hunger staring us in the face, while we are having lunch? 

There is one dictum in Leviticus 19  which stands out amongst the others, summarizing them all: ‘Love (to) your fellow (neighbour) as yourself - I am the The Eternal One’. How do you ‘love to’ your neighbour?  Bible scholar Abraham Malamat argued that the ‘le’ implies an action, not merely a feeling, so that the Golden Rule is not about feeling love but doing love/doing loving deeds.

Loving your neighbours as yourself is a lovely but abstract concept, and as anyone who has ever had a difficult neighbour or family member will know, it is not easy to live up to. But if it is to have any meaning at all we have to make it work in reality, even in the most difficult situations; the personal ones, whether it is someone invading our sacred community occasions or in society, helping alleviate the stark poverty that more and more people are experiencing, by for example supporting local foodbanks. In all these situations our traditions ask us to do lovingly to your neighbour even if that neighbour has just taken a whole plate of bridge rolls.

“Food sits at the heart of Judaism. We carry in our rich Jewish texts and values a duty to care for those who do not have access to food”. 

Edie Freidman, founder of JCORE , who will be sharing her experience with us this Friday, in honour of Human Right Shabbat says; “We live in a country where more than 1 in 3 children live in poverty - 4.3 million children - that's equivalent to 9 children in a classroom of 30. Turning to adults, 1 in 4 adults live in poverty. In addition 31% of disabled people live in poverty and 2.2 million older people.  

All this leads  to increased use of food banks  with all the shame, loss of dignity and anxiety that this brings meaning that deciding between eating and heating is more than a slogan for millions but is a daily reality which will greatly affect their life chances  and sense of worth for years to come.  

Given the stark reality of these statistics, and given the importance our community has always placed on amelioration of poverty, we need us to ask what we in the Jewish community can do to address this issue through educating our community, raising our voices about the injustice of this situation and campaigning to systematically reduce these unacceptable levels of poverty.  Will you add your voice to this endeavour?”