Thanksgiving is a holiday almost everyone loves:  A day to gather family and friends, enjoy a turkey feast, watch a little football, relax . . . .  Thanksgiving is the great equalizer in America:  Jews and Christians and Muslims and Buddhists and the most secular among us all gather to count our blessings and appreciate the plenty so accessible to all of us.

Well . . . not all of us.    

On the eve of Thanksgiving, please read with care and take to heart the following article by Rabbi Steven Gutow of the Jewish Center for Public Affairs:

Huff Post Politics:  Americans Are Falling Off the Food Cliff -- We Can Stop the Pain
Posted: 11/16/2013 1:20 pm

This week, just days before Thanksgiving, lines at food banks will be growing. This is not unexpected. In fact, unbelievable as this may sound, this was scheduled. On November 1, 47 million Americans on SNAP (formerly food stamps) began receiving fewer benefits thanks to the expiration of funding from the 2009 stimulus. For a family of four, that reduction comes out to about $36 less for food for the month. Which brings us to this week; when those suddenly reduced grocery budgets begin to run out.

Congress saw this coming. We knew that even as food prices were increasing, working families, the unemployed, children, the disabled, and seniors would start to receive less assistance and problems with increased hunger in America would ensue. But not only were we allowed to go over the food cliff, Congress is actually debating even more cuts to SNAP. The Senate Farm Bill includes a $4.1 billion cut - almost equal to the $5 billion cut this month - and the House is making the Senate look like a humanitarian body by proposing a cut of $39 billion, eight times more devastating to the poor than the already problematic Senate proposal.

What made the fall from the food cliff even more painful is that we have been pushing our most vulnerable towards the edge for months. In March, the sequester went into effect, slashing nutrition assistance to low-income women and children, limiting the capacity of food banks, and cutting Meals on Wheels deliveries to homebound seniors. Not to mention cuts to Head Start and LIHEAP, the energy assistance program that had alleviated the need for families to choose between paying their heating bills and buying food. But that pain of the sequester was quickly forgotten because last month's government shutdown caused even more harm by diminishing these services even more. No doubt, 2013 has been a difficult year. And things are not looking better in 2014 as the next round of sequestration cuts goes into effect in January.

Bit by bit we are tearing holes in the fabric of our national human needs programs, and I fear the repercussions not only for those who need our assistance and protection, but for our nation. With one in seven Americans facing hunger, we went over the food cliff this month. Before that, the costs of disagreements that led to the government shutdown and sequestration were felt most by those with the least.

This week, as the food banks around the country work to meet the planned food cliff, we must acknowledge the choices we are making. Private charity is a noble but insufficient substitute. According to the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, the estimated dollar value of all food distributed by U.S. charities this year is $5 billion, the same amount as the cut that took effect this month.

However, we are still able to change our course. Instead of demonizing and punishing those who need support in this season of plenty and thanksgiving, let us unmask the face of hunger in the United States and dedicate ourselves to overcoming it. The truth is, over half of those who benefit from SNAP are children and seniors. For unemployed adults, SNAP serves as support to help them through difficult times with more than half of enrollees leaving the program within a year, most of whom are only on the program for 10 months or less. Instead of taking away food from those in need, we should strengthen this program which feeds families, helps children do well in school, and supports the most vulnerable.

With each cut, our country pushes more Americans down the food cliff. How long until we stop noticing the fall? This Thanksgiving, as many of us sit at our tables for an annual feast, more of our fellow Americans will have less to eat. With this stark reality we must choose a different path. Now is the opportunity. As they actively negotiate a Farm Bill, Members of Congress, acting on our behalf, should open their hearts and offer an outstretched hand to those who have fallen over the food cliff. Simply, there should be no more cuts to SNAP.

Rabbi Steve Gutow is the President of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. For more information and updates, visit here and follow @theJCPA on Twitter.

Each of our patriarchs has an iconic moment which has become a key element of his personality and his spiritual legacy:  Avram responds with unquestioning alacrity to God's call to leave all that is familiar and embark on an uncharted spiritual and physical journey.  God renames him "Avraham" -- father of multitudes.

Isaac, never re-named, never journeyed beyond the borders of his homeland Canaan, married his "love at first sight" match Rebekkah, and faithfully received and transmitted the covenant to his son, Jacob.  God named Isaac before his birth:  Yitzhak -- he will laugh.
In this week's Torah reading, Jacob is also re-named, mid-life, like his grandfather Abraham.    

The event around Jacob's renaming is also centered around an iconic moment:  Jacob has packed up his extensive extended family of wives and concubines and children and servants and flocks and is on his way back to Canaan to re-settle in the land of his birth.  His reunion with his twin, Esau, looms large in his consciousness.  Jacob has prepared for this reunion carefully.  He does not know if Esau will meet him with aggression or affection.  So Jacob divides up his travelling estate into two camps so that, worst case scenario, Esau will only be able to attack half of Jacob's family and belongings.  

Perhaps out of anxiety, Jacob separates himself from all the rest of his convoy and sleeps isolated out in the wilderness.  The Torah relates:  And Jacob was left by himself.  And a man wrestled with him until the dawn's rising.  And he saw that he was not able against him, and he touched the inside of his thigh, and the inside of Jacob's thigh was dislocated during his wrestling with him.  And he said: "Let me go, because the dawn has risen."  And he said, "I won't let you go unless you bless me."  And he said to him, "What is your name?"  And he said, "Jacob."  And he said, "Your name won't be said 'Jacob' anymore but 'Israel,' because you've struggled with God and with people and were able." (Breishit/Genesis 32:25-29).  Jacob receives the new name "Yisrael" -- who struggled with God.

Each divinely-named patriarch adds another layer to the legacy of our tradition: the eternal generations of the progeny of Abraham; the laughter of Isaac who partnered with one woman in one place; and, most fascinating, Jacob's emergence whole and blessed from his struggle with God.  

How extraordinary:  one who struggles with God emerges blessed.  Our legacy from Jacob/Israel is encouragement to question God, explore God's strength and balance our own against it.  Our legacy from Jacob/Israel is not just permission, but a challenge to forgo passivity and find our own best grasp of God in our lives.  Like Jacob, who failed to elicit the name of his Adversary, we will never know God completely, but it is clear that we will emerge from struggle blessed.

This Shabbat is one I look forward to every year:  on the Friday evening of Veterans Day Weekend, our congregation honors veterans at our service and welcomes them at a Shabbat dinner following the service.  Our veterans stand together and tell us their rank, where they served and a bit about their experience.  Some remember their serial number!  Some still fit into their uniforms or wear their military caps.  It never fails to move me.


I'm a baby-boomer:  I cut my activist milk teeth on Vietnam protests.  I was anti-military, anti-war.  I sang protest songs in coffeehouses.


Then I moved to Israel: my husband and then my daughter and then my son went through basic training and served in the IDF.  I did a teeny-tiny bit of training and served in our local "Mishmar Ezrachi" / Civil Guard.  What happened to the kid who led the Vietnam Moratorium in high school?


I learned about the necessity of maintaining a well-trained, ethical military force.  I learned about the intense effort, focus, commitment it takes just to survive military service.  I learned to revere those who have served.


So, in my tenth year at Torat Yisrael, we are honoring our veterans with a service and dinner for the tenth time.
Because those who have served have given over months and years of their lives for a greater good.


General Douglas MacArthur was honored by West Point in 1962.  Here is an excerpt from his remarks as he accepted the Sylvanus Thayer Award, given “to an outstanding citizen of the United States whose service and accomplishments in the national interest exemplify personal devotion to the ideals expressed in the West Point motto, “DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY.” 


"Duty—Honor—Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean. ... But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character, they mold you for your future roles as custodians of the nation’s defense, they make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid. They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for actions, not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of 
difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future yet never neglect the past; to be serious yet never to take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength. They give you a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman."
 
Please join me in thanking our veterans.  Whether drafted or enlisted, they rose to the challenges of training and service and side-lined their personal aspirations and agendas for a significant chunk of their youth.  We owe them.

Yesterday morning I had one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.  The Rhode Island State Council of Churches named me "Faith Leader of the Year" at their 4th Annual Heroes of Faith Breakfast.  My son and daughter-in-law and my very own Rhode Island cousin and a good friend all came to cheer me on (and I thanked the Council of Churches Executive Minister, Reverend Dr. Don Anderson for making me look good in front of my kids!).  But I was also blessed with the support of our Torat Yisrael community which filled a table as well as my colleagues of the Board of Rabbis of Greater Rhode Island and the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island which also shared and filled a table.

After listening to my dear friend and colleague, Don Anderson, say some generously complimentary things about me, I responded with the following:

When I was a little girl in East Orange, New Jersey, I was often chased home by kids in a local parochial school . . . they’d chase me through the alleys in our neighborhood and called me “dirty Jew.”  When I was a young mother living in Jerusalem, I had rocks thrown at me from the Arab village across the road as I parked my car one night early on in the intifada years.  I was not a promising candidate for interfaith leadership.  The proximity of Christians and Muslims was more threatening than reassuring.

Jews engaged in the study of the Torah and rabbinic literature don’t sit in concentrated isolation in a library . . . we sit across the table from a chaver, from a study partner, and we examine, debate, argue, postulate, explore . . . the premise is that two heads are better than one.  The premise is that one person, no matter how brilliant, just cannot bring out all the depth of meaning of a text alone.  We each need a study partner to challenge us, teach us, show us paths we’d never be able to discover on our own.  

Indeed, the premise is that where two people come together to study Torah, the shechinah, God’s most imminent nurturing presence, draws even nearer.

I can tell you that the collaborative effort I have engaged in with Reverend Don Anderson, Imam Farid Ansari, Reverend Betsy Garland and so many other inspiring faith leaders in our state has been a journey of exploration, personal growth that has led to spiritual fulfillment.  I have learned from and been inspired by my chaverim, my partners.  These people have shown me paths I never would have discovered on my own.

The actions for which I am being honored this morning mean a tremendous amount to me and I am proud to be standing before you as the recipient of this year’s Rhode Island State Council of Churches Faith Leader of the Year Award.  Reverend Mercedes and Bishop Wolf and Reverend Balark, whose ranks I join today, the previous recipients of this award, are each visionary and inspired leaders.  The leadership of the Rhode Island State Council of Churches has taken an extraordinary step by bestowing this most respected award on a churchless rabbi.  Members of my terrific . . . and patient . . . congregation, Temple Torat Yisrael of East Greenwich,  are here today to support me and to express our congregation’s appreciation for this recognition.  There is another whole delegation of leaders from the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island who are also here in support and appreciation . . . the significance of this award is not lost on any of us . . . and is, indeed, treasured by all of us.

None of my actions, none of my achievements have been attained by sitting in concentrated isolation in my study . . . trying to build bridges between faith communities in a unilateral process is like clapping with one hand.  It can’t be done.

Getting an award for the work I’ve done with my partners in faiths makes me a little nervous . . . because somehow the bestowing of an award feels like a summing up.  But I don’t feel done with any of this; we have way too many more journeys to take together.  There are still so many mistaken assumptions waiting to be blasted, so many barriers of wariness to lower, so many infinitely rich bridges of trust to build. The conviction that real faith creates a safe space for mutual respect and reciprocal learning fuels this journey.  I first sat down at those tentative breakfasts with Reverend Anderson and Imam Ansari  in the hope that we might demonstrate in some small way that real faith fosters peace.  We’ve achieved much more than I had ever hoped with my chaverim, my partners in faith. When we come together to live the principles of all our faiths, the shechinah, God’s most imminent, nurturing presence, draws near and blesses our joint enterprise.  Let’s keep that shechinah very busy!