Our Words Make a Difference

What follows is my sermon from the Friday night of Thanksgiving weekend when we read the portion Toldot.

This week we read about the tortured relationship between Jacob and Esau, twin brothers born to Isaac and Rebekah. Even though Jacob is revered as our forefather he can in these earlier stories act as his name implies like a heel. And Esau who the tradition sees as the father of our future enemies can sometimes appear as a sympathetic character.

The portion opens with this story. Jacob, our mild-mannered hero, is home cooking lentil stew while Esau, a skilled hunter is out in the field hunting for some tasty game. Esau comes home famished and asks his brother for some stew. Jacob tells him to first sell him his first-born birthright. Esau says and I quote, “I am at the point of death, so of what use is my birthright to me?” And this is how Jacob first supplants his older brother Esau and the beginnings of the tension between the two.

Leaving aside the questions about Jacob’s trickery let’s focus on Esau’s disregard for his obligations and most especially his statements about hunger. It is hard to believe that he was so hungry that he was at the point of death. And yet his words seem all too familiar. They make me think of my own and our own. How many times do we say, “I’m starving?” We do not really know hunger. We are as fortunate as Esau and perhaps as self-absorbed. We say his words all the time. We casually use words such as “I am famished” when we are really not. We say, “I’m starving” so often we are unaware of saying it. We say things like “I’m so hungry; I am going to die” when this is not even remotely true. I am pointing a finger at myself too.

In the Hebrew Esau describes himself as tired or weary. He states, Anochi holech lamoot—I am walking towards death. How dramatic! His emotions are the center of the universe. He sees nothing of the struggles of others. He forgets that there are so many people who are in fact truly hungry and who are really approaching death.

Likewise, when we use such words and phrases, we distance ourselves from those who are truly hungry. We diminish their truth when we muddle our own. We brush away the facts when we allow our emotions do the talking. Perhaps it is defense mechanism. We would rather think of our own needs rather than the needs of others. We would rather focus on the hunger we feel even though it will soon be satisfied rather than the hunger out there that might never be allayed. It’s almost impossible to think about the actual numbers.

Twelve percent of Americans face food insecurity. As I explained to our religious school students, food insecurity is defined as not having access to sufficient food or adequate food. It may mean people who are not able to eat three meals a day or eat even one proper meal. In this land of plenty nearly 13 million children face such conditions. In the world, it is estimated that the number is about 800 million. Here on Long Island, it is over 200,000 people. Those are sobering numbers. They are frightening statistics. They are so large that we feel like we can’t do anything about it.

But we cannot give up. We cannot give in. This is why our synagogue has an ongoing collection for the local food pantry. We want to help to make sure its shelves are always stocked so that people who are hungry and who understand what hunger really feels like can shop there at no cost. And as important as this and other efforts are this evening I want to focus on those words, and those offhand phrases that turn us inward rather than outward. I want us to think about our attitude and our language.

The words we use do matter. They shape our feelings. They influence our actions—or our inaction. They can do as they did for Esau and push him more and more inward or they can help us look outward, away from our own wants and needs to those who actually need more.

This is the essence of why we say a blessing for food. If we pause and say thank you before eating, we are more apt to think of the food we eat as a gift. The blessing is the corrective to the false words we might have offered while waiting to eat or after coming in from a long day when we inevitably say I am famished. They become the true words. They are the balance to the false words we may have said before we sat down. That’s the tradition’s theory. They force us to stop and think before stuffing our faces with food.

The Thanksgiving dinners that we just celebrated are about excess. Most, if not all, of our tables had too much food on them. It would be contrary to our American ethos to run out of food when hosting such a Thanksgiving meal. We stuff ourselves until we are uncomfortable so that we might feel blessed.

But the tradition’s counsel is that it should not have to be an overabundance of food to make us feel blessed. In fact, the Talmud asks how much food do you need to have in front of you before offering the motzi? And its answer is my rabbi David Hartman’s favorite teaching. The Talmud’s answer is k’zayit. It only needs to be as big as an olive. I am pretty sure that there is no one here or anywhere for that matter who considers such a small bite size satisfying. Such a morsel cannot possibly be filling. It is almost not deserving of a blessing especially when you put that up against last night’s meal. An olive was less than what we munched on during the football games.

That’s exactly the tradition’s point. If you say a blessing for such a small morsel of food, then your perspective and your words stay true. Food is not only an answer to hunger. It is instead an opportunity to give thanks. Rabbis think about the spirit. They reason that if the spirit is satisfied the rest can follow. They believe we will then think less about what we want and more about what other people need. We will think about those who are truly hungry.

It begins with a blessing. And leads to making room for others. And that offers us the opportunity to make sure less people actually need to say, I am famished.