Stop ignoring and start acting

My column tends to attract mail, and not of the most complimentary kind. I have never resorted to publicly responding to these private communications.

This week, I must make an exception. An email that arrived in my in-box right before Yom Kippur took me to task for what I didn’t write in my September 18 pre-Yom Kippur column, “Atoning for the world we ignore.” Its author began by “agreeing with much of [my] description of what is wrong with the world,” but then spent the rest of the email criticizing me for not offering solutions.

This is a complaint I often hear from my wife, Harabbanit Donna Amsterdam. She edits my first drafts and makes this point almost every time. She had not read this one, however, and so was able to comment only after the fact. I must assume, though, that many others feel the same way, and, therefore, I believe a public response is required. That is because the subject matter is too important to leave anyone wondering what he or she can do.

Because today is Hoshanah Rabbah, the last day of our annual penitential season, I apologize in advance if this response causes the writer any distress.

Unlike most of the often hurtful communications I receive, by the way, this one was extremely well-written, and that actually brought a smile to my face even as the complaint disturbed me. I will refer to my critic as a “he” for simplicity’s sake. I have no wish to identify the writer in any way.

Quite frankly, “he” wasn’t wrong in saying that my column lacked substantive solutions, but he was very wrong in asserting that it offered none.

The focus of  that column was the role that we, as God’s “kingdom of priests and holy nation,” must play in addressing serious problems that society the world over chooses to ignore. These include hunger; the lack of proper sanitation, clean water, and health care in many parts of our world; homelessness; and slavery in all its forms.

I noted that more than a quarter of the eight billion people in our world suffer daily from some form of what is euphemistically referred to as food insecurity, which actually trivializes so massive a problem, including that 13,300 children under age five die every day because of malnutrition, augmented by the absence of proper health care. At the same time, I noted, households around the world throw away more than one billion meals every day.

That “some of us have too much food while others have too little” is not the problem, my critic wrote. “The harder question,” he said, “is why, in a world capable of producing so much food, we have not figured out how to get it to the people who desperately need it.

“[If] I eat the leftovers in my refrigerator rather than throw them away,” he continued, “I have not fed a hungry child. If I buy less food at the supermarket, the food I did not purchase does not somehow make its way to a starving family thousands of miles away.”

Actually, here in the United States, at least, we have “figured out how to get [food] to the people who desperately need it.”

We all tend to shop for food with our eyes, not with our heads. We walk into a supermarket to pick up one or two items that we need, only to walk out with several shopping bags filled with items we hadn’t thought we needed. I do that more often than I care to admit.

If we shopped more intelligently, however, “the food [we] did not purchase…[will] make its way to a starving family thousands of miles away,” but only if we want it to. All we need to do is to use some of the money we saved by buying with our heads to purchase scan-to-donate food vouchers that most supermarkets — at least in our area — offer at the checkout counter. The vouchers come in varying amounts. Purchasing one in any amount will provide food for families in need throughout the Garden State.

There is also the special annual voucher campaign that runs roughly each year from this month through January. The program is known as Check-Out Hunger and it’s run by the Community FoodBank [sic] of New Jersey (CFBNJ) in cooperation with more than 40 Feeding America food banks and affiliates throughout the state. Participating stores include ShopRite, Wegmans, and Wawa. Its donation vouchers come in $1, $3, and $5 denominations.

A mere one-dollar donation to Feeding America will help a “starving family thousands of miles away.” Feeding America is the nation’s leading hunger-relief organization. It says that one-dollar donation will provide at least 10 nutritious meals to people in need throughout the United States. A monthly donation of just $18, then, will provide 2,160 meals over the course of a year.

Donations to MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger are divided between feeding people of all faiths and backgrounds here and in Israel, and on its much needed anti-hunger advocacy efforts in the public sector.

There is, in fact, a serious hunger problem in Israel. We can help with that by making donations to Leket Israel, the Jewish state’s national food bank.

These donations are tax-deductible, which is an added incentive for all of us — or, at least, it should be. As of this year, even taxpayers who do not itemize charitable deductions from their gross income may deduct up to $1,000 for single taxpayers and $2,000 for married couples filing jointly. Those who do itemize may be able to deduct considerably more. It’s a win-win.

The letter’s author correctly states that “Hunger, poverty, children without clean water or education, modern slavery and human rights abuses are all horrifying.” Sadly, our current government actively seeks to scale back health care, food stamps, school lunch programs, and other social welfare programs. It also has taken aim at limiting the scope of existing environmental legislation, including the Clean Water Act, which will leave more waters and people exposed to pollution.

As individuals and as a community, we need to oppose these actions by denying the administration the congressional majority it needs in order to implement many of its proposed changes. We can each do that this year by how we vote on November 3.

The letter-writer also took issue with my including slavery in all its forms among the societal ills we must work to eliminate. The Torah, after all, “recognizes slavery as an existing institution and establishes laws governing slaves, their treatment and, in certain circumstances, their release.”

Like so many other people, he has the wrong idea about what those laws were designed to achieve. As the late and sorely missed Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, zt”l, once explained it:

“If history tells us anything, it is that God has patience…. He wanted slavery abolished, but He wanted it to be done by free human beings coming to see of their own accord the evil it is and the evil it does…. [God] had faith that eventually we would learn … [that we] must grant freedom to others if we truly seek it for ourselves.” (See rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation-5772-mishpatim-the-slow-end-of-slavery/.)

Slavery is a form of human rights abuse. Our government — regardless of who is in charge — usually condemns such abuses when our enemies commit them, but too often turns a blind eye when it profits us. Our current administration, however, is shameless in this regard.

For example, as I wrote in my last column, the administration boasts about the new “golden era” in the U.S.-Saudi partnership built partly upon hundreds of billions of dollars in investments and weapons sales. The administration, however, ignores the  extensive human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia that our own State Department has repeatedly documented in its congressionally mandated annual Country Report on Human Rights Practices.

Congress required these reports in connection with sections of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (Public Law 87-195) that restrict U.S. assistance to governments such as Saudi Arabia that engage in “a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

These reports must be submitted to Congress no later than February 25 of the following year. The 2024 report was submitted five-and-a-half months late, on August 12, 2025. It is now October 2026, yet the 2025 report still has not surfaced. The Trump administration clearly has no interest in faithfully complying with the law.

Compromising principles for advantage is wrong and we need to have the will and the moral courage to demand that such compromises must end. We can do so by bringing them up at community meetings, petitioning campaigns, and the like. We can also do so by how we cast our votes on Election Day.

There is a great deal we can do to help resolve the social ills my column spoke of — ills the letter-writer correctly calls “horrifying.” All it requires is for we who are God’s kingdom of priests to take the lead in getting all such efforts started.

In this regard, considering my critic’s obvious writing skills, I urge him to use those skills to help prod the public to rise up and act.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is shammai.org.