Eating Garbage

Earlier this week, I was standing right next to a large trash can in a public area when something startling happened. A seemingly put-together man walked up, removed the lid, and began to rummage. He found a half-eaten sandwich, pulled it out, and gobbled it down. He then reached back in, examined the soda bottles and cans that had been disposed of, and found one that still had soda left. He pulled it out and guzzled down the little ginger ale that was left in the bottle.

I am embarrassed to admit that my first reaction as I witnessed him literally eat garbage right next to me was to recoil with a sense of disgust and revulsion. Something was incongruous about the way he was dressed, the fact that we were in a public, visible place, and what he was doing. But not a moment later I caught myself and realized – how hungry must this man be to be willing to reach into a trash bin in front of many other people, pull out a half-eaten sandwich that was contaminated with garbage, and put it in his mouth. How thirsty must he be that he would grab a stranger’s unfinished bottle of ginger ale covered in someone else’s germs and gulp it down.

The world produces enough food to feed all of its 8 billion people, yet 822 million people, over ten percent, are malnourished and go hungry every day. Around 9 million people die every year of hunger and hunger-related diseases, yet over 1 billion meals are wasted every day. I am hardly the first to recognize and point out that we must do a better job of rescuing food and getting it into the hands of those who are hungry. (There are amazing organizations attacking this issue, like Leket in Israel or Shearit HaPlate in some cities in America, but not every community yet has such programs in place.)

It should hurt to observe a simcha and look out at the shmorg and Chosson’s tisch in which so much food is leftover, untouched, and will eventually be wasted, then find ourselves at the main meal in which many of the guests won’t remain even though food was prepared for them and to consider how many could benefit from food that will go right into the trash. How much food is disposed of even after eating the Shabbos and Yom Tov leftovers a few more days? What happens to the food from Kiddush and Shalosh Seudos at shuls everywhere?

I wanted to help the man who had gone through the garbage but he was gone before I knew it. In that moment, I felt not only tremendous compassion for him, but enormous gratitude for myself and my family. If you have fresh and clean food to eat, if each time you are hungry you are able to satiate yourself, if you don’t know what it means to have to rummage through garbage to put something in your belly, you are fortunate and blessed. If you were in a room with nine other random people from the greater world, the chances are one of them would be hungry and malnourished enough to eat food out of the trash and if it isn’t you, be grateful, say thank you each and every day.

We are fortunate to have Torah and Halacha that is designed to make us mindful. A Beracha before and after we eat reminds us to be grateful to have access to fresh and clean food and to further express gratitude when our belly is full and our body is hydrated. Our rabbis teach that benefiting from this world such as by eating without first making a beracha is considered me’ilah, taking sacred and holy property for oneself. The Tosefta (Berachos 4:1) references a verse in Tehillim (24:1), “The earth is Hashem’s and its fullness.” If you take and benefit from the world without first paying with a “thank you,” you have taken something holy and made it profane, you have desecrated something consecrated.

We don’t need to wait for something extraordinary to say thank you. Each and every day, with each and every morsel of food, there is so much to appreciate, not take for granted, and be grateful for.

Last Shabbos, we hosted Michoel Gottesman of Shlomit, Israel, a community on the border of Israel, Gaza, and Egypt. On October 7, as a member of the community’s volunteer security team, Michoel grabbed his weapon, put on his vest and helmet, and went to defend his family and his community. Shlomit wasn’t infiltrated but the neighboring community of Prigan was and they desperately needed reinforcements. Michoel and others answered the call, the only volunteer security team that defended a neighboring community, not only their own. They encountered a large group of terrorists that far outnumbered them and were much better armed.

Tragically, four of those heroic volunteers fell in that battle. Michoel himself was shot. The bullet entered from his side, in the small area not protected by the ceramic vest. It pierced his lung, went through his kidney and spleen, exited his left side and shredded his upper arm. He fell to the ground bleeding profusely and understood there was significant damage to his internal organs. He calculated that he didn’t have long to live and used what he thought was his last breath to say Shema and to declare the unity of Hashem’s existence.

After finishing Shema, he found that he was still conscious, still alive but thought that for sure, now he only had moments to live, enough time to think or say one more thing. What should it be? In a conversation at our Shul he shared that after saying Shema, he looked up to the Heavens and said, “Thank you Hashem. Thank you for a beautiful life. Thank you for my amazing wife, my beautiful children, my friends and neighbors. Thank you for all that you gave me. If I go now, Hashem, I just want to say thank you for everything.”

As he described what happened, I thought to myself, what a perspective and what an attitude. Instead of saying, “Why me, Hashem, how could you do this,” while lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, Michoel chose to look at his life and to say thank you.

It took two hours to evacuate Michoel and two more hours for him to be picked up by the helicopter and taken to the hospital. Miraculously, he survived, though he spent many months in the hospital healing and many surgeries to reconstruct his arm. He continues to need rehab three times a week. While his body will please-God heal, he will forever carry the emotional and spiritual injuries and trauma of that day. He lost close friends, almost lost his life, but never lost his sense of gratitude.

If he could express gratitude in that moment, can’t we and shouldn’t we express gratitude when everything is going well, when we have food to eat, a roof over our head, and air in our lungs? We don’t need to wait until we think it is the last moment of our life to say thank you for our lives, the big and small, the ordinary and extraordinary.

When we wake up in the morning, the very first words we say are Modeh Ani, which literally means, “Grateful am I.” Grammatically, it would be more correct to say “Ani modeh, I am grateful,” but our rabbis understood that the first word on our lips cannot be “I.” Instead, despite it sounding clumsy, we wake up saying “Grateful,” and with that we set the tone for our day, an attitude of gratitude.

With each beracha you say, be mindful to feel grateful for the food you will eat and committed to enable all to never go hungry. Wake up with an attitude of gratitude and fill each day with a sense of “Grateful am I.”

{Reposted from the Rabbi’s site}

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