I wrestled with what to say this weekend. As a congregation we were participating in Human Rights Shabbat together with 180 congregations around the globe. However, last week I had spoken about the topic because of the death of Nelson Mandela. As I discovered, there was still much to say…

“C.O.F.F.E.E. Coffee is not for me. It’s a drink that people wake up with, that it makes them nervous is no myth. Slaves to a coffee cup. They can’t give coffee up.”

.When I was a little girl and we lived in Evanston, we would go to the Old Town School of Folk Music periodically. There I was introduced to a wonderful singer/songwriter with a deep resonate voice, similar to Odetta who sang this song. I even have it on an LP. Remember LPs?

I never thought I would become a slave to a coffee cup. How did that happen? What does it mean to be a slave? People answered, being subservient to someone else, not having control, not having any choice, not being paid, not having any power, being oppressed.

Coffee is one of those things that we are enslaved to. And in the process of needing our daily cup of joe, we in turn enslave others. That’s what today’s Torah portion is about. It is a bridge between Genesis and Exodus, between Joseph enslaving Egyptians so that Egypt had enough food during a famine and then Pharaoh 400 years later enslaving Israelites. What happened here?

Pharaoh had slaves to build the pyramids. Southern plantation owners had slaves to pick cotton. Even John Adams, a northern states president had slaves. But that was long ago and far away. It doesn’t happen any more right? Think again.

Yes, there are modern day slaves, just like our portion is talking about. Does anyone know how many? (Guesses of 20 million, 26 million). About 27 million of them according to slaveryfootprint.org. When I took their survey, they estimate 49 work for me. They make my car, my running shoes, my body wash, my clothing, my gadgets. They make yours too. They even help make my chocolate and my coffee.

Children chained to looms in Bangladesh so we can have cheap t-shirts. CNN’s lead headline this week online that girls in one neighborhood of Cambodia are being sold into the sex trade. Most likely for people in the United States. Tomato workers in Florida who provide the tomatoes to many of our grocery stores and to Wendy’s who are not being treated fairly.

And then there is my beloved coffee—I work hard to find fair trade, organic, kosher coffee. These days you will find me drinking Green Mountain Columbian Fair Trade. Sometimes I drink Delicious Peace, a collective of Jews, Christians and Muslims in Uganda who grow fair traded, organic, kosher certified coffee. But what I buy is a drop in the bucket. When companies like Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds switch over to mostly Fair Trade as opposed to about 3% their buying power makes a difference in the life of farmers.

Why does all of this matter? What does this have to do with us as Jews, as Americans?  As one member pointed out, “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” (Deuteronomy 16:20). Every year at Passover we say that “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt.” And because of that experience we are told that we have an obligation to treat the stranger, the widow and the orphan correctly. 36 times, double life, we are told to protect the stranger, the orphan and widow. That’s more than any commandment on kashrut, on Shabbat, on how to davven.

We are told that we have to work to free the captive wherever they are. We pray for their release in the G’vurot prayer and we work for it as we saw with Gilad Shalit and many others. The rabbis declared the redemption of captives to be a mitzvah of the highest order. Knowing that there are millions of people today who are enslaved, we cannot remain silent.

We have an obligation to treat workers correctly. We must pay them a living wage and pay them on time. We are commanded to not withhold the wages of a laborer overnight. We are taught that we are each created in the image of the Divine, b’tzelem elohim. This means that no person should ever be a slave to another.

We need to avoid buying goods that are produced unethically. The rabbis forbid buying goods that were known to be stolen, holding the buyers as responsible as the thieves. Today, we have an obligation to avoid buying those products that have documented human rights abuses in their supply chains and supporting independent monitoring of worker conditions.  This includes re-examining how we source kosher meat, where our Chanukah gelt comes from and what coffee, yes back to the coffee, we are drinking.

Jews were at the vanguard of organized labor. We started the labor movement. Names like Samuel Gompers, Emma Goldman, Sidney Hillman. They are ours. Bread and Roses, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, actions that helped establish the 40 hour work week, 8 hour work day, child labor laws, safer working conditions. We are proud of the contributions we made. And we may take some of them for granted these days.

One of the founders to this congregation, Rabbi Emil Hirsch, whose photo was prominently displayed on the Elgin Jewish History exhibit, was famous for calling his own congregants to task for their treatment of workers. He helped negotiate the labor contract for Hart Schaffner and Marx after Hannah Shapiro, led a walkout in response to a wage cut. 40,000 others joined this strike. With Hirsch’s help—or nagging, Schaffner eventually settled, including a 10% wage increase, a 54 hour work week and an independent arbitration committee to resolve ongoing labor disputes.

I never thought that I would be married to a Teamster but for 11 years we answered the question that the UPS ad asked, “What can Brown do for you,” very differently than the ads suggested. Brown provided health insurance, like we will most likely never see again, with free premiums and a 0 deductible, it gave us an education credit, it gave us stability, it gave us a pension. And when Simon was being bullied early on because he was deemed too slow and later because he was Jewish, the union went to bat for him and protected his job.

We can’t solve the poverty question or the slavery question here today. We can talk about the Universal Declaration for Human Rights, the anniversary of its ratification we celebrate this weekend. You have a copy of the 30 articles with you. I have taken each one and linked them with Jewish values and halachot. When we talk about modern day slavery, worker’s wrights and poverty, we are talking about human rights. Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights clearly states: “Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.” Now there has been much written in recent years about trade unions and how they have been the downfall of the auto industry or how they mismanaged pensions. There have been attempts, starting with Reagan and air traffic controllers to break unions. Our neighbors to the north, in Wisconsin, thought they could do it at the state level. Perhaps some of you believe that in a free market economy unions have outlived their usefulness.

Has any one read the book, Nickeled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich? My daughter read it as part of Sociology 101 in college and then made me read it. It was eye opening. The author, a journalist, went under cover to work in a restaurant in Florida, a Hotel maid in Maine and a Wal-Mart worker in Minnesota. She spent a year doing this. Could she make it financially without dipping into any of her own personal financial reserves. The answer was sometimes yes, sometimes no. Mostly no. When she was living in a hotel, it was because she didn’t have first and last month rent and a security deposit. She also didn’t have a can opener or a microwave or a refrigerator. She would go to the food pantry, get cans and then not be able to open them or heat them. It was easier and sometimes cheaper to swing through McDonalds.

These are current, very current events. Last week the news reported that McDonald’s workers walked off the job in an attempt gain higher wages. Last month a McDonald’s representative told a low wage earner to apply for food stamps. The families of fast food employees nation wide receive $1B in food stamps per year according to a study by the University of California Berkeley and the University of Illinois. This year McDonald’s tried to train its staff by teaching budgeting. It was a good idea but it received a lot of negative press when it showed needing to have a second job, charging only $20 a month for gas and having nothing in the budget for childcare or groceries, although it did allow for $800 in discretionary spending. http://www.practicalmoneyskills.com/mcdonalds/budgetJournal/budgetJournal.php

While writing this sermon, I made it a point to call one of our members who owns 11 McDonald’s franchises. I began by thanking him since McDonald’s does use fair trade coffee and has worked with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to make sure that the tomatoes McDonald’s uses are grown and harvested in the most ethical conditions. This partnership was ratified in 2007 and amounted to McDonald’s needing to pay a penny a pound more, something Wendy’s still has not agreed to.

Our member reports that in Chicagoland McDonald’s did not see many workers walk off the job last week. His interpretation—unions face declining membership and underfunded pensions and need new members so they trumped up the story. He assures me that McDonald’s puts its people first and that is an especially big focus this year. His franchise pays worker’s health benefits not through the corporate self-funded plan and he believes that for those who want to advance, there are plenty of opportunities for training, education, jobs beyond the line workers. He contrasts it with WalMart, which he says are next to impossible to deal with. At WalMart the majority of employees make less than $25,000 and many of them are forced to rely on food stamps. One WalMart in the Cleveland area was setting up its own internal food bank to support its own workers. HR personnel are equipped to give out food bank numbers to WalMart employees. Will organizing solve all these problems? No. Will raising the minimum wage to $15.00 an hour work? Maybe. But not if that cost needs to be passed on to the consumer and the consumer stops buying $1.00 hamburgers.

Recently a CEO of another fast food chain took the Food Stamp challenge. Ron Shaich, the founder of Panara Bread attempted to live on the $4.50 a day. He found it was nearly impossible. http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/25/opinion/shaich-food-stamp-challenge/ He believes that this is all of our problem and that we must solve it. “Eighty percent of households that have problems putting food on the table include the most vulnerable — children, the elderly and the disabled…. Throughout my SNAP Challenge, I kept returning to the same questions: What kind of society do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a country that turns a cold shoulder to the problem of hunger, or one in which we work together to face it head on? We, in corporate America, must be part of the solution.”

If you think that this is only for poor families, people we don’t know here at the synagogue and never see, think again. In our own congregation, we have families that are not making it financially. Families that take from our community pantry because that is the only way they can stretch their food budge. Families that make impossible choices between heat, prescription drugs, rent or food.

The sponsor of Human Rights Shabbat, Truah, is an organization of 1800 rabbis. Its mission statement reads: T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights is an organization of rabbis from all streams of Judaism that acts on the Jewish imperative to respect and protect the human rights of all people. Grounded in Torah and our Jewish historical experience and guided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we advocate for human rights in Israel and North America. T’ruah continues the historic work of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America, which was founded in 2002 and renamed T’ruah in January 2013. – See more at: http://www.truah.org/who-we-are/mission-statement.html#sthash.HNEPSXAW.dpuf

Truah has worked effectively on issues of slavery and trafficking, on worker’s rights, on human rights issues in Israel both with Palestinians and Bedouins. I am proud to cast my voice with theirs.

So my question to you as a congregation—are we willing to pay a little more for our coffee, for our chocolate, for our tomatoes, for our olives. The sisterhood gift shop is already doing a good job. We sell fair traded kippot, like the one I am wearing today made by craftspeople in Guatemala and fair traded Shabbat candles from Africa. I exhort us to do more. To speak out. But not just to speak out. To take the next step. To be active. To be intentional. To take the slavery footprint survey. To commit to buying products for the synagogue and for ourselves that are fair traded. To make sure our own synagogue employees are treated equitably. To make sure that any of our employees are treated with dignity and respect, with a living wage that we pay as promised. To consider petitioning our elected officials to protect worker rights and to fight against trafficking.

Then when we read the text as we are about to do, of how Joseph was buried in Egypt and how the Israelites brought Joseph’s bones back out of Egypt, we will not be the oppressors, we will remember our legacy of being slaves, and of being set free. Chazak, chazak v’nitchazek.