Recently I received a phone call from someone who had been part of my global justice fellowship with American Jewish World Service. “Are you still in Peter Roskam’s district?” Yes, I answered. She is now working on global food insecurity issues and needed someone for a panel honoring the Congressman’s work on hunger. I readily agreed and it turned out to be this week. So on a rainy morning, I schlepped to Harper College to join a small panel from the Global Poverty Project to speak about global food insecurity. What follows are my remarks…

As David said, I am Rabbi Margaret Frisch Klein, the rabbi at Congregation Kneseth Israel in Elgin. I am honored to be on this panel to honor Representative Peter Roskam with whom I have worked on several issues already. Hunger is an issue I have been working, dare I say on a college campus, for 30 years. It is shocking to me that hunger has gotten worse, not only globally, but right here in Elgin. There are 19,000 food insecure people in Elgin and despite good work by agencies like the Community Crisis Center, Food for Greater Elgin, United Way, Salvation Army, PADs, and others who we at Congregation Kneseth Israel partner with, food insecurity remains an intractable issue..

Our congregation works on food issues doing several things. We have our own little food bank which members can take food with no questions asked. We grow fresh produce in our community garden, just a simple 8×16 plot from which we delivered 1100 pounds of fresh produce to Food for Greater Elgin last year. We host an annual food drive during our high holidays, and then again the citywide Martin Luther King Day food drive. We volunteer with Food for Greater Elgin, PADs and the Elgin Cooperative Ministries which provides the weekly soup kitchens. Last summer we worked weekly with ECM to deliver lunches to children who otherwise without their school lunch program might have gone hungry. We are a partner with Mazon, a Jewish response to hunger, Part of the reason we like supporting Mazon, is their commitment to advocacy. While it is important to feed the hungry person sitting before you today—it is critical that we solve the systemic problem of hunger in America and around the world. Otherwise we are just putting on bandaids.

This comes naturally to us. We are commanded to take care of the widow, the orphan, the stranger amongst us, or as I say the most marginalized amongst us. 36 times it tells us to do this. We are to leave the corners of our fields so that the poor can glean. Most of us don’t have fields, but that is the exact reason, the root you might say, of why we put in a community garden.

It is also the reason I am currently doing the SNAP Challenge, living this week on a food stamp budget to call awareness to this growing problem in this country. Others in the congregation and the wider community are doing it with me and while we are only on Day Three, the learnings have been many. Yesterday I spent a lot of time thinking about how one is social on a limited budget. How do you celebrate a child’s birthday? Because buying a store bought birthday cake would have put us over our budget.

And while there are 19,000 food insecure people in Elgin, hunger is a global problem. That’s why it is so important to support the Global Food Security Act, introduced into Congress by Representative Christopher Smith, Republican from NJ and co-sponsored by 123 members of Congress including almost all the representatives from Illinois.

According to the World Health Organization, poor nutrition causes almost half, 45% of all deaths in children under 5. One out of six children in the developing world is underweight, about 100 million. One in four children is “stunted”, that number grows to 1 in 3 in the developing world. We could sit here and discuss statistics all day. And they are alarming.

We know unequivocally from the research that children who are malnourished have a harder time learning. We know that children who are malnourished can suffer from Failure to Thrive. My own rabbi’s wife, Dr. Deborah Frank, is the Director of the Grow Clinic at Boston Medical Center. She recently won the AMA’s Leadership Award presented here in Chicago at their annual convention. She said, in accepting that award that, “As a pediatrician I can never forget that the policies enacted in the capitals of our nation and our states will be written ultimately on the bodies and brains of our young children,”

Her recent research as the director of the Children’s HealthWatch team has uncovered alarming evidence about the increasing risk of hunger among young children nationally, ever since budget cuts have been made to SNAP. In Boston, particularly they have found more and more families of infants and toddlers who are homeless or having difficulty maintaining secure housing. Recent work of Children’s HealthWatch also uncovered that within groups of poor families, those whose children have chronic health problems are even more likely than their peers to struggle with hunger.

If you need more details and more correlation from her work, I have electronic links to her actual academic and professional articles available. When I told her I was speaking this morning and asked whether she had any particular message, she said she didn’t know as much about global food insecurity but what concerns her, having just returned from yet another hunger summit, is the connection between violence and hunger. “War causes hunger. That’s what we are seeing in Syria. People don’t have reliable access to food. If they don’t have access to food, the children can’t go to school. They can’t learn. The families become refugees. It is that simple.” She couldn’t have been any clearer.

She also worries about scorched earth issues. If people can’t farm, they can’t eat. These are the kinds of things I saw when I was a Global Justice Fellow with American Jewish World Service last summer when I was in Guatemala. Guatemala is only one example of many of the 19 countries that AJWS works in. The unique specifics are horrific. In Guatemala, 200,000 people, mostly indigenous people, were murdered or “disappeared: in the 1980s as part of a civil war. Make no mistake, there was nothing civil about it and there are still leaders being disposed and tried for genocide.

One of the real issues remaining as is that access to land is denied. Mining companies have been brutal is stripping away land from indigenous people. One of AJWS’s grantees, CCDA, use coffee and advocacy to secure land rights for indigenous people. Leocadio Juracan, the coordinator recently was elected to Congress. He said, “we’re not just in the business of buying and selling coffee. We are using resources we have to work for justice in our communities.” What impressed me the day we were on the coffee plantation, was how they use education to improve the lives of women. Many of whom have never been to school but are learning to grow food on their patios in container gardens, not unlike CKI’s own community garden. One woman told us that with the proceeds of her patio garden and the one chicken she was able to send her daughter through high school. Wow! Access to land, to food, to education.

But there is a problem. Despite the good work that CCDA is doing, there are arrest warrants out for many of the leaders. No matter how heated our current political season has become, we are not rounding up and arresting our leaders.

Moral leadership is about taking risks. If I am not challenging my people to work on issues like hunger, I am not doing my job. Although frankly, I don’t understand how anyone could argue that children should go to bed hungry. Nonetheless, sometimes, I make people angry with my activism. Sometimes, maybe even often, the congressman and I do not agree on individual policy. However, if I don’t agree, I can’t have him arrested. I can’t have him disappeared. I have to work with him, and he with me. But on this I think we do agree, stopping violence, through strong legal measures as suggested in the book the Locust Effect by Gary Haugen is critical to stopping world hunger. Recently there were two murders in Honduras of AJWS grantees. Berta Cáceres and Nelson García, leaders of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisations of Honduras (COPINH). These two defenders of human rights were assassinated because they led an organization and a broader movement fighting to protect the land rights of the Lenca indigenous communities in Honduras.We have asked our US elected officials to demand justice in Hondoras.

Moral leadership is why I have to support the Global Food Security Act which puts some of those strong measures and food assistance in place. So that more Guatemalas, Hondorases, Darfurs, Syrias cannot happen. So that as the prophet Isaiah said, “Every one neath their vine and fig tree can live in peace and unafraid.” So that every child can have a birthday cake.