Ticket to Heaven

One of the most popular television channels is the Food Network, which features 24 hours of programming about food preparation, food competition, and everything you always wanted to know about food. Cookbooks are among the best sellers in America, and top chefs continue to open new restaurants. How ironic it is that with the talk of food in America, more and more people in the world are suffering from lack of nourishment.
Elie Wiesel once wrote that “hunger is isolating. It may not and cannot be experienced vicariously. He who never felt hunger can never know its real effects, both tangible and intangible. Hunger defies imagination. It even defies memory. Hunger is felt only in the present.”
When you are hungry, you can never imagine being sated. And when you are full, it is far too easy to forget just how hungry you once were.
Jewish tradition has lots of practical advice when it comes to food. In Jewish tradition, each person is mandated to give a fraction of his or her own food to the priests, Levites, poor, widows and orphans before eating, making a critical distinction between humility and indignity. 
We are mandated to begin every meal with a blessing of appreciation for the bread that we have to eat, and at the end of every meal to say thank you for the meal that we have finished eating.
At Passover, we are required to invite those who have no place to our Seder meal:  ‘Let all who are hungry come and eat.’
The difficulty of feeling another’s poverty when you are not poor yourself gave rise in rabbinic literature to praise for those who do. “God says to Israel, ‘My Children, whenever you give sustenance to the poor, God counts it as if you gave food to God.’”
Thankfully many synagogues and churches actively participate in collecting food for the needy and working at local food banks. One of my friends in Central New Jersey drives a food mobile complete with a full kitchen and with his helpers offers food to the hungry each week.   
Here’s an idea for your consideration. Each week when you go shopping, purchase some extra items and donate them to a local food bank.
God has provided enough food for all the inhabitants of the globe.  But God needs our hands to help with its distribution.
There is stunning ancient Jewish teaching based on Psalm 118:17: “When you are asked in the World to Come, ‘What was your work?’ and you answer: ‘I fed the hungry,’ you will be told: This is the gate of God, enter into it, you who have fed the hungry.” It is our ticket to heaven.
Rabbi Isaacs is rabbi at Beth Judah Temple, Wildwood. He invites questions emailed to his website, www.rabbiron.com.