Zach Goldberg attends Congregation B’nai Shalom in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Last Sunday during Confirmation class, Rabbi Gene Levy brought the JCPA Child Nutrition Seder to our attention. The short, brightly colored Haggadah contains “a Seder dedicated to child nutrition and hunger awareness.” The other 10 confirmation students and I, along with Rabbi Levy and Sheri Simon, sat in a circle and read through the booklet. The discussion that followed was both insightful and engaging.
Each step in the traditional Seder had a passage, reading, or statistic that related it to the problem of hunger in children in our country. All of us were amazed at some of the dismal facts. For instance, 17 million children went hungry at some point in 2008. As teenagers ourselves, this was particularly dismaying. Perhaps the most poignant part of the Seder is the Four Questions. In this Haggadah, we ask not “Why is this night different from all other nights?” but rather questions such as “What does it mean to be hungry in America and what is the main cause of hunger?” The traditional four children story has four very personal first person narratives about young people who do not have enough to eat, or who participate in important free school lunch or other nutrition program. Each step of the Seder opened our eyes to a different aspect of hunger in America.
After we finished reading through the Haggadah, our group reaction was very strong. One of my friends, Laura, told us how her friend at school often went hungry at home. We talked about how important free lunch and breakfast at school programs are, and how they help many kids get the nutrition they needed. We were so affected by the seder that we felt like we had to take action. Now we are currently planning to collect backpacks full of food through our Temple. These backpacks will be given to local elementary schools to give to children in need. The food inside is meant to help get hungry children through the weekend, when there is no school at which to get a free meal. We will soon be asking our congregation to donate snacks that are healthy and ready to eat; no microwaving or cooking required. We, as a class, feel like this is a great way to make a real difference in our community, which fits right into what we have been learning in Confirmation, especially when we attended the RAC’s L’Taken seminar.
To wrap up our class for the day, we participated in another act of social action. One of our Senators, Blanche Lincoln, is the chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, which oversees child nutrition programs. We took paper plates and markers and each one of us wrote Senator Lincoln a personal message on the back of a plate. We urged her to support the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act, with an increase in funding of $5 billion over 5 years. This bill could go a long way towards continuing and improving child nutrition programs in the United States.
So, I urge you to take a look at the Child Nutrition Seder, and include some, if not all, of it at your Seder this year. It is a great way to learn more about child hunger in America, and to make your Pesach a little bit more meaningful this year. I also urge you to write your members of Congress about supporting increased funding in the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act.
