workers – Sim Lev

A peasant farmer was my father

When my mind wanders, I like to think about where I would go if I could travel in time. Have you ever considered this? When you would want to visit?

Personally, my first thought is Paris in the 1890s. In my higher moments, I project myself into medieval Andalus, the Golden Age of Hebrew poetry in Spain.

And, of course, I’d love to go back to biblical times. Wouldn’t it be marvellous to see the First Temple in all its glory? What would it be like to inhabit that world of prophets and visionaries?

But this time travel thought experiment always comes with a corollary. I’d have to be a rich man. No matter what spot of history I got dropped in, the only way to enjoy it would be to be part of the elite.

If I were sent back to biblical times without that condition, I’d probably be a peasant farmer. We like to imagine our ancestors as great kings and high priests. In reality, they were less than a small fraction of the ancient Israelite population.

95% of people in the biblical period worked the land. Dropped back to the time of David and Solomon, we probably wouldn’t be in their courts, but in the fields.

I take a perverse pride in this knowledge.

Think how hard they must have worked to bring that ancient society into being!

As a peasant farmer in the ancient world, you would have about 3 acres, growing different crops, including grains, fruit trees, and olives. You would, almost certainly, have a chicken run and a small herd of goats.

If you were really fancy, you might also have a cow.

Your home would be a collection of huts and tents, stretching out to include your extended family. Each would be a bustling, cramped place, with pots and pans and a fire stove. Your animals would potter in and out of your sleeping quarters.

I am not trying to paint a romantic vision of any of this. Your life would be hard. You would pull a plough with your own hands and sow seeds with your back hunched over. You would cultivate and cut and glean your trees in the searing heat.

You would spin your own wool, stitch your own clothes, bake your own bread, build your own dwellings, subsist on whatever you needed to survive.

Yes, all that is true for women, too, with an additional burden. You would give birth to ten children and breast feed all of them. You would count yourself incredibly lucky if all of them lived past the age of 5. If they did, they would likely be married off in their teens.

No, there is nothing romantic about the lives of our real ancestors.

But we should be proud of them.

Peasants, labourers and serfs might not be the subject of great poetry and sagas, but without their efforts, nothing exists. There could be no food, no shelter, no community, and no culture, without their graft. That gruelling work made civilisation possible.

This week’s parashah tells us something of how they built ancient Israelite society.

If they had just stuck to their own homesteads, they would have had to survive on the paltry gains of subsistence farming. In a bad year – if rains failed to fall or crops failed to grow – they would simply perish.

So, our family, the farmers of the ancient world, signed up to participate in the agrarian state.

The agrarian state was responsible for distributing food and creating common irrigation and transport systems. In ancient Israel, the centre of that state was the Jerusalem Temple.

Our parashah explains the criteria for participating in its systems. You must not glean your fields right to their edges, so that you leave enough for travellers and strangers. You must donate a tenth of your grain and livestock to support those in the community who are most vulnerable, like widows and orphans.

In some ways, this is the foundation of the earliest welfare state.

But the poor are not the only beneficiaries of this redistribution.

In fact, they were not even its primary targets.

Our parashah begins with a ritual that Israelites must undertake each year. At each harvest of the year, you must collect your first and best fruits. You must bring these, the choicest of all the crops you worked so hard to create, and give them to the priests.

You must lift them above your head and say: “A wandering Aramean was my father. He was enslaved in Egypt, but God brought him out into this land of milk and honey. Now, I bring before you, the first fruits of the soil that God has given me.”

The priest will sacrifice it, perform closed rituals, and eat it in front of you.

That priest did not work to produce those fruits. He did not share in the exhausting work of raising children in a hovel, or run ploughs over the land. In fact, he wasn’t responsible for any land.

The priest’s sole job was to be the leader of the ancient cult. He was in charge. He profited from your work.

That great Temple in Jerusalem, with all its priests and writings and rituals, only existed because the poor majority paid in and made it happen. That entire society functioned on the basis of our ancestors’ labour. How could they have done it without the work of the people who harvested the grain, built the bricks, and cared for the sick?

I don’t resent the ancient priests.

That work made possible great cultural developments. At that time, we couldn’t have had literary culture, organised society, music or scientific discovery without a class who had the leisure time to devote to such pursuits.

We then wouldn’t have benefited from the innovations in agriculture, technology, transport and trade that makes our lives today less horrible than they were in ancient times.

But, while resentment for ancient figures might not be productive, we should feel entitled to be critical.

After all, their world is our world. For all the social progress we have made, the divisions that defined civilisations millenia ago are only greater than they were then.

Far fewer people profit far more from the work of the majority than ever did in the biblical period.

Almost all of us, I know, are worried about how energy price gouging, interest rate rises, and higher costs of living will affect us. Some are already feeling the effects of an economy where wages won’t rise but prices keep going up.

Meanwhile, the energy companies and their shareholders are making record profits. These last few years, which have been so frightening for most people, have been a period of great abundance for the world’s richest.

This is not accidental. The rich are not rich in spite of the poor. They are rich because of the poor.

Perhaps those inequalities were essential to create our current world. But how much greater would society be if we decided to eradicate them? Just imagine what we could accomplish if nobody had to worry about heating their home or feeding their family.

We could unleash the great talents of everyone, whether priest or pauper; shareholder or sharecropper; king or taxi driver. We could enjoy this world, with all its bounties, without the constant friction of struggle.

On reflection, if I could travel in time, I don’t think the past would be the place for me. I would prefer, instead, to make my way to the future.

I want to go to the time when technology is harnessed to benefit everyone in the world, regardless of who they are and where they live. An era in which it is not just a small minority that creams off the profits of the many, but when everything is redistributed between everyone. One in which the gains of civilisation are shared with all humanity.

We can’t change the past. We can’t go back and rescue our ancestors from the harsh realities of peasantry. But we can build a different future for the next generation. We can make it so that the future is not defined by the same problems of the past.

Let us travel to that point in time together.

Shabbat shalom.

Ki Tavo 5782, South West Essex and Settlement Reform Synagogue

Once, Rabbi Israel Salanter, the founder of the Musar movement, visited a new matzah bakery in order to check its work practices and level of kashrut. He reviewed all the manufacturing procedures extensively and observed the intense labor and toil of the employees. At the end of Rabbi Salanter’s visit, the bakery owner proudly asked him, “What does the rabbi say?” He answered, “The Gentiles accuse us, God forbid, of using the blood of Christian children in matzah. While this is not the case, from what I have seen here, there is indeed a violation of the prohibition on blood in food. The blood of the workers is mixed with the matzah! I will not certify this bakery as kosher.”

For me, my proudest moment of 2020 came in the middle of a Torah shiur. Early on into the lockdown, I was teaching a class over Zoom. 8pm was nearing and one teenage girl in attendance interrupted. “We have to go clap for the carers!” she said. At once, almost the entire class got up and walked away from their screens. I did the same. We whooped and cheered, then, ten minutes later, returned to our studies. Clapping for the carers became part of our weekly Torah study.

That, I thought, was real Judaism. It is not in our texts or our rituals, although those are important. Judaism lives in the dignity and respect we show to each other. It is in the solidarity and love we demonstrate to each other, even when we cannot physically be together.

This year, for the first time that I can remember, care workers received the recognition they deserved. In this pandemic, we learnt who really keeps the country ticking. It is the nurses, the cleaners, the teachers, the nursery workers, the porters, the social carers and home support. So often, this work, which constitutes the majority of work, is ignored or made invisible.

In this parashah, we get a rare insight into that kind of work. Jacob and Joseph both die. We hear of how the dignitaries and officers of Egypt mourned them. But we also hear, just in passing, of the physicians who embalmed their bodies. Or, rather, as Rabbeinu Bachya points out from the grammar of the sentence, that the physicians instructed others, who were lower-ranking and skilled in the matter, to embalm the bodies. We glimpse, if only momentarily, amidst the hullabaloo of important people wailing, what care work looked like in Ancient Egypt.

Care for the elderly must have been one of the hardest jobs to do this year. The Coronavirus pandemic spread fastest and with most deadly impact in the elderly care homes. The workers, without adequate protective wear, on low wages and with few rights, went in to care for older people. These workers had to return to their own vulnerable family members, potentially infected.

For many older people, their care workers were the only human contact they received, as families were prevented from mixing in the homes to prevent the spread of the virus. Care workers have done an amazing job this year, and everyone is forever indebted for their service.

So it should be a cause for absolute disgrace, for moral outrage, that a care home within the Jewish community should be spotlighted for its abhorrent treatment of elderly care workers.

That’s right. I’m talking about The Sidney and Ruza Last Foundation at the Yehoshua Freshwater Centre, better known as Sage Care home, in Golders Green. The staff there have been asking for fair wages, full sick pay and union recognition since September. These domestic and maintenance staff are paid well below the London Living Wage, denied fully paid time off if they are sick, and their grievances have been brushed aside and ignored. The management have flatly refused to have any meaningful negotiations with them, or made the workers any offers.

What an insult, then, that this care home calls itself Jewish, and says it serves the Jewish community! Who in the Jewish community is it serving? It certainly does not serve the care workers in this congregation. It definitely does not serve our elderly and vulnerable family members if it puts them and their carers in danger. Above all, it does not serve our Jewish God and our Jewish values if it exploits people.

The great conservative rabbi and posek Jill Jacobs, says that a Jewish company must meet certain labour standards to be considered kosher. It must treat workers with respect; pay a living wage; protect workers’ living conditions; and recognise their trade unions. Needless to say, the owners of Sage Care Home have failed on every single one of these fronts.

Moreover, the elderly are not safe from the pandemic if staff cannot be open about when they are sick to get necessary time off. The elderly cannot receive high quality care if employees don’t feel like when they complain about risks to health and safety they will be taken seriously. This is a grave issue for residents and staff alike.

As a result, the staff at this care home have now ballotted to strike. Unless the management intervenes swiftly to meet the carers, the whole workforce will walk out this month. The strike is scheduled to begin on 15th January.

It should never have reached this point. Many care homes manage to look after their residents and staff, by focusing on the human beings they are, rather than just profit. By ignoring the workers’ legitimate requests, the owners are endangering both staff and vulnerable older people. They must be held to account.

I know that the elderly people in these care homes and their family members want to know that their care workers have safe and fair working conditions. I know the Jewish community in London has high ethical expectations of its communal institutions.

The care workers are calling on the Jewish community to give them support. I know you will. The same community that came out to applaud care workers in the spring will surely stand by them in their struggle for a livelihood through winter.

If you have family at this care home, please write to the management to let them know your concerns. Express to them your concern for the welfare of the workers and your family.

Alternatively, take action by signing the petition or donate to the strike fund.

Let us join with the elderly and their carers to demand more from our communal institutions. May we be able to take pride in our care homes. May we truly be able to call every Jewish space kosher.

I am giving this sermon on Saturday 2nd January 2021 at Edgware and Hendon Reform Synagogue.