Think Locally, Act Locally

Delivered June 6, 2014

You have the ability to feed students this summer who normally receive a free midday meal during the school year but because school is out the need does not go away for food.  

It is called the Kids Summer Lunch Program, and it’s one of the special projects of the Interfaith Council of the Northshire on which our congregation is a member.

What Kids Summer Lunch does is feed a nutritious lunch to over 200 children for ten weeks.

• $13.00 will feed a child for one week.

• $130 will feed a child for the entire summer.

• $1,300 will feed ten children for the entire summer.

Through Kids Summer Lunch, children from Manchester, Pawlet, Rupert and Dorset who receive government funded breakfast and lunch during the school year are fed during the summer.

One-hundred percent of your donation goes directly to feeding these children, our children, members of our community who cannot go hungry just because the lunch program is on school break.  

Any of you who have raised children and teenagers know that to go without food is to deny a child the opportunity to grow.  

You may have noticed the gold bags when you entered the sanctuary tonight.  

Those gold bags are for you to fill, as in Willy Wonka’s search for the golden ticket.  The golden ticket is your contribution to ensure that our community’s children--those at MEMS and Burr and Burton--two of the front-line poverty relief providers in Manchester during the school year--do not go lacking for nutrition over the summer months.  

Often non-profits market their programs by offering you the opportunity to end hunger.  But as human beings, we always need to eat--the need for food is never ending.  What we can do is relieve people’s hungry, one meal at a time.  For as long as we live, we need food.  

What is so beautiful about the Kids Summer Lunch Program is that your local dollars are turned into food that feeds the children and teenagers that you see in your daily activities in our community.  It is a local need, with a local response, with a direct impact.  Each Tuesday during the summer you will see a small tented area next to Town Hall where the families we serve will come to get their edibles for the week, edibles that are packed to ensure that free lunch is replaced not with cheap food, but balanced, nourishing foods.  

In donating to the Kids Summer Lunch Program, we also fulfill one of our obligations as Jewish people.  When we do birkat ha mazon, the blessing after we eat, we thank God for allowing us to be satisfied.  We replace our hunger pangs with a sense of having enough, not for the food, but being relieved of our hunger.  This blessing truly encapsulates the context of hunger:  we must continually be able to eat in order to be satisfied.  It is not a one-time thing:  it is a thrice-daily (at a minimum) action that must be taken to keep us in life.

We can expand that sense of food satiety and satisfaction to those who still live in poverty, to the kids who need food to be satisfied, by sharing our blessings for food and for satisfaction with others, and by making an immediate difference right here, right now.

I encourage you to join with me in taking a gold bag and after Shabbat using the envelope within to fund this wonderful tikkun to our community, to repair hunger that exists around us with food.