A dear one at Kadima was begrudging the fact that they can be found on that website—but at least, they said, they used a decent picture. Perhaps, if you’ve been public in your opposition to the Israeli government or military policy, you can relate (and hopefully they used a good picture!). It had been a while since I checked whether I had appeared there, so I opened an incognito tab and searched my name.
Nothing.
What does an anti-occupation, ceasefire-calling rabbi have to do to get noticed?
All kidding aside, before I closed the tab—quickly, before my computer caught something worse than a virus—I saw a few of the graphics and headlines demonizing “Mamdani and the DSA.” And I found myself thinking not just about who gets named, but how.
Who is made hyper-visible?
Who is rendered invisible?
And who gets to tell the story?
I looked down at my “New York Jews for Zohran” t-shirt and thought about this week’s parasha. In Parashat Behar, Rashi comments on the verse, “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is Mine” with a simple comment: “Do not begrudge this, for it is G-d’s [not yours].” Don’t resist policy that might interrupt ownership, redistribute wealth, and lift up the worker and the holiness of the land. Because it is not ours. We do not own it.
And if the land is not ours, then the food is not really ours either.
And that raises uncomfortable questions:
When I eat, whose labor am I consuming?
Whose hands planted, harvested, transported, stocked?
Whose names do I know—and whose stories remain invisible?
Our food system depends on a kind of invisibility. The people most essential to what sustains us are often the least protected, least paid, least seen. The Torah’s economic vision pushes directly against that.
In Bava Metzia 83a, Rabba bar bar Chanan confiscates his workers’ cloaks after they break his barrels. When he asks Rav if this is the law, Rav tells him not only to return the cloaks, but to still pay their wages—“so that you may walk in the way of the good.” The law is not just about what you can take. It’s about the dignity you uphold.
Behar imagines a society where land resets, where debts are released, where access is restored. And Bechukotai warns us what happens when we ignore that vision—not as punishment from above, but as a kind of moral ecology. When we build systems on extraction and indifference, the land itself becomes unstable, society fractures, and scarcity follows.
If we won’t pursue justice for its own sake, the Torah says, then at least recognize this: our lives depend on it.
So the question isn’t just how to get noticed. It’s how to notice.
To notice the sources of our food.
To notice the people behind it.
To notice where our systems obscure dignity—and where we might begin to restore it.
This shabbat, may we learn to see what sustains us—not as ours alone, but as something held together by many hands. And may that seeing move us, slowly but surely, toward a world of greater care, equity, and shared abundance.
Shabbat shalom,
R’ David
Nothing.
What does an anti-occupation, ceasefire-calling rabbi have to do to get noticed?
All kidding aside, before I closed the tab—quickly, before my computer caught something worse than a virus—I saw a few of the graphics and headlines demonizing “Mamdani and the DSA.” And I found myself thinking not just about who gets named, but how.
Who is made hyper-visible?
Who is rendered invisible?
And who gets to tell the story?
I looked down at my “New York Jews for Zohran” t-shirt and thought about this week’s parasha. In Parashat Behar, Rashi comments on the verse, “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is Mine” with a simple comment: “Do not begrudge this, for it is G-d’s [not yours].” Don’t resist policy that might interrupt ownership, redistribute wealth, and lift up the worker and the holiness of the land. Because it is not ours. We do not own it.
And if the land is not ours, then the food is not really ours either.
And that raises uncomfortable questions:
When I eat, whose labor am I consuming?
Whose hands planted, harvested, transported, stocked?
Whose names do I know—and whose stories remain invisible?
Our food system depends on a kind of invisibility. The people most essential to what sustains us are often the least protected, least paid, least seen. The Torah’s economic vision pushes directly against that.
In Bava Metzia 83a, Rabba bar bar Chanan confiscates his workers’ cloaks after they break his barrels. When he asks Rav if this is the law, Rav tells him not only to return the cloaks, but to still pay their wages—“so that you may walk in the way of the good.” The law is not just about what you can take. It’s about the dignity you uphold.
Behar imagines a society where land resets, where debts are released, where access is restored. And Bechukotai warns us what happens when we ignore that vision—not as punishment from above, but as a kind of moral ecology. When we build systems on extraction and indifference, the land itself becomes unstable, society fractures, and scarcity follows.
If we won’t pursue justice for its own sake, the Torah says, then at least recognize this: our lives depend on it.
So the question isn’t just how to get noticed. It’s how to notice.
To notice the sources of our food.
To notice the people behind it.
To notice where our systems obscure dignity—and where we might begin to restore it.
This shabbat, may we learn to see what sustains us—not as ours alone, but as something held together by many hands. And may that seeing move us, slowly but surely, toward a world of greater care, equity, and shared abundance.
Shabbat shalom,
R’ David
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