Health Care is a Moral Right

Yesterday, July 27th, was the third action for health care in the last two weeks in which I participated. I was arrested at the first two, I spoke at the third - I had the honor of following the great Rev. Barber.
I begin speaking at 11:47 (and a few other appearances later - including me singing slightly off key -oh, well!) plus keep an eye for excellent colleague Rabbi Ruti Reagan in a blue silk tallit, but you should really watch the entire thing - it's worth it, believe me.
Oh, also... did I mention... we won?



Here is, more or less, the text of my remarks:


Good morning,
I am Rabbi Alana Suskin. I am not anyone famous or important -except that as a rabbi, I am called to be a kli kodesh - a vessel for the holy, and in that role, two days ago, I was arrested in the Senate gallery for chanting alongside dozens of other people: clergy of all faiths, physicians, grieving mothers, and many more American citizens. Our message was clear: Kill the Bill. Protect our care.

I was in the Senate gallery that day because, as a rabbi and as a Jew, I am obligated to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves.  I came to the Senate to tell them, that it is a moral and religious obligation for our society to care for the sick.

Today, once again, speaking with one voice, we implore Senators to oppose any efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

The Book of Isaiah warns, “Woe to you who make unjust laws, to those who issue oppressive decrees to deprive the poor of their rights and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people, making widows their prey and robbing the fatherless.” The Republican health care bill that strips children, families and elderly people of affordable coverage is the very definition of such an unjust law. It would leave more than 32 million people without healthcare by 2026.

Who will comfort the grieving mothers, the bereft fathers, the children whose parents died far too young to raise them? Who will hold their hands and wipe their tears? I refuse. I refuse to let this state of affairs come to pass. There is no justification for slashing Medicaid and taking health insurance away from 32 million low-income Americans, people with disabilities, children and seniors -- while lavishing tax cuts on insurance companies and the very wealthy.

There is no excuse for letting insurance companies impose lifetime limits that cut off your insurance as you face life-threatening disease. It is immoral. There is no acceptable reason. We will not stand for it.

The Golden Rule, to not do to others what we would not have done to us, is a fundamental value held across faiths.  But Members of Congress who vote for the Senate health care repeal bill will still have coverage for themselves, while leaving millions of Americans at risk of bankruptcy, health emergencies and death. The American Health Care Act makes a mockery of the Golden Rule.

Hebrew Scripture teaches in many, many, places, that as a society, we have a duty to care for the poor, the vulnerable, and the oppressed.
In Leviticus, we are told, “If your brother is becoming poor, and is not able to support himself; then you must support him...” Jewish commentaries[i] explain, “If your brother is becoming poor, do not let him fall. He is like a load resting on a wall; as long as it is still not fallen, just a single person can hold it and prevent it from falling, but once it has fallen to the ground, even five cannot raise it up again.”
Once people fall into deep difficulty it takes a much greater effort to help them –if it is possible at all. Emergency room care isn’t enough: we must enable everyone to access health care.

Behold the sin of your sister Sodom: pride, satiation, and a quiet, peaceful mind was in her and in her daughters; neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy [ii].
We stand together today – and for as long as it takes – against repealing the ACA. We must vote down ANY bill that would strip healthcare from 33 million people.

In the book of Deuteronomy

we read:
אַחֲרֵי יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם תֵּלֵכוּ …
You shall walk after the Lord your God…

The rabbinic sages[iv] explain: What does this mean: …[It means] to walk after the attributes of the Holy One, blessed be. As God clothes the naked, … so must you clothe the naked. As God, visits the sick…  so must you visit the sick. As God comforts mourners, so must you comfort mourners...

If we are commanded to walk after the attributes of God, well, it is also written in Exodus[v]

אֲנִי יְהֹוָה רֹפְאֶךָ

I, God, am your healer.

As God heals the sick, so must we heal the sick.

Senators now must answer a moral question: whom do they serve? Do they serve all the people, or do they serve only millionaires and powerful special interests? If they serve the people, they will reject this bill.

---

[i] (Sifra 109b on Leviticus 25:35)

[ii] (Ezekiel 16:49)

[iii] (13:5)

[iv] (Talmud Sotah 14a)

[v] 15:26

See more from the extraordinary Rev. William Barber at his site Repairers of the Breach.

e

35 years...

Today is the 35th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade.
These years have not been easy years, and certainly for many of them, we have had to spend our energy trying to fight those who would overturn it. But it is a struggle we must continue with. To go back to the days before Roe v. Wade would be a disaster: in the dark days in which abortions were outlawed in most states, women died, regularly, of botched abortions. I don't suppose it's news to anyone that that's the case, but just in case, let's review a current case: Nicaragua.
Since Nicaragua outlawed abortions once again in 2006, we know of - for certain- over 100 women who have died. Keep in mind those are the ones who were reported, who made news; we will probably never know how many women really.
Over at Human Rights Watch, check out their report, from which I quote:

A medical doctor at a large public hospital in Managua, however, testified to one case:

Here [at this hospital] we have had women who have died.… For example, [name withheld] came here and had an ultrasound. It was clear that she needed a therapeutic abortion. No one wanted to carry out the abortion because the fetus was still alive. The woman was here two days without treatment until she expulsed the fetus on her own. And by then she was already in septic shock and died five days later. That was in March 2007.

Chad Gadya

Liveblogging from the Hazon Food Conference (for more see Jewschool's posts from YehuditBrachah).



We all have a huge amount to say about the goats. I'm not sure that this was planned, but in some ways, this topic has nearly taken over the Hazon Food Conference. And I do not think that this is necessarily a bad thing. The questions that have arisen throughout the past years, regarding the ethics of eating meat - especially kosher meat produced in factory farms, slaughtered in places like Agriprocessors, where the heart of kashrut seems to have bled right out are questions which are just right for the people of this new Jewish sustainable food movement to address.

And while there is a lot going on at this conference, your intrepid livebloggers (YehuditBrachah, KungFu Jew and KRG) have set aside an entire post to talk about the shchita and the conversations surrounding it.

Thursday night, the first night of the conference, Nigel Savage of Hazon started out by explaining how it came about that it was decided to shecht a goat this year at the food conference. Last year during the conference, Nigel asked meat eaters if they would still eat meat if they had to participate in the death of the animal: some said yes, others: no; he then asked the veggies if they would eat meat if they were part of its slaughtering: again, some said no, but others, yes. From this arose the idea to try to humanely schecht a goat at the Hazon Food conference.
That is how Nigel introduced the first panel of the conference: a panel including a shochet, Rabbi Yehuda ben Chemhoun, Rabbi Seth Mandel of the Orthodox Union, who oversees all American slaughterhouses, the shepherd who raised the goats Aitan Mizrahi, the woman who continued to shepherd them when the shepherd separated them from their dams (he is a dairy farmer, and this is how female goats are kept giving milk) Rachel Gall, Dr. Shamu Sadeh of Adamah and Simon Feil.

Effortlessly skinny people, I fart in your general direction...

According to a recent article in the New York Times,"overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases that includes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, infections and lung disease. And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease."

This isn't exactly a carte blanche to snork out at the trough, since obese people still die at a higher rate - as do underweight people. But interestingly what we consider to be "overweight" may actually be a more appropriate weight level, as long as people are eating well and exercising and otherwise generally healthy (what the fat activists have been saying for some time, BTW). Despite the fact that culturally, Americans think that even normal weight people are actually somewhat unattractive (cf the slightly stale collection of snarkery over Britney Spears unflattering outfit at some awards event, when it is perfectly clear that the woman, whatever else is wrong with her, is NOT overweight), it turns out that our ideas of what is attractive may not be what is healthy - uh, well, duh. Any other surprises out there?

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