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Challah For Hunger

Eli Winkelman, the founder of Challah For Hunger, found a non-traditional way to set aside a portion of her own “harvest” and show the community how the harvest seasons can affect our food resources.

By Eli Winkelman
Reprinted with permission from Hazon. This originally appeared in Food For Thought: Hazon’s Sourcebook on Jews, Food, & Contemporary Life.

In 2004, Eli Winkelman started baking challah. When she realized that people loved the bread, and wanted to learn how to make it, she got the idea that she could bake it in bulk and raise money for charity simultaneously. Her project, Challah for Hunger, began at Scripps College and by late 2007 had raised more than $35,000 for refugees from Darfur.

Why Challah for Hunger?

People often ask me, “Challah, Darfur? What’s the connection?” I used to think that there was no connection, that we were doing something good and challah was just the tool.

The truth is that it was an accident that we ended up selling challah for Darfur. But it turns out to have been an accident that makes sense:

In Jewish tradition, we have the concept of tzedakah. According to the orthodox Chief Rabbi of England, Sir Jonathan Sacks, “It is difficult to translate tzedakah because it combines in a single word two notions normally opposed to one another, namely charity and justice.” Tzedakah, in the time of the Torah, was a concept enacted through food. During the harvest, if one missed some stalks of wheat or dropped them on the ground, they were to be left there, for those who needed to gather. At the same time, the corners of the fields were also reserved for the poor. Of course, I don’t harvest my own food; I don’t have fields. My obligation to social justice has to take another form besides setting aside portions of my harvest.

Bread has significance in Judaism, because it symbolizes the relationship between humanity and a higher power. With the science we have today, the availability of our food is not as fickle as in times past: in the past, and today in many places, if something went wrong with your field, if the rains didn’t fall and then cease at the right times, if the seeds didn’t sprout for whatever reason, if a pest descended on your crops, it was all over. Truly, the ability to make bread comes only with great blessing.

I have been more than sufficiently blessed in my life. Besides everything else that I have, I have the time and ability to bake bread. By making challah, and thinking about it, I am acknowledging how lucky I am, to have my wonderful family and friends, to have the opportunities of education, to have been born today and in a place of freedom, instead of in Germany in the ’30s or today in Darfur. And by using that challah to help feed people in Darfur and alert people here about their situation, I am  beginning to fulfill my obligation of tzedakah.

According to Rabbi Sacks, “What tzedakah signifies is what is often called ‘social justice,’ meaning that no one should be without the basic requirements of existence, and that those who have more than they need must share some of that surplus with those who have less.” Now I understand. The connection between challah and Darfur is this: I have food to eat. Finding sustenance is neither a challenge nor a danger. I have time to make food. I am safe. For many people in the world, none of this is true.

I have been blessed with more; they have less. I will share; I am obligated to share.