Orthodox groups to offer ethical seals for businesses
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 | Uri L’Tzedek leaders, from left, Ari Hart, Shmuly Yanklowitz, and Ari Weiss are at work on the Tav HaYosher campaign in a New York restaurant — kosher, of course. Uri L’Tzedek |
Not to be outdone by their Conservative colleagues, Orthodox groups on both coasts will soon be vetting the ethical standards of businesses serving the Jewish communities.
In New York, Uri L’Tzedek, a social justice group founded last year by rabbinical students at the liberal Orthodox Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, is set to launch its Tav HaYosher, or ethical seal. The seal will be awarded to kosher restaurants in New York City that treat their workers fairly. “Yosher” is a Hebrew word meaning honesty or straightness.
On the other side of the country, in Los Angeles, three Orthodox rabbis are putting the final touches on Peulat Sachir, or the Ethical Labor Initiative. The term comes from a verse in Leviticus 19 demanding that workers be paid the same day they complete their work.
Like the Tav HaYosher, the Los Angeles program involves a seal certifying that an establishment is treating its workers fairly and humanely. Unlike the New York initiative, the West Coast operation will offer its seal not just to kosher restaurants but any local business serving the Jewish community, including synagogues, bookstores, even attorneys’ and physicians’ offices.
Both initiatives emerged in response to mounting scandals at Agriprocessors, formerly the nation’s largest kosher meatpacking plant that has virtually closed down under a slew of financial difficulties and alleged labor law violations. Founders of the initiatives declare that as Orthodox Jews, they feel compelled to respond to a situation that cast aspersions on their communal values.
“As Orthodox Jews, we have a very strict commitment to the laws of kashrut,” said Chovevei Torah student Shmuly Yanklowitz, the co-director of Uri L’Tzedek. “We see them as separate from but equally as important as how much you pay somebody.”
The New York and Los Angeles efforts are modeled closely after the Tav Chevrati, or social seal, a similar initiative run by the four-year-old Israeli nonprofit Bema’aglei Tzedek, or Circles of Justice. The Bema’aglei Tzedek seal is granted free to restaurants that are seen as respecting workers’ rights and being accessible to those with disabilities. More than 300 restaurants in Israel, including 130 in Jerusalem, display the seal in their windows.
The Agriprocessors scandals engendered widespread public discussion this summer and fall within the American Jewish community about the ethics of kosher food production. The latest was a Dec. 9 forum at Yeshiva University on the ethics of kashrut, where for the first time the heads of three major Orthodox groups debated the role of ethics in kosher certification.
Some in the wider community argue that social justice and kashrut are important but separate concerns. Others hold that they are inextricably entwined, that kosher food produced in an unethical manner is not “fit to eat,” one translation of the Hebrew word “kosher.”
The Conservative movement’s response to the issue was the Hekhsher Tzedek, or Social Justice Seal, based on the opinion that the two spheres cannot be separated. The seal, which has been endorsed by the Reform movement, will be awarded to kosher food manufacturers that meet a broad range of ethical standards regarding treatment of workers, environmental concerns, health and safety, and financial transparency.
The details of the seal are still being worked out, with a launch date expected next year. It will be awarded only to food products already certified as kosher.
While much of the Orthodox community has criticized the Hekhsher Tzedek as unwieldy at best and, at worst, an attack on the Orthodox-controlled kosher certification system — it is not, its organizers insist — the founders of the two new Orthodox seals believe that, as Orthodox Jews, they bear a special responsibility for the actions of businesses that cater to their community. If Jews are to take Torah seriously, the founders of these two initiatives say, they should ensure that businesses serving their needs adhere to Jewish ethical values.
For Uri L’Tzedek, that means the kosher food industry. The group had been holding study sessions on the ethical imperatives of kashrut and kosher food production for more than a year, says Yanklowitz. The May 12 immigration raid at the Agriprocessors plant in Postville, Iowa, moved them to take concrete action, first by calling for a boycott of Agriprocessors products, then by developing the Tav HaYosher.
“We have an extra ethical imperative on issues of kashrut,” said Yanklowitz, speaking of Orthodox Jews, the majority of whom choose kosher restaurants when dining out. “First, it’s our system, one we think has a certain level of sanctity, so we have a certain responsibility for it. And not only is it something we care about, but being that it’s our dollars and cents that keep it going, it’s an industry where we can have the greatest impact.”
The Tav HaYosher seal will be given free to kosher restaurants in New York City that guarantee three basic rights to their workers: fair pay; regular time off; and a safe and healthy work environment. Restaurants that opt into the system will be vetted by a team of volunteers and then display a certificate showing their adherence to these standards.
Uri L’Tzedek held its first volunteer training in early December and has quietly collected a handful of Manhattan restaurants interested in the project. The group expects to award its first seals in late January.
The Los Angeles intiative is not as far along as Uri L’Tzedek’s project.
Rabbi Daniel Korobkin, the spiritual leader of Kehillat Yavneh in the city’s Hancock Park neighborhood, says he and the two others behind the Peulat Sachir — Rabbi Elazar Muskin of Young Israel of Century City and Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky of B’nai David-Judea Congregation — conceive of it as a covenant that a business owner will sign, pledging to treat his or her workers fairly.
“If a synagogue has a janitorial staff, for instance, we want to make sure that staff is being treated well,” he said.
Like the New York Orthodox initiative, the L.A. seal is not meant to be punitive.
“We want it to be educational, to empower the employer and employee who might not know their rights and obligations,” Korobkin said.
But it also goes beyond the voluntary ethical guidelines proposed by the Rabbinical Council of America for Jewish businesses, he says. Businesses carrying the seal in their window will be reviewed periodically, and owners will be expected to attend regular training sessions.
Korobkin says the first Peulat Sachir seals should go up in a couple of months.
JTA
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Bravo for your efforts! Now how about ethical seals for Rabbis?
And work on prevention so that we wil not have to be ashamed of any more Rabbis.
Read on…
The shame of Orthodoxy, by Shmuly Yanklowitz, ( founder of Uri L’Tzedek, a rabbinical school student at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, and a doctoral student in moral psychology at Columbia University) , Haaretz 31.7.09
“Is nothing sacred?” read a newspaper headline last week that accompanied a photo of one of many Orthodox rabbis in New York and New Jersey who had been caught in a vast criminal scandal. Seeing the images of the rabbis allegedly involved in the laundering of tens of millions of dollars and in black-market trafficking of kidneys, I felt an all-too-familiar shame. Once again, a group of my fellow Jews, who publicly display their religious affiliations and their pietistic adherence to rabbinic authority, were being accused of engaging in terrible violations of ethics and U.S. law.
According to the Talmud, the very first question one can expect to be asked at the gates of heaven pertains not to belief or ritual, but to whether one acted honestly in all of one’s business dealings (Shabbat 31a). How many members of our community could pass that admissions test?
A message concerning ethics and social justice emerges clearly and unambiguously in Jewish texts, one after another. Yet, I find that many of my fellow Orthodox Jews believe these values apply exclusively to their interactions with other Jews. When they enter the public sphere - the secular space of business and politics - they may retain the external garb of ritual Jewish observance, but often seem to drop the ethical and moral principles.
This phenomenon strikes me as a perverse reversal of the Enlightenment maxim that suggests being “a Jew at home and a man in the streets.” For some 200 years, until the second half of the 20th century, Jews could often safely enter the public sphere only by casting aside the external signs of their religious identity. Now an American Jew can walk in the street wearing a skullcap or take off from work to observe Sukkot, but ironically the values of ethics and social justice are in many cases left behind in the private sphere.
The increasingly individualistic nature of religion in America often embraces self-fulfillment and personal spirituality at the expense of community involvement and collective responsibility. This phenomenon may be especially true within American Orthodoxy. Psychologists have found that membership and identity with a community that believes in collective responsibility is a better predictor of moral conduct than the capacity for sophisticated, personal moral reasoning. If Orthodox Judaism continues to relegate ethics to the private sphere, and to hold off from identifying with American culture, values and even laws (and a similar phenomenon could be said to exist with the ultra-Orthodox in Israel) - the problem will be perpetuated.
Rabbi Aharon Soloveichik argued that, “the Torah does not make a distinction between Jews and non-Jews within the realm of mishpat [law] and tzedek [justice]. A Jew should always identify with the cause of defending the aggrieved, whosoever the aggrieved may be, just as the concept of tzedek is to be applied uniformly to all humans regardless of race or creed.”
With this in mind, I would suggest that we need to change the fabric of our behavior in the public sphere such that ethics becomes our first priority. Here are a few ways we might achieve this:
First, we should let our rabbis know that we need more than just sermons and classes in ritual practice. As Proverbs 21:3 tell us, “Doing what is right and just is preferable to God than an offering.” A multitude of laws concerned with competition, worker treatment and pricing are integral to the Torah, and our rabbis should be teaching us how to incorporate these moral standards into our daily lives.
Second, our community’s businesses and financial institutions require more transparency and accountability. Rather than waiting for the government to conduct more raids and to expose more scandals, we must clean up our own shop. This demands innovative approaches to demonstrating publicly how organizations owned by or patronized by Jews are operating according to Jewish values and law.
This is one of the reasons why Uri L’Tzedek (the Orthodox Social Justice Organization) was founded in 2007: to inspire a more elevated moral discourse and cultivate more responsible Orthodox leadership. By creating high-school social justice curricula, running workshops at over 20 college campuses, leading monthly learning events on contemporary moral issues at synagogues, as well as creating the Tav HaYosher (Ethical Seal) organization - which certifies that kosher food establishments give their employees fair pay and treatment - we advance a new educational approach to integrating Jewish ethics into civil life.
Third, we can reembrace a model of communal reparations. The cases exposed last week supposedly involved the sale of kidneys. Let us view this as a call for every individual in the community to register to be an organ donor so that when we pass from this world, we have the possibility of saving the life of another.
This Orthodox crisis embodied by the disregard for secular law necessitates a restructuring of priorities. Judaism in America can no longer remain in the comfortable private sphere; it is a public enterprise rightly subject to the scrutiny of all. To be sure, all communities endure scandals, but if we wish to profess a moral message for the world, our public actions must meet our own internal standards.
The time has come for a new moral order. We must stop merely shaking our heads at Jewish scandals and start to hold ourselves responsible; we must begin today to take more productive steps to get to the root of the problems. Only then can Jewish tradition be a relevant moral force for the 21st century.
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We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
(Martin Luther King Jr.)
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