Hengel got the idea for a food bank in 1967 after a homeless woman who regularly rummaged through trash cans told him how much perfectly good food was being thrown away by restaurants, bakeries, and supermarkets. She said that what the poor really needed was a place where food could be deposited and then drawn out—a food “bank.” Inspired by her suggestion, van Hengel borrowed start-up money and the use of an empty building from his church, St. Mary’s Basilica, scrounged food from local groceries, and gleaned vegetables and fruits from local farms.
In its first year, the food bank at St. Mary’s, which is still up and running, distributed a quarter million pounds of food to the needy. Ten years later, van Hengel expanded the operation by founding America’s Second Harvest, a national network of food banks that collects food from major corporations and then channels it to local charities. Second Harvest, now renamed Feeding America, routinely distributes about two billion pounds of food, feeding over twenty million Americans each year.
Van Hengel is estimated to have inspired or helped form at least one thousand food banks in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Thanks to his vision and industry, the man who called himself a “first-rate beach bum” helped feed millions of hungry women, children, and men. His efforts were rewarded in 1992 when he was given an Americas Award, described as the “Nobel Prize for goodness,” at a ceremony in Washington DC’s Kennedy Center.
22 February
Menachem Froman
1945—
Meeting the Other Side
The whole secret of religion,” says Rabbi Menachem Froman, “is meeting the other side.” When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that’s exactly what he’s been doing for over forty years: reaching out to Muslims in Israel and other countries—even to violent Muslim organizations such as Hamas—in the hope of building peace.
Froman is an unlikely candidate for this kind of reconciliation. In the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War, ex-paratrooper Froman and other Zionists founded Gush Enumin, a political group dedicated to populating the West Bank with Jews and edging out the Palestinian inhabitants. Froman still lives in the West Bank settlement of Tekoa—home of the ancient prophet Amos, another champion of social justice—and serves as its chief rabbi. But he long ago dropped his youthful insistence that Israel is only for Jews. Today, he is more than willing to live in a West Bank that’s ruled by Palestinians. What’s important is honoring the holiness of the land, not claiming ownership of it. So there’s no reason, he believes, why the Holy Land can’t be a peaceful home for all three Peoples of the Book. It’s only proper, he says, that Israel be “the place where members of all faiths convene to renounce their breeding of prejudice, hostility, and war.”
Although some Israelis consider him to be a traitor for it, Froman on various occasions met with both Yasar Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and Ahmad Yassin, the leader of Hamas, to discuss the possibility of a peaceful accord between Arabs and Jews. In 2008, Froman teamed up with Khaled Amayreh, a Muslim journalist who has close ties with Hamas, to work out a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. The concord called for an immediate end to Palestinian attacks against Israelis in return for an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. Hamas representatives endorsed the plan, but the Israeli government ignored it.
Rabbi Froman believes that Jewish and Palestinian populations are too mixed for a two-state solution to work if both sides insist on strictly demarcated borders. As an alternative, he advocates two countries without borders, Israelis and Palestinians being citizens of two sovereign nations who just happen to occupy the same land. Jerusalem, he argues, should be a free international city in which people of all faiths live in peace with one another. “The key to peace is peace in Jerusalem,” he says, “to re-establish Jerusalem as the capital of peace in the world.” But he’s quite certain that the ultimate solution to the conflict must be religious rather than political. The externalities of the conflict obviously focus on geopolitical disputes over land. But the “core of the problem is religious,” and only when all sides recognize that their worship of the same God binds them more than territorial spats divide them will the problem be solved.
23 February
Wulfstan of Worchester
ca. 1008—1095
A Medieval Abolitionist
One of the many changes wrought by William the Conqueror’s 1066 invasion of England was the gradual replacement of all the island’s native Anglo-Saxon bishops with Normans. Only one was left standing: Wulfstan of Worchester. That he survived spoke to his great reputation for holiness. He had been a confidant of King Harold, slain on the field at Hastings, and this alone would have made him persona non grata to the Normans.
From an early age, Wulfstan was renowned for his great dedication to prayer. One of the stories about his early life has it that he was once so distracted from prayer by the aroma of a roasting goose that he forswore meat for the rest of his life—the reason he’s acknowledged as the patron saint of vegetarians. Although ordained a priest, Wulfstan left active parish ministry to live as a cloistered monk. But he was pulled back into the world in 1062 when he was consecrated bishop of a diocese whose seat was the town of Worchester.
During his episcopate, Wulfstan revealed himself as a social reformer who defended the poor and stood up to the Norman conquerors who oppressed them. Every day he washed the feet of twelve homeless men brought in from the street and distributed alms to them. He did this as both a reminder to himself of Christ’s teaching and as an example of compassion to those around him. Concerned about the number of hungry people in Worchester, he once invited the town’s wealthiest citizens to a banquet at the bishop’s palace. As they arrived, they were told that the bishop was running late and would soon arrive. When he eventually showed up, he brought with him several hundred of the town’s poor and quickly shamed the assembled dignitaries into serving them food and drink.
But Wulfstan’s greatest nonviolent effort at restoring justice had to do with the slave trade carried out in Bristol, the busiest seaport in his diocese. The town was the center of a thriving slave industry. Anglo-Saxon peasants who fell into debt were sold as slaves there and shipped off to Ireland to spend the rest of their lives in miserable servitude. Apparently no one thought much one way or another about the practice until Wulfstan stepped up to condemn it. Perhaps living under the domination of the Normans sensitized him to the cruelty of slavery. Correctly viewing it as an evil inflicted on an already oppressed peasantry, the bishop was relentless in his denunciation of it, preaching sermon after sermon in Bristol exhorting slave traders to abandon their distasteful line of business. Whether because he touched the slavers’ hearts or they wearied of listening to him, Wulfstan finally succeeded in stopping their traffic in human beings, making him one of the world’s first abolitionists.
24 February
Monika Hauser
24 February 1959—
Helping Women Reclaim Their Lives
Too frequently, sexual violence against women in wartime is reported by the media as simple criminal assault. Monka Hauser, founder of Medica Mondiale, a women’s advocacy organization, believes this is wrong-minded. Sexualized violence, says Hauser, is always a destructive “exertion of power over the immediate victim.” But in wartime, sexual assaults take on an entirely new vehemence. “They always have strategic significance, regardless of whether they were explicitly planned, tacitly encouraged, or merely tolerated,” because they “boost the morale of one’s own fighters and terrorize the enemy.” And it’s for this
