From the Middle East to Eastern Europe to the Americas, Jews are known for placing a very high premium on food. And even if jokes about Jewish mothers and their tendency to ply their children (and everyone else in the vicinity) with an unending supply of food are a bit overblown, the stereotype of the food-loving Jew exists for a reason. It should come as no surprise that food is central to a people whose religion includes ritual meals on the first two nights of Passover, a Purim feast, the prescribed diet of kashrut, and whose sacred text tells the famous story of a hungry first-born son who sells his birthright to his younger brother—for a bowl of soup.

Perhaps it is because a food-centric culture breeds among its adherents an acute awareness of the importance of food that many at the forefront of the international war against hunger are Jews. In fact, Jews have been obligated to fight hunger for at least as long as the Torah has been around—approximately 2,500 years

Concepts of tikkun olam and tzedakah are instilled in Jewish children from an early age. They learn to put a coin in the pushke, to say prayers before and after eating, to share mishloach manot (gifts for friends) on Purim, and on Passover to invite Elijah—and anyone who is hungry—so that they may join and eat.

Organizations built on missions of peace and justice often don’t have either in their work culture or staff relations. Activists burn out after years of work fueled almost entirely by outrage. We see cycles of activism and apathy generationally and in our own lives, but there seems to be something new happening. A younger generation of Jews is finding deep meaning and relevance in using contemplative and meditation practices not only to go searching for inner peace, but also to use that sense of rootedness and engaged Jewish spirituality to inform their work in the world.

After five years of organizing clergy around social justice issues in the Bronx, I headed to India intensely curious. Would the grassroots leaders that the American Jewish World Service Volunteer Corps matched me with find my practice of community organizing relevant? Would I be able to extract lessons from the Indian social movements that had long inspired me? After four months of teaching and learning from Indian activists, I was amazed by the fruitfulness of our exchange. I discovered that many Indian organizing practices can nurture the Jewish community’s swelling interest in organizing.

On a hot July night in 1964, Heather Tobis Booth—a young Jewish college student spending the summer as a civil rights activist in Ruleville, Mississippi—wrote a letter to her brother. Booth was one of approximately 1,000 young people who came to Mississippi as part of the Freedom Summer Project to register voters, run Freedom Schools for African-American children, and build the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as an alternative to the state’s all-white Democratic Party. In her letter, she described the fear she faced daily as an activist in Mississippi, the power of singing freedom songs like “We Shall Overcome” to dissipate that fear, and how her experience provoked religious feelings.

Community organizing involves a slower process of building social capital through taking on a set of one-to-one relational conversations, learning what makes a person tick, what they care about, and the issues upon which they are motivated to act. Once you have gathered multiple stories from various people (which can be done in a salon or house meeting), you figure out what issue people have in common and leverage it to enact change in the immediate community.

When you register for  an event with Hazon, a New York-based Jewish environmental organization, there is a dropdown menu of options regarding religious identity. Orthodox, Conservative, Conservadox, Reform, Reconstructionist, Renewal, Secular, Cultural, Other, Just Jewish, Not Religious, and Not Jewish are all on the list. Over the past several years, the Jewish environmental movement has become a vibrant force within the larger Jewish community, encouraging individuals and institutions to do everything from recycle, eat less meat, eat more meat (local and organic), plant gardens, create Green Teams, and eliminate disposable dishes. While this movement now models diversity and pluralism, cornerstones of its recent growth and success, this was not always the case. The growth of the modern Jewish environmental movement is a story of an idea moving from the edges of a culture to take root in the mainstream.