Rabbi Adam Allenberg

November 6, 2007

Shabbat Vayeitze 5768

          I’ve had the opportunity in my life to live all over the country and I’ve driven a great deal of it as well.  What I’m increasingly struck by are the number of companies that rent storage facilities.  I don’t recall seeing them as a kid or even as an adolescent.  Now when I travel, I see them everywhere.

          Even though the average American home has doubled in size since the 1950s, we don’t seem to have enough space for all of our stuff.  New York City , infamous for its expensive and petite spaces, has resorted to converting apartment buildings in Manhattan into a complex network of rental storage spaces.

          The name of one of the largest of these storage-for-rent companies just highlights the irony of the situation—it’s called Public Storage.  It is ironic because the storage is least of all public, as you have to pay to rent a private storage space.  And it takes over what could be public land and instead uses it to keep the excess that we “must keep.”

          Americans are the greatest consumers in the entire world.  We are the model of what a successful capitalist society looks like.  Living in a nation like ours means that we are constantly growing our economy, which, we are told is good for us.  A good economy means that more people are working.  More people working means more people making money.  More people making money means more people spending.  More people spending means our economy is healthy, which makes our dollar more valuable than someone else’s dollar, which means we can buy more stuff than they can.  Hence our current predicament.  The problem with our consumption is not just the consumption, it’s what we do with what we don’t use.

          Buying more leads, inevitably to two problematic consequences.  The first, that we never get rid of anything and therefore need more space to store all of our stuff.  This is the Storage-for-Rent problem.  A problem which only affluent societies know.  The second problem to our unrelenting buying power is that it means that much of what we buy becomes disposable.  I say that it becomes disposable because, while much of what we buy is meant to be disposed of—coffee cups and coffee cup cozies, the box that contains another box or container—the quality of our goods and the habits to which we have become accustomed lead us inevitably to throw things away.  When these things get thrown away, they end up in landfills.  These landfills, by the way, while they rot and degrade, are the number one source of methane gas in the United States .  Methane is 19 times stronger than CO2 at trapping heat within our atmosphere.  So it’s not just the cars on the road and the planes in the sky causing global warming, it’s our trash too.

          Recently on an edition of Marketplace on National Public Radio, reporter Sean Cole, decided to follow an average American family.  Who better to represent the average American family than the Simpsons.  The real Simpsons.  The Real Simpsons live about 25 miles outside of Los Angeles .  Dan, his wife Dena and their two daughters Anna and Christa and their son Micah, who is away at college in Hawaii .  They are a church-going family.  This family considers itself environmentally aware and conscious.  They collectively make choices which they believe will make less of a negative impact on the world.

          Though the family owns one small, four-dour sedan, they only put about 250 miles on the car each month.  Dan commutes to work by bus.  Dena walks to work.  Their home is under 1000 square feet.  This means that spend less on their heating and electric bills because there is less space to heat and light.  The most lavish expense in this family’s home is that they have a t.v. and dvd player in every room of the house.  They admit that they are quite reliant on their television.  If a t.v. set breaks, they replace it immediately.  The Simpsons eat out only about once a week and tend to eat at a local family Mexican restaurant or an In-n-Out Burger.

          If everyone in the world lived like the Simpsons, with their conservative (lower case “c”!) lifestyle, it would take 3 Earths to produce all of the resources that this kind of living consumes.  That seems like a lot, and it is.  When you compare it to the national average, you realize just how far our consumption has gone.  If everyone lived like the average American, it would take 6 Earths.  Six planet Earths to provide enough resources for every person to live like the average American.

          The way that we live our lives, as Americans, has gotten out of hand.  We have become so preoccupied with convenience and luxury that it is hard for us to see how we could possibly live or act differently.  And somewhere along the way, when asking if we could make or buy something, we stopped asking whether or not we should.

          I can’t stand in front of you tonight and quote a litany of Jewish teachings on over-consumption or choosing to live with less.  It’s just not something the Jewish people have had to deal with.  Thoughout most of our history, we simply had less.  I could make the argument that the light of the Chanukah menorah is a symbol of our great intuition as Jews to reuse and recycle what we have, but I would be twisting the story of one miracle to encourage another miracle altogether.  I wish that I could chastise us for committing the sin of gluttony, but that doesn’t belong to us either.

          I can think of many very good reasons for us as Jews to take it upon ourselves to begin to think and act differently, dramatically differently.  That living with less doesn’t mean living less.  One reason in particular should resound within our community with familiarity.  It has always inspired us to action, and my hope is that it will inspire us again to think and act differently.

          We were once slaves in the land of Egypt .  We consistently identify with the downtrodden and destitute.  When a cause requires rallying or when another group of people knows hardship, we expect to see our fellow Jews at the frontlines defending them.  Fighting for workers rights, for women’s rights, for the desegregation of our public schools and institutions, and many other noble causes which limit the ability of our fellow human beings to live a life of dignity.

          We Jews living in America now know an unprecedented freedom in our lives as a people, and yet we continue to stand up for those who have not.  We stand up for the poor, the orphaned, the disadvantaged and unrepresented.  We speak up for those who have no voice.  We pursue what is right and just at every turn, because if we, a stiff-necked and stubborn people, could be freed from bondage, then all human beings deserve freedom and a chance to live a life of health, happiness and dignity.

          A chance to live is what is precisely at stake.  The more we consume, the greater the drain on our natural resources, the harder our world will become.  The damage is already being set into motion.  The devastating strength of Hurricane Katrina.  The wildfires in Southern California only a few weeks ago, fed largely by the dry hills caused by drought.  Our massive consumption of natural resources and environmental negligence has begun to have dramatic and disastrous effects.  And in every society throughout history, when times get tough, when basic resources are depleted, it is the poor, the orphaned, the disadvantaged and unrepresented that suffer most.  As a Jew, this disturbs me deeply.

          As the air quality in our society worsens, it is our poorest communities who are hit the worst.  During Hurricane Katrina, it was the poor who were disproportionately displaced and whose lives were torn apart.  And we know of countless other examples like these.

          As a people, we are constantly concerned with both the immediate needs caused by a hardship and the causes that created that hardship.  We feed the hungry and fight the causes of hunger simultaneously.  A new era of hardship has begun.  As the world gets smaller and smaller, we see just how deeply we are connected to one another, how the effects of my actions reverberates around the globe.  As Jews, our concern for the poor and the disadvantaged must follow us home.  We must learn to live with less.  We must learn to value less.  Less is the new more.

          Each year at Yom Kippur we examine our actions from the past year and the way that we act from day-to-day.  We do this so that we might be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year of blessing as the gates of Heaven are closing.  The rabbis, perhaps as a pre-cursor to what we now called “Jewish Standard Time,” push that date back.  “Yom Kippur?  Oh that’s much too early!  How about HoShanah Rabbah at the end of Sukkot.”  Another teaching pushes it back still further to Chanukah, a mere few weeks away.  The lesson here should not be lost on the humor of the arrangement.  We are constantly growing and changing.  Nothing is ever final, save for death.

          As we enter the upcoming holiday season, let us be renewed in our strength and resolve to live differently.  As our culture of consumption pushes us to buy and have more, let us be countercultural, purposeful and intentional to buy less.  And may our lives of blessing continue to be just so, by insuring that those blessings are shared by all.

          Shabbat Shalom.