Passover Homespun

There is something different about Passover this year, besides its confluence with Birkat Hahammah, that exciting once-in-28-years celebration. That is the way of holidays, after all. While they stay the same year after year, we don't. Therefore, we experience them differently each year. If we pay attention to how we see them, and feel about them, and react to them each year, we can learn a lot about ourselves, where we are in our evolution of values, choices and life.

So it is for me this Passover. These past three years of living deeply aware of the impression, the footprint, the impact my life leaves on our physical world has made me judge my lifestyle differently. This is not, and never has been, am "I'm okay, you're okay" world. We each live in each other's space whethere we like it and acknowledge it or not. My waste is your legacy.

Which has taught me two things:

1) I must have you in mind as I live my life. That is, I must live intentionally with the awareness of your presence and how what I do affects you.

2) To live so intentionally is to live more meaningfully, more fully, more profoundly.

In a way, I am never alone. The community, the purposeful intertwining of lives that we all crave, is consciously part of my everyday life.

As a committed Jew, this has always been that way for me: "All Jews are related and responsible one for the other," we say and teach our children. So too, the mezuzah is to me like a dot in the connect-the-dots puzzles we did as kids. Each mezuzah is a stopping point along that invisible line that connects us all, so that all Jews can seek home and refuge in a strange place simply by looking for the place with the mezuzah.

But this new heightened awareness is an extension of that, a filling out of that to include all people, all nature, all creation. So when I get up and turn on the shower, or rip the plastic off my dry-cleaned dress or microwave my breakfast, all of this is laden with an awareness of the ethic I am living. Every act I take, every act we each take, leaves a trail, and therefore is a witness to our values and our care for each other.

In the beginning, as we move into this realm of greater self-in-place/self-and-other awareness, we feel a bit overwhelmed. On the one hand, we don't want to be so self-conscious about our habits and our deeds. Or what they say or what they mean. We just want to do them.

On the other, we already construct our lives based on the audience and reception of the other. I do what I do in part, and make the choices I make in part, because I worry about what you will say and think about me. That awareness guides us in the clothes we buy, the coffee we drink, the cell phones we carry, the papers we read. What I think you will think of me by what I look like and what I consume affects so much of what I do, even in the privacy of my own home. Which is to say, we already live with the burden of the presence of the other in our lives. Why not just extend that awareness beyond what it does for me to what it also does for you?

Which brings me back to this Passover. Walking down the supermarket aisles, looking at the profusion of hametz look-alike products, seeing all the did-it-for-you prepared foods, never mind the extraordinary expense we are all burdened with in buying all that stuff, I cannot help but believe we have strayed from one of the premier lessons of Passover: simplicity. On Passover, hametz/leaven, is the symbol of too-muchness. It is the symbol of bloatedness, the things of our lives that are more than is necessary. It is a time when we are to simplify, take only what we need, only what we can carry.

On Passover, my kitchen reverts back to the essentials: fresh and frozen raw fruits and vegetables (I will be more aware this year about what is seasonal and what is not); eggs; oil; matzah meal; spices; cheese. I will do more cooking the week of this holiday than I do in over a month during the rest of the year. And despite the amount of eggs and oil I use, this week will probably produce some of the healthiest food to come out of my kitchen.

We make homemade almost everything – from soups to French fries to desserts. Our haggadot too are becoming more homespun. So too our matzah covers, seder pillows, games. My buying appetite, never large, is getting smaller. Not just this week but throughout the year. I can hardly imagine something I need that I do not already have, in some form or fashion. That is where I am this year in life. It is this simple message of our return to Passover each year, that we learn more about what each of us truly needs, what is truly our hametz. Changing over our kitchens and doing more with less - or different things - than we have during the year opens our eyes to who we are and what we really need.

I am learning that for me, this year, I don't need much. Rather, I cherish the homespun, the stuff that bears the earnest work of others, the stuff that leaves a smaller footprint, the stuff that conveys and inspires an interesting story, the stuff that brings people closer together, and the stuff that makes me worthier of sharing this world with my family, my community and you.

What will drive tomorrow's economy?

Here is my dilemma:

Today's economic engine is fired by stuff. It is the production, manufacturing, and distribution of stuff that keeps our marketplace humming. That is what this economic downturn is reminding us. When we stop buying, the economy starts tanking. But to buy more stuff degrades the environment. More stuff equals more mining, more manufacturing, more housing, more land development, more stores, more driving, more shopping, more throwing away, more waste.

To save the economy, then, we have to buy more stuff. To buy more stuff, though, is to harm our world.

Which forces the question: How do we break this cycle? If we wish to save the environment, ourselves, and our finances, what will drive tomorrow's economy?

There seem to be two possible solutions: (1) either we should make stuff more-efficiently, ie, more sustainably; or (2) we should build an economy not based on stuff. Or both.

Few of us want to envision a future built on "less." We live in a world that imagines that more is more, more is better. Almost everyone, from the most developed lands to the least 'emerging markets,' want more. And how can we say no to that? It would be both mean-spirited and fruitless for us Americans, who are but 5% of the world's population and yet consume 25% of the world's resources, to tell others they cannot aspire to the quality of life that we live here.

In this vision, then, if world consumption grew to match US consumption, we would need multiple earths to meet that demand. Since we don't carry around extra earths in our pockets, we will have to think of something else.

One suggestion is to make more stuff than we do now in better ways. Efficiency and recycling, cradle-to-cradle manufacturing, is one suggested solution. In this view, we dare to imagine that no matter how many of us there are, and no matter how big our appetites, if we can devise cyclical, sustainable, waste-free ways of manufacturing and consuming, all will be well. Done right, there will be enough money and resources for all.

I do not doubt that efficiency is a critical and necessary piece of the puzzle. Doing more with less is almost always advisable. And we know it is achievable to some extent. Years ago, California instituted energy efficiency procedures. In response, over the past 30 years, its energy consumption per capita has plateaued, remaining flat at just under 8,000 kwh per person, while the US average per capita usage has soared to 12,000 kwh. At the same time, California's average per capita GDP has surpassed the US average. (source: California Energy Commission; via Congressman Bartlett's power point).

And yet the question remains: is this sufficient?

First, there is the challenge by some that GDP is not an appropriate measure of a country's health, indeed that a country's quality of life can be sinking even as the economic indicators are rising . (For more information on this, and the alternative measure of GPI, check out Redefining Progress at www.rprogress.org. I will write more on this in another entry.) To be fair, the cradle-to-cradle view leans more to GPI than GDP. Still, is that enough?

Second, no matter how efficiently we live, no matter how creatively we stretch the natural laws of the earth's carrying capacity, we will eventually bump up against its limits, and be constrained by them.

And third, even if there were no natural limits to expansion and growth, are there not spiritual limits? Don't we need to ask at some point: Are we there yet? Isn't this enough? One quick example: over the last 30 years, America's average house doubled in size. Doubled. What was acceptable and sufficient, and perhaps even comfortable thirty years ago, is small and tight and unacceptable today. Yet today's households - the number of people living in these houses - are smaller. One report says: "As household size has decreased, the floor area per capita has increased by more than a factor of 3, from 286 square feet per capita in 1950 to 847 square feet per capita in 2000."

Of course, this trend may be temporarily reversing itself during this recession, as family and friends move in with family and friends. But that may be just the point: larger houses, representing our overall bloated consumer habits, didn't make us happier. In fact, one could argue that because we pursued more than we needed, we ended up with less than we had. And as the AIG bonus fiasco has shown us, those at the very top of the mess have developed a tin ear to the ethics of money. Do we really want people running our economy who only or mostly think of money and short-term profit, regardless of risk, rectitude, righteousness or social justice?

According to some happiness or satisfaction surveys, even before this recent economic downturn, Americans were no happier than we were decades ago (and perhaps a little less so). Nor are we the most satisfied nation on the planet.

Spiritually, then, even if we could have ever more, without cease, is that what we would want? Is that what would make us happy? Is that what our purpose in life is?

Once we pass a threshold of comfort, health and viability, how much do we need? At what point do we say, enough?

Which takes us back to our question: what will fire the enginen of our economy if not stuff?
Can we build another model?

Can it be driven by the services we provide one another: teaching, nursing, protecting, research, companionship, repairing, fixing, developing, curing, entertaining, transporting, etc. instead of making unnecessary stuff?

It is reported that Americans spend $2.6 billion on wrapping paper a year. What if we put our gifts in reusable bags (saving both the earth and our money) and instead, took the savings and with it, renovated our schools, and created community gardens, retrofitted old factories into green manufacturers, and increased and improved our social work, police and home aide work force?

Stuff will continue to be made to the extent that all these services, and our needs, require it. But wouldn't it be better if we didn't make stuff just so we can make a living but rather made a living with a minimum of unnecessary stuff. A quote in the Baltimore Sun business section on Tuesday, March 17, page 10, talking about the hard times an up-scale clothing store is going through, reads: "You have to try and encourage a 'wants'-based shopper in America and give people a reason to go out and make that purchase."

Is that really what we want to do? Waste our money on things we don't need so it can go to who-knows-where, instead of using that same money to do all the things we as a society say we need to do but can't afford? At what price is such a "want-based" society? What does it cost us in children who go to bed hungry, families without support systems and an environment that continues to degrade?

What would a healthy society, and a healthy economy, not based on wants and stuff really look like? I would love to know the answer.

We need to see this recession as a game-changer. It is not just something we need to get through so we can return to the good old days. We need to use this crisis to see the underlying ills that brought it on and build a new, renewable, economic model, to heal the earth, protect our bodies and enrich our souls.

Then, all the pain we are all going through will have been worth it.