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By Erin Beser<\/p>\nBy Erin Beser<\/p>\n
Despite the near-constant worry over, well, nearly everything, but especially our family\u2019s finances, my mother always made sure my brother and I had brand-new outfits on Rosh Hashanah. The shopping for the outfits was one major way my mother showed love. I have strong, happy memories of being with her in the changing room of bargain basements like Ross or T.J. Maxx. I never felt so loved or taken care of in my whole life as when she helped me assess each item and took the \u201cyes\u201d pile to the cash register.<\/p>\n
This year, my mother died. She declined rapidly with a type of dementia that robbed her first of the ability to speak and then of the ability to do pretty much everything else. This Rosh Hashanah, I will still be in the traditional year of Jewish mourning mandated by the Biblical commandment to honor your mother and father.<\/p>\n
And so buying my own children new outfits to mark the new year might make a fitting tribute. But instead, my family and I are continuing a Rosh Hashanah tradition of our own, taking on a new habit meant to bring us closer together and put our values into practice.<\/p>\n
And this year we are committing to buying, if not nothing at all, then far, far less.
My family lives now, as we have for the last three years, in the Main Line suburbs of Philadelphia. We are some of the luckiest people in the world. We own our own home and it has a basement and a sunroom and a backyard and lots of closets. And it is full of stuff. So much stuff.<\/p>\n
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Excessive shopping can provide a momentary thrill. (Photo credit: Getty Images via JTA)<\/p>\n
Where does it all even come from? You know how it is. One-click shopping when the mood strikes. Instagram ads for that perfect item. Trips to Target and Whole Foods with my kids would be cheaper if I hired a babysitter with the tax it feels like I have to pay to get them in and out of the store.<\/p>\n
Sometimes out of nowhere my son will scream, \u201cI want something new!\u201d He\u2019s right.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I just want to scream it, too. It\u2019s an itchy and uncomfortable feeling \u2014 stoked constantly by social media \u2014 and it is soothed almost immediately by shopping.<\/p>\n
And yet as I have learned in my grief, the relief is only temporary. After it passes, I am still holding all of the bags, of my grief, my impulsiveness, my worry, my feelings that I want to be enough just as I am \u2014\u00a0and of the fast-fashion, impulse purchases I\u2019ve accumulated along the way.<\/p>\n
The High Holidays are an ideal time to turn intentions into plans. We are literally commanded to just show up, to stand before God and our community and take account, not of what we\u2019ve spent, but of how we\u2019ve spent our days. Not of what we own, but of who we are. We pray and sing in community and ask God for the one thing money cannot ever buy: more time.<\/p>\n
A few years ago, my husband, who is a rabbi, gave up eating meat in honor of the Shemitah year (the year after seven that we let the earth lie fallow), in a sermon on Rosh Hashanah in front of his whole congregation. I like eating meat, by the way. But he hasn\u2019t gone back and neither have our children. Last year, we zeroed out the daily, casual usage of screens, with no TV, no video games, no iPad or phone, nothing except the occasional family movie as a very rare treat. To say it has been life-changing is an understatement.<\/p>\n
Our family\u2019s new plan has three parts. First, we\u2019re adding \u201creduce\u201d and \u201creuse\u201d to our recycling practices. We will articulate the difference between needs and wants and save our wants for special occasions like birthdays and Chanukah. I\u2019m not canceling Chanukah, because I am not a monster. We\u2019ll just slow ourselves down to really reflect on what we need before we buy. And we\u2019ll demonstrate some degree of vulnerability to ask our community first if they have something we\u2019re looking for \u2014\u00a0and give back when, as we hope, our community reciprocates.<\/p>\n
Second, we\u2019ll seek out wisdom from our rich tradition. Jewish sources offer guidance, values and morals on the balance between materialism and meaningful choices. The rabbis themselves wrote blessings for new clothes. They knew how awesome it feels to get something new. But these sources will also give us the story we need to be telling ourselves about who we are and what we are meant to do on this earth with our limited time, money and energy \u2014\u00a0and while we have a lot to learn, we\u2019re pretty sure no answer will be to go shopping.<\/p>\n
And third, I\u2019m going to take a hard look at the role Jewish women play in American consumer culture (and the impact American consumer culture has had on the identity of Jewish women). Did my mom and her working-class mother of immigrant parents even stand a chance? Our people came from Eastern Europe with nothing and made it in America, to the land of opportunity. Why shouldn\u2019t they take their hard-won affluence to Loehmann\u2019s? I\u2019m going to speak to American Jewish historians and ask them: How do we create a cultural legacy for Jewish women that isn\u2019t one of materialistic, spoiled princesses; or the opposite, that being a woman fundamentally means you are never enough as you are and true personal satisfaction is just one purchase away?<\/p>\n
This won\u2019t be easy. Our culture is against us, and the memory of my mother in that dressing room is strong. In fact, one of the first indicators of my mother\u2019s mental decline was that she would buy clothing in wildly wrong sizes for her grandchildren. After she died, my daughter, now 5, found a gymnastics outfit with tags on it in her closet, brand new and still a bit too large for her. \u201cWho bought this for me?\u201d she asked. Even from the grave, Savta is still spoiling us with new things.<\/p>\n
I inherited this love language from my mother, of shopping for the perfect item to lift the mood or brighten the day of the people I love. And I don\u2019t want to forget it. But I want my children to speak other languages, too, ones drawn from the values of their faith, ones that fight for the planet they will need to survive, and ones still forming in my heart and theirs.<\/p>\n
I want them to hear love in many different ways, the ways we show up for each other as a family and let others in our community show up for us; the ways we lavish attention and time as the real present; the ways we slow down for each other and not try to occupy or fill our days, but to treasure and savor them. I think one day, when I\u2019m gone, I hope they remember me for that.<\/p>\n
And until then, I will embrace the rhythm of Rosh Hashanah and the way that the Jewish calendar invites us to put down all of the bags we\u2019ve been carrying, even if they\u2019re just from T.J. Maxx, and approach God, our communities and ourselves, just as we already are.<\/p>\n
Erin Beser is an educator who teaches Jewish studies at the Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy and is the founder and CEO of Adoughma Dough Play Events, an educational initiative working to bring dough and sensory play into Jewish educational and communal spaces. She lives with her family on Philadelphia\u2019s Main Line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Erin Beser Despite the near-constant worry over, well, nearly everything, but especially our family\u2019s finances, my mother…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":232150,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5132],"tags":[5229,1448,2830,1311,125123,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-232149","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-philadelphia","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-pa","10":"tag-pennsylvania","11":"tag-philadelphia","12":"tag-rosh-hashanah","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-united-states-of-america","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","17":"tag-us","18":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115215862698450293","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232149"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232149\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}