The Truth of Lists

Lists. Some of us love them and some of us hate them. We joke that it is good that Leviticus, the grand biblical book of lists, is read in the summertime when no one goes to shul anyway. And yet we could not live without lists: invitation lists, packing lists, shopping lists, laundry lists, to-do lists, top ten, ingredients, deposits, check lists, medical chart, punch list...

In my reading about homes in New England, I stumbled across whole books that were simply estate lists, that is, documents that listed the contents of a person's possessions (their land, home and all that was in it) at the time of death.

And what was so remarkable about that is that for the most part, the list ran to 2-3 pages.

That's it. After a lifetime of living, producing, consuming, accumulating, most of these good folks who lived what would have been considered comfortable lives had very few possessions.

Which put in high relief for me the mishnah which tells us that in addition to the statutory pilgrimages, people would go to the Temple for four reasons: (1) to mourn a death (2) to ask God for the recovery of a loved one who was ill (3) to be readmitted to their community after being cast out and (4) if they lost something.

In the context of the deep and wrenching sense of loss and the aching desire for wholeness that the other three situations evoke, I was always struck with how mundane and perhaps even crass the fourth reason was. Temple as Lost and Found? Temple as the place where you would stand and declare: "I lost my keys - if you find them please return them to..."

But of course, I was assuming possessions were a dime a dozen. I imagine that for some of us, the contents of our coat closet would fill at least half a dozen pages. Never mind the stuff we need to store off-site in those rental storage units.

When you read the inventories of New England households, however, you realize how precious, and indeed how distinctive, each item was. Each item was made by hand and had the unique markings of the peculiar ways the user handled it. Chips and dents and craftsmen's markings. No factory-built sameness.

When my in-laws moved to Israel 30+ years ago, they took with them much of their American life, including their furniture. They were a modest family living a modest life in a modest home. And yet when they got to Beer Sheva, they realized that their modest American life and modest American holdings were massive in contrast to the modest southern Israeli life.

All of which is to say, we have so much stuff. Too much stuff. Imagine if our possessions had to all be listed in an estate account. How many pages would that take? How long would it take to assemble the list? Imagine if that list were to be published - for estate accounts are most often public documents. What would it say about us?

And the biggest kicker is: it is hard to say that we are richer or happier today for all of our possessions than they were in American colonial times, or in the times of ancient Israel.

Lightning Bug Enchantment

Two years ago, you could count the flashes of the lightning bugs in my yard one by one, out loud, sipping tea between each count, and still not miss a beat. The display was frighteningly paltry, and not just at my house but throughout the neighborhood. I was fearful that somehow we had managed to massacre this crepuscular army of lit-up beetle bottoms.

But this year, they have rebounded.

The very best view of this blessed renewal can be found just a few doors down the street, where the fall of the land flattens out into a little creek, and opens onto a hidden pond in my neighbor's side yard. It must be the combination of creek, pond, meadow-like lawn and arc of tall trees surrounding it all, for evening time hosts literally thousands and thousands of fireflies lighting up the ground, the bushes, the treetops, the air. The beauty of the incessant, urgent flickering is heightened by the accompanying absolute silence of the display.

We street-side visitors can see our neighbor's light-show best through a break in the hedge, which frames the staging of this fairy display through an enchanted gateway. The scene is precisely what I would paint on the cover of a child's book of bedtime poems (assuming I could paint). We are standing on this side of reality, close enough to watch the enchantment in awe, but knowing that we stand beside a threshold that we cannot cross.

Beauty and light, charm and hope, seeking and finding can be found there, on the other side, just beyond our reach. Each day is filled with preparation, anticipation, for the wonders, the adventures, the promises of the evening to come.

We do not fully inhabit that world. It is too sweet, too lovely, too light for us. But we can peer into it there, and imagine it from here, the way we can peer into the Garden of Eden, and seek to recapture it, and recreate it, as best we can.

How to Respond?

I came out of the post office the other day to find three apparently kind and concerned people worrying over the fate of a small dog barking away inside a parked car. The driver's window was open a crack, the day was hot though not impossible, the car was no doubt steamy, and the dog seemed unhappy about his confinement, though frisky and not in distress.

These kind people were quite anxious about the fate of this dog, were ruminating about the callous and reckless nature of its owner, had called 9-1-1 and could not pull themselves away from this potential small tragedy unfolding until it was somehow resolved.

But here's the thing that got me: two of them were sitting all the while in SUV's with their motors running and the air conditioning on. (I am rather certain about that because they too had their driver's side windows open just a crack to allow them to talk to one another.)

Species are dying, the ocean are being over-fished and oxygen-starved, natural habitats that are home for millions of animals are being cut down and these kind folks are spending their time, their money and their CO2 chits on one small dog.

Imagine how the world would be if they spent those personal, monetary and energy resources on saving the world, or just one region of it, or just one species, or just one regulation or law or bill that worked to improve the ways we lived.

I am glad someone was looking out for this little dog. But we need them to work just as hard, indeed harder, looking out for the world. Perhaps instead of using the Big Blue as the iconic photo of the earth we needed to save, we should mold the planet into the shape of a dog enclosed in a case of metal and glass baking in the sun with the temperature rising.

Perhaps that will get the message across.

Dive - Living Off America’s Waste

"Dive" sounds like a film I want to see.

Film creator Jeremy Seifert tells us that "Every year in the United States, we throw away 96 billion pounds of food. That’s 263 million pounds a day, 11 million pounds an hour, 3,000 pounds per second!"

Jeremy should know. He regularly feeds his family by diving into the trash heaps behind supermarkets and surfacing with perfectly edible, healthy, and unexpired food. (I hope he finds soap and clothes detergent there as well.)

In a world where millions go hungry and thousands die each day from malnutrition, to throw this food away is both a waste and a tragedy. I would bet that just miles, or even blocks, away, families are eating a diet of potato chips, pastries and sodas when they could have spinach, eggs, cheese and vegetables.

The film is being released July 19 on iTunes and Netflix. Check it out

Planting Oak

Last fall, the oak trees of Maryland yielded a bumper crop of acorns. In early October, I gathered up handfuls from out Towson way, hoping to plant them somewhere in my yard.



The street behind us has oak; one or two houses around my neighborhood has oak; but we don't have any oak. I was hoping that soon we would.

The internet told me that acorns need 1000 hours of cool weather to "ripen," so that I should put them in the refrigerator in plastic bags along with a bit of moist dirt and keep them there throughout the winter.

Since we would be turning off our fridge for the five months we were to be away, I approached my mother, who graciously acceded to the honor of incubating our dirt.

When we returned from our sabbatical, I thanked my mother, reclaimed my slumbering acorns and transferred them to small flower pots with soil from my crude but functional compost heap. Eight acorns all told. Remarkably, four have sprouted.

It takes them a while to get started, and once they do, they seem to grow in a most peculiar way. It is as if they first create a needle with an eye at the end of it through which they thread their outcropping of green. Then, they burst forth.




I will keep the saplings in larger and larger pots on my porch until they are ready to brave the elements on their own, and until I build an enclosure that will protect them from the deer.

From what I have read, an oak-and-poplar forest should be just fine.

And if someone can tell me what kind of oak these are, I would be most grateful.

The Harmony of Sentiments

The first major book that Adam Smith wrote was not The Wealth of Nations but The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Although I have just begun it (one of my summer goals is to read it all), I needed to get no further than Part 1, Section 1, Paragraph 1 to be amazed, and to imagine what our marketplace might look like if the book's opening words were the first words studied in business school, and the first words that opened all corporate board meetings:

"How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it."

"To feel much for others and little for ourselves... to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent, affections constitutes the perfection of human nature, and can alone produce among mankind that harmony of sentiments and passions in which consists their whole grace and propriety." (Part 1, Section 1, Paragraph 5)

If that is the moral underpinning of the theory of The Wealth of Nations, if that is what could guide our lending and borrowing and building, our buying and selling, instead of the excessive interest in self, imagine what a world it would be!

The Necessity of Composting

April 18, 1935, Stratford, Texas.



In the midst of our heartland, in the midst of our Great Depression, America suffered one of its most devastating environmental, economic and human losses. The Dust Bowl ruined 50 million acres of what had been fertile, verdant grassland. Over 850,000,000 tons of topsoil were lost in 1935 alone. The systematic plowing under of the prairie sod destroyed an ecosystem that had developed over tens of thousands of years, and loosened billions of tons of topsoil so that, in the drought, it simply dried up and blew away.

By 1940, over 2 million people were displaced. Having lost farms, livelihood and sometimes children to the ever-present dirt, they abandoned their homes, becoming a wave of "environmental refugees".

And the greatest tragedy was that it was all human-induced, predictable and avoidable.

Today, we are witnessing something similar, and equally avoidable in the very same place.

In his 2007 book called "dirt: the erosion of civilizations," David Montgomery reminds us of what we know but often ignore: the essence of life resides in dirt. Dirt is the earth's placenta, the womb that incubates the life that sustains us. It needs constant refreshment to remain fertile and productive.

No amount of sunshine, no amount of water, no amount of hard work or money can sustain our civilization if we don't have good dirt for our plants and trees and produce to grow in.

I am beginning to think that we are living through a second, mostly invisible Dust Bowl. That is, the riches of the mid-west soil are being shipped to us in east and around the world in the form of food, whose waste - from our kitchens and restaurants and stores - is then being dumped in our landfills. This one-way process of food to trash is siphoning off the best of our mid-country's land just like the winds and drought did in the 1930's. Only this time, we can't see it. (And we are not even talking about the farmers that have been displaced in the name of efficiency and technological development.)

True, some of us compost, a little. But mostly we are treating composting as a gentleman's leisure, something to do if we garden and want enriched soil to make our geraniums bright.

But composting is serious business. It is part of the essential cycle of life, giving back to the soil the good stuff that helps it grow the food we eat. We should compost not so that we will have lovely decorative gardens but so that the earth doesn't lose the goodness it so desperately needs, the goodness it loaned us in the guise of food but that it must get back in the form of organic waste.

What if, I am wondering... instead of making all those chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and shipping them cross state lines to artificially boost this year's harvest, while damaging the soil for next year's... what if we systematically collected our compost, much of which is the leftovers from the harvest that came from the mid-west, and haul it back to the mid-west (and, eventually, to the increasing local farms we hope to create and support) so the farmers could spread it on their fields and return it to whence it came? An added bonus would be for us to use it to power the very trucks that would haul the compost.

Right now, in many places, including most synagogues, half our garbage is organic. Instead of throwing it into a dead-end pit, what if we returned it to its source, and used it for the very purpose nature intended, to replenish the goodness of our fields.

So instead of contributing to the invisible Dust Bowl, we become part of the re-greening of the plains.

I am thinking that in 20 years or so, as part of the return-to-the-farm movement we are witnessing today, we will all have weekly municipal organic waste pick-up, just like we have recycling and garbage pick up today. Our fields will be healthier, our food will be healthier and our bodies will be healthier.

God's Keychain

“See all the keys that God possesses!"

God has the key to life, as it says: "... and God opened Leah's womb"

(Genesis 29:31).

God has the key to rain, as it says: "... and God will open for you the storehouse of heaven" (Deuteronomy 28:12).

God as the key to livelihood, as it says, “You open Your hand and lovingly satisfy every living thing.”

(from the 8th century Letters of Rabbi Akiva)

This ancient tradition imagines that God is the Grand Celestial Key-Keeper, the One who oversees life's storehouses of goods and the gates that keep them secure. Day in and day out, God opens and closes this door and that: now the one to the heavenly pool that falls as rain, now the one to the rays of energy that fall as sunlight, now the one to the pulse of air that rises and falls as breath.

There are times these doors must be open and times they must be closed.

This omer season between Passover and Shavuot, my family borrowed this image of a celestial key chain and made our own "omer counter" (a mnemonic device that helps us keep count of the days as they pass) using "orphaned" keys, that is, keys that no longer have doors of their own, keys whose original locks and treasures and secrets have evaporated, been lost, destroyed or forgotten.



So we have appropriated these keys, salvaging their power to open and close doors of matter and recasting them as keys that manage the drama of time.

The colorful strand that grew before us, the daily discipline of adding a-key-a-day, helped to remind us that each day opens to us a new door. At night, upon counting, we would hang a new key. The key of the previous day was spent. It had been used - wisely or not, for better or worse - seeking the right lock to the choices, the experiences, the deeds of that day.

At night, the heir of a new day, new key was chosen, slipped onto the chain, and let loose to go in search of its chosen door. We need so many keys.

Perhaps what really happens when the celestial Door of Doors opens for a moment at midnight tonight, on Shavuot (as the mystics tell us), is that God rains down upon us the gift of a brand new batch of keys.




(top photo: a gaggle of keys bearing lifetimes of stories, presented to me by a dear group of friends. bottom photo: our omer counter with 48 keys))

Collaborative Consumption

Collaborative Consumption is an intriguing idea. It is based on the realization that many of us have too much and that perhaps we can put that excess to work.

For example, if I have a drill that I rarely use, perhaps I could rent it to you for when you rarely need it. Or perhaps I work at home and have a car that sits idle for most of the week. And perhaps you have no car but only need a car for discrete times of the day. I could, if I were entrepreneurial, create a web presence to publicize these excesses, and invite you to rent my drill or my car.

Friends do this all the time. Now this style of resource-sharing is becoming big business - person by person on a global scale. These peer-to-peer enterprises are popping up all over the place and being aggregated and promoted on dozens of websites. It is a groundswell of a movement that seeks to use well the dormant resources we already have. And that is very good.

(It also, as the authors of the book of the same name tell us, both assumes and builds the social capital of trust. None of this would happen if we did not have a propensity to trust one another and these transactions would not continue without both parties honoring that trust. The track record of collaborative consumption transactions so far has been remarkably good. I don't know how the insurance companies are going to handle this, though. And a quick search on Google doesn't seem to indicate any problems yet - but I would bet that sooner or later insurance companies will try to use this to jack up rates and make even more money. But then, again, maybe I am just jaded.)

But there is another point I wanted to make. While the upside of all this is that we are becoming better at using the excess "resources" we have, perhaps this peer-to-peer movement can help us rethink how we create and come by those excess "resources" in the first place.

Today, most of us, including me - I am sad to say - tend to build, buy and own for maximum need. So we build houses for the biggest family and crowds we imagine hosting; we buy plates and silverware and cups and mugs and kitchen utensils for the maximum kind of entertaining we imagine doing; we buy wardrobes and shoes and handbags for the maximum kind of adventures we imagine having.

Yet, while we expend - in aggregate - millions or billions of dollars warehousing stuff we rarely use, millions of people right here in America - never mind around the world - walk around daily in a state of need. (And then of course there are the environmental costs we incur in having mined, manufactured, packaged, transported, and marketed these items that we hardly ever use. Let's not even talk about off-site storage units for the moment.)

I remember reading about how, years ago, people who attended weddings and holiday celebrations would bring their own utensils, knowing that the host family did not have service for the hordes invited. And favorite dresses or purses would be borrowed for women did not have wardrobes sufficient to cover every celebrated adventure that came their way. And Dagwood and Herb are forever borrowing tools from each other.

So what if, in addition to using well the excess that we have, which is wonderful, we also work on building a world that has less excess, less waste and greater equity?

It seems to me that this is the kind of world that the laws of shemittah, pe'ah, and tzedek (equity) were meant to build.

In a hollowed out trunk, on a quiet residential street in the fair town of Cambridge, just off the hurly-burly rush of Massachusetts Avenue, you can find this whimsical neighborhood treasure: Pooh's Reading Place.

It was conjured up by the shared craftsmanship of a small band of locals for the delight of those who happen by. Throughout the year, in every season, a small grey box sits in the trunk's rough-hewn recess, holding children's books in a take-one-give-one swap. In fair weather, Pooh himself makes an appearance.

We were lucky enough to find Pooh in residence the other day as we wandered the neighborhood on the holiday weekend.

It is one of those charming pleasures of city life: an anonymous gift that touches the soul of unsuspecting passersby; a simple hollow creating a portal to the enchanted realm of the 100 Aker Wood; a tender blending of nature and culture, adult and child, age and eternity, fantasy and reality.

In a pay-it-forward fashion, I am wondering what can we do in our neck of the woods?