Despite the near-constant worry over, well, nearly everything, but especially our family’s 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 TJ 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 “yes” pile to the cash register.
This year, my mother died. She declined rapidly with a type of dementia that robbed her first of the ability to speak and then after 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.
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. 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.
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.
Sometimes out of nowhere my son will scream, “I want something new!” He’s right. Sometimes I just want to scream it, too. It’s an itchy and uncomfortable feeling — stoked constantly by social media — and it is soothed almost immediately by shopping.
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 — and of the fast-fashion, impulse purchases I’ve accumulated along the way.
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’ve spent, but of how we’ve 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.
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’t gone back and neither have our children. Last year, we zeroed out the daily, casual usage of screens: 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.
Our family’s new plan has three parts. First, we’re adding “reduce” and “reuse” to our recycling practices. We will articulate the difference between needs and wants and save our wants for special occasions like birthdays and Hanukkah. I’m not canceling Hanukkah, because I am not a monster. We’ll just slow ourselves down to really reflect on what we need before we buy. And we’ll demonstrate some degree of vulnerability to ask our community first if they have something we’re looking for — and give back when, as we hope, our community reciprocates.
Second, we’ll 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 — and while we have a lot to learn, we’re pretty sure no answer will be to go shopping.
And third, I’m 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’t they take their hard-won affluence to Loehmann’s? I’m going to speak to American Jewish historians and ask them: How do we create a cultural legacy for Jewish women that isn’t 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?
This won’t 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’s 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. “Who bought this for me?” she asked. Even from the grave, Savta is still spoiling us with new things.
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’t 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. 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’m gone, I hope they remember me for that.
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’ve been carrying, even if they’re just from TJ Maxx, and approach God, our communities and ourselves, just as we already are.
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