Every year around this time I begin to look forward to the holiday season here in America: spending Thanksgiving with my family, the familiar sounds of ubiquitous holiday tunes on the radio, the crispness in the air after the fresh snow. As I reflect on recent news, social trends, and the thought of admired leaders in justice and Judaism, the spirit and reality of consumerism gives me pause. Perhaps this feeling of ownership the holiday season brings out in us is not the ideal we, as religious people and thinkers, should strive for.
Austrian-born “>Gandhi opposed the imposition of a Jewish state in Palestine. While his rationale was not fully stated, it appears that he was concerned that the British would use this issue in order to reestablish their colonial power in the region. “>letter dated February 24, 1939, Buber respectfully but fiercely critiqued Gandhi for deeply misunderstanding and opposing the Jewish struggle for survival, security, and peace: “Jews are being persecuted, robbed, maltreated, tortured, murdered. And you, Mahatma Gandhi, say that their position in the country where they suffer all this is an exact parallel to the position of Indians in South Africa at the time you inaugurated your famous ‘Force of Truth’ or ‘Strength of the Soul’ (Satyagraha) campaign.” In this letter, explaining why Gandhi misunderstood the Jewish yearning for national sovereignty, Buber made a broader ideological point: “It seems to me that G-d does not give any one portion of the earth away so that its owner may say, as G-d does in the Holy Scriptures: ‘Mine is the land.’ Even to the conqueror who has settled on it, the conquered land is, in my opinion, only loaned – and God waits to see what he will make of it.” Buber challenged Gandhi’s claim that the land should merely be reserved for the surrounding Arabs, excluding a Jewish presence, and explained that even though the Jews have a right to live on the land, no human has an absolute claim to land ownership. We are all merely temporary residents.
This point, that while we have clear property and land rights we must at the same time value human dignity and ethics over the pleasures of absolute physical ownership, is expressed time and time again in Jewish thought. One’s body is merely a temporary attachment that one must be prepared to separate from, as we see from Rabban Gamliel’s actions in this truly humbling talmudic passage: “It used to be that funeral expenses were harder for the relatives of the deceased than the death itself. This was to the extent that the relatives of the dead would abandon the body and run away from it. Until Rabban Gamliel treated himself disrespectfully, being buried in cotton garments. The people followed him, adopting the practice of being buried in cotton garments” (Moed Katan 27b).
In contemporary society, property rights have been perverted to the status of a cult. The dangerous spirit of Ayn Rand capitalism has taken hold, the political culture has become more elite, and the clamoring for gun ownership and gun rights to protect property has become a religion for some. During the 1980s, credit rules were eased, and credit cards flooded America, leading to a frenzy of consumer spending at shopping malls. (The coining of the term “shopaholic” in 1983 attests to this trend.) “>Credit card debt peaked at $976 billion just before the Great Recession in 2008. In April 2012, it stood at $931 billion, nearly $8,000 per household. The period before the December holidays has become particularly associated with rampant consumerism.
The Walmart chain, with its emphasis on low prices, has had several notorious episodes illustrating what happens when people value the accumulation of consumer goods over any other value system. In 2008, “> a woman pepper sprayed about 20 people as videogames were being put out for purchase. A detective stated: “Once the wrapping came off the pallets, there was total pandemonium.” A customer noted that people began pulling the plastic off the pallets themselves, and then people began “screaming, pulling and pushing each other, and then the whole area filled up with pepper spray.” The next day, in Little Rock, Arkansas, video footage attests that “>Uri L'Tzedek, the Senior Rabbi at Kehilath Israel, and is the author of ““>top 50 rabbis in America!”
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