Paper or Plastic? A rumination for Pesach 5765

B"H

While purchasing my last chametz of the season, there at the register, I experienced a moment of deep revelation. The cashier asked, "paper or plastic?" and I felt violated. I didn't know what to say. My wife and I had stopped off on our return from a Vancouver Jewish Film Festival selection that took good time to ferret out, then combed a dozen aisles for the most appealing produce, an exciting new flavor of ice cream, and an egg brand suggesting both ethical farming and few blood spots. Having then assessed the quickest checkout line and the safest Visa card, I suppose I thought I was home free. Being called to choose between landfill liner or a fallen tree actually broke the camel's back. I had made all of the choices I could muster.

One has to thank G!d for small breakdowns like this, because they bring the unconsciously endured to light. Had I not felt absurdly oppressed by such a trivial question, I may not have realized it: On the eve of this Passover, I too am a slave, to choice.

A Chosen People obviously has particular interest in the matter of choice. It is no accident that most of today's Jews live and prosper within secular free-market democracies, economically and politically geared to maximize individual agency. As a consequence, old Tevya's generation has given way, not only to a massive tide of new "Jews by choice," but indeed to a time when all Jews are, practically speaking, Jewish because and in the way we individually choose to be. We now choose Jewish identity and affiliations in the same way we have come to choose life partners -- as an expression of each individual's peculiar devotion. Any couple blessed to have carried this kind of elective, true heart's love into a successful marriage can attest that the great privilege of choice brings also great responsibility to bear. It challenges old institutions in new ways, and it also makes possible the most profound actualization of the human soul.

This height of spiritual possibility is no sorry achievement. It is at least as great as the architectural marvel of Pharaoh's Pyramids; but its capacity to enslave casts a shadow at least as long. My first clue came in our beloved rebbetzin's happy announcement that her subscription to a weekly organic produce delivery was freeing her from ignorance and suspicion of many delicious vegetables. They are all commonly available in the market, but what stressed-out mother has the time or energy for adventures in the produce section? This local crop may taste funny, that exotic one may be genetically engineered -- and with ever more dizzying varieties to choose from, best to stick with what is familiar. In a culture where free choice of career, of partner, of lifestyle has produced unprecedented mobility, it is now necessary to import everybody's native crops to every place, at tremendous collective expense, in order to provide us each a sane path through too many unfamiliar options. And the singularity of each region's ecology goes untested and untasted. So it is that the burden of daily responsibility for so many choices arbitrarily narrows our awareness of G!d's manifest presence.

The next sign of our enslavement was more alarming. My wife and I viewed an excellent documentary in which a number of Vancouver teens were interviewed regarding their sexual experiences and decisions. I am sorry to report that the rampant carelessness and consequent regret was no surprise. What did surprise me was to then meet the parents and realize, it's not their fault. Perfectly respectable parenting is just no match for cell phones, cars, and money to spend. Consumer culture pushes unprecedented choice-making privilege, and therefore responsibility, on our youth as well. The same free-market insulation from social consequence that gives me access to fresh bananas in Canada in February, gives the least enterprising 13 year-old anonymous access to weekend raves where it is so easy to have casual sex and never meet that partner again, a decision that was once a no-brainer is now very much up for debate. Many teens choose for the better of their spiritual and physical health; but many more are overwhelmed, in this historically new vulnerability, by the manipulation of hormones and their peers. It is hard to blame them, when we "grown ups" are in identical straits.

The cult of choice has also wrought a significant impact upon synagogue life. As synagogue affiliation becomes a consumer decision -- one more brand loyalty by which the Jewish urbanite shores up his sense of identity -- synagogue options proliferate. The benefit is a wide selection overall, but the liability is increasing narrowness of each separate community. We are excited to see our synagogues multiplying, but we mustn't forget that, more often than not, they do so by dividing. If I hear rumblings of mutiny in my community, which once split off from another local community, I can perhaps look forward to the appearance of yet a new synagogue even more precisely fit to my individual religious needs, but I would have to accept, in kind, the gradual erosion of synagogue half-life across the board.

Furthermore, our heritage is not founded on my exact satisfaction being an overriding priority. In Hebrew Scripture, the "Egypt" we demand to be let go of next week is identified literally as "narrownesses." My desire for a more perfect synagogue can easily become a narrowness that I impose upon the path of my own soul. The alternative may be forty years spent restless in the desert wilderness of seemingly intractable differences between my needs and those of certain co-congregants. But our history shows that this is the alternative that leads to Zion.

After all, classical rabbis clarified that our enslavement in Egypt, as indeed all enslavement anywhere, is not only the oppression by external taskmasters. Some intrinsic part of you and me desires to stay enslaved. It may be a hard life in this narrowness, but it is familiar, and the unknown beyond could be harder still. This, my personal share in my own enslavement, is what I will try to hold in mind when we sit down to our Organic Kosher Progressive Modern Orthodox Participatory Traditional Passover seder this Saturday.

As for that fateful shopping trip, I did at last remember that we had brought canvas bags, so we needed neither paper nor plastic. In a place called, of all things, "Choices," to elude this one choice left me feeling subtly subversive. Just like a Jew.

Chag Pesach Kasher v'Sameach!