Recently, I was in the car with one of my twins and we were discussing how easy it is to accumulate too much stuff. We\u2019d just had a conversation with a neighbour who mentioned that his sibling had moved into their parents\u2019 house as an adult. It was a large, old home, now sadly so full of stacks of papers and other belongings that one had to turn sideways to navigate some of it.<\/p>\n
I commiserated with my neighbour, misunderstanding the level of hoarding. I imagined how hard it must be to move, as an adult with a household, into a home already full of one\u2019s parents\u2019 belongings. Alas, our neighbour said, it was a mental health issue. It\u2019s sometimes referred to as a hoarding disorder or Diogenes syndrome. It was serious.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In the car with my kid, we found ourselves understanding how people get to this point. He said, quite astutely, that our society pushes \u201cmore, more, more.\u201d We both agreed that it is hard to resist the siren song of acquisition that we\u2019re constantly hearing. Choosing to stop, clean, tidy and cull things and acknowledge what we don\u2019t need is even harder than resisting new acquisitions.<\/p>\n I was faced with my own \u201choarding\u201d scenario. My personal, free email account is more than 20 years old. Suddenly, I got a warning about a month ago that the storage on these accounts would be slashed dramatically. I could choose to pay a fee every month or delete a lot of messages. My husband got a similar warning, but his account was not as old or big as mine. Even so, we commiserated, because deleting some of these saved emails felt painful. Save the baby photo elsewhere and then delete the message? One by one, it didn\u2019t seem to make a dent. Eventually, I figured out how to move older messages to a folder on my computer and I didn\u2019t have to delete messages from people I\u2019d loved who have now died; I didn\u2019t have to cull every family photo.<\/p>\n Still, this exercise made us look around. My kids, about to start high school, decided that they didn\u2019t need about 75 books on their shelves, acquired over the years from Scholastic book fairs, PJ Library and elsewhere. They are making plans to sell or donate the books.<\/p>\n Each kid, getting ready for a new school year, worked to empty out enormous middle school binders. They recycled tons of paper. They acknowledged that we no longer needed a Grade 5 workbook leftover from those pandemic days of learning at home. Both kids realized we needed to make space in their backpacks: for new intellectual growth and a new school year.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As my kids grow physically this summer, I\u2019m knitting as fast as I can to make them new sweaters for winter but I\u2019m knitting a sweater now out of \u201cstash\u201d yarns that I acquired when they were infants. Both kids are now bigger than me. The sweaters I make from now on will likely be too big for me when they outgrow them.<\/p>\n This is a balancing act, of course. It\u2019s normal in our household to get some new things for a new school year, even if we reuse the old stuff, too. This celebration of something new even has a word for it in Modern Hebrew. We might say \u201cTithadash<\/i>!\u201d or \u201cMay it renew you!\u201d when you see someone with new belongings.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n At the same time, I\u2019ve been studying the Babylonian tractate of Avodah Zarah. It explores how Jews are to interact with non-Jews or those who might worship idols. One of the concepts it covers is whether one can reuse anything that might have been used by someone who engaged in idol worship. This is a complicated topic. It involves both \u201cdecommissioned\u201d idols and whatever was used to sacrifice to the idol. One also must consider whether any of these items might be ever \u201creused\u201d in Jewish worship or sacrifice, in the days when the Temple still stood in Jerusalem. It goes even farther, examining what one does about an idol created by Jews in the first place, like the Golden Calf. The tractate is sometimes confusing because it\u2019s in so much detail.<\/p>\n That said, I returned to something else the text seemed to be telling us. In some cases, these items can be reused. The underlying message explores what we waste or throw away, versus how we can give things \u201cnew lives\u201d even if their first use wasn\u2019t ideal.<\/p>\n Nobody is worshipping idols at our house, but we\u2019re discussing reuse, as well as the acquisition of new things for the upcoming school year. I see 14-year-olds evaluating their lunch bags and considering making themselves new ones. There was a pile of shirts in the give-away pile after we cleaned up today. I even saw a completely tidy sock drawer. This may never happen again!<\/p>\n I\u2019m not sure how to always resist or even push back against our consumerist culture. However, the talmudic debate over physical leftovers from idol worship and what might be used again and\/or refurbished made me realize that this struggle isn\u2019t new. Just as we hope our kids are off to learn more with each school year, we also hope they\u2019ll hold onto the good, sweet things that they embodied at younger ages, too. New, shiny ideas and things are tempting, but there\u2019s something powerful and potentially meaningful about reuse, too.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Joanne Seiff <\/b>has written regularly for the <\/i>Winnipeg Free Press and various Jewish publications. She is the author of three books, including <\/i>From the Outside In: Jewish Post Columns 2015-2016, a collection of essays available for digital download or as a paperback from Amazon. Check her out on Instagram @yrnspinner<\/a> or at joanneseiff.blogspot.com<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Recently, I was in the car with one of my twins and we were discussing how easy it is to accumulate too much stuff. We\u2019d just had a conversation with a neighbour who mentioned that his sibling had moved into their parents\u2019 house as an adult. 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