The Jewish case for recycling all consumables and getting energy from trash.

We live in a consumer society. Food and clothing, books and magazines, concerts and sporting events, love and relationships—we need to take it all in. We want to eat it all up. Our experiences fuel us. They morph into the cells and tissues of our inner world.

Increasingly, the whole modern world is starting to become more selective and reflective about what we put in our bodies. Lifestyles of today extend this concern to the gamut of all experience. We want to be smart ‘consumers,’ endeavoring to make informed choices for mind, body and soul. Even our eating habits are changing.

As Jews, we are without a doubt renowned for our eating habits. The whole ‘kosher’ deal has pushed its way into the mainstream vocabulary of the general populace even while the authentic traditions of this Jewish observance have remained somewhat occluded. As a system of practices, Judaism encodes critical subtexts in the most basic repetitious acts, thereby transforming day to day performance into a form of memory storage. Consequently, the act of eating, is by design, a carefully choreographed activity meant to embody a critical attitude towards all consumption. Broken down to its basic structure, eating signifies the process of internalizing that which is exterior. Common parlance reflects this figurative understanding with expressions such as ‘food for thought’ or ‘digesting an experience.’

One particularly salient idea that is wrapped up with Jewish food obsessions has to do with relating to the undesirable. We seldom like everything served on our plate. For those of us with a palate that rejects anything not normally appearing on the kids’ menu when we go out to eat, there is a lot to avoid. Finicky diners are apt to cut off crusts, remove those green little trees and set the burnt parts off to the side or place them under the table. In short, the process is one of natural selection. Only the fittest (food) survives to be swallowed.

The Chassidic masters identified this approach to food as the mentality of the six weekdays. During this time one is permitted to take the pesolet, the worthless matter, from the desirable food. In essence, selection becomes rejection. Consequently, one hopes to be left with only the good part. The refuse can simply be thrown out.

By contrast, Jewish law forbids this type of filtering of consumables on the Sabbath. The mentality of the mundane week must invert itself. The Sabbath reconditions all of a person’s activities and reverses the polarity of much of the familiar world. While taking the bad from the good is prohibited, the Torah does allow for a person to take the good from the bad. In other words, everything that is apparently ‘bad’ has some ‘good’ in it. The Sabbath ‘consciousness’ is about finding the good in everything—even those things which we might want to dismiss or push away.

To take this idea one level further, the cycle of the week that spirals through six mundane days and the specialness of the seventh, is itself a model for Jewish history. The classical interpretation of world epochs transposes days into millennia, such that the meta-week becomes a span of 7000 years.

For 6000 years the world struggles with conflict after conflict, but ultimately finds resolution before the seventh millennium rolls around. This time scale is pivotal but not exhaustive of human experience. What it does drive home as framework for understanding much of our recorded collective history, is the marked shift that many are experiencing right now in and around the Hebrew year 5771(2010-11).

We are at a tipping point, a transition from a conflict driven world where we fight to extract the bad from every aspect of our lives, to a whole new game written in accordance with the rules of Sabbath observance. More and more people are playing with the literal and metaphoric dimensions of finding the good in everything, of taking the good from the bad or even transforming the whole of the bad into the good by seeing the positive potential therein. Once again, this applies to the full range of our experiences, everything and everyone we encounter.

Eating habits are changing—which is to say, consumerism as a whole. While it is far too premature to celebrate anything remotely resembling success, we are witnessing a move unprecedented in history as mass numbers of people have started recycling. Turning waste into the feedstock of some new product, is at its depth, a recognition of the possibility of reincarnation, of re-incorporation, of finding the useful possibilities within the trash.

While the past mentality of trying to smelt silver—to get rid of impurities—persists in many parts of the world, increasingly innovative approaches are popping up to enable us to find a use for the whole cow. Dumpster diving is in. And if we can do that with basic commodities, can we not do that with society at large? Is there not a growing opposition to kicking out the bad lemons and leaving in only the cream of the crop? Can we abandon expressions like the ‘dregs of society’? Can we make room for outcasts?

Look around. Aversion to waste, allergic reactions to the useless and the abandonment of the unfruitful, is starting to be replaced with a new culture of improvement—at least on some fronts. The right mixture of passion and creativity is offering

a new valuation for people, places and things. For starters, try searching companies that convert trash into energy; it sounds too good to be true but it is happening right now, albeit on a small scale. While we have only started

down this path, technological progress is leading the charge and may one day, with the arrival of advanced nanotechnology, even allow the some degree of repurposing of all matter and energy. As the science of molecular engineering, nanotechnology seeks to atomize the world around us and offer the keys to reprogramming a myriad of substances into ever new forms. Could we reach a point where nothing is wasted?

In the words of futurist par excellence, Buckminster Fuller:

The physical is inherently entropic, giving off energy in ever more disorderly ways. The metaphysical is anti-entropic, methodically marshaling energy. Life is anti-entropic.

In resisting the philosophies of ‘diminishing returns’ of entropy, we can continue to aspire to the dream so beautifully articulated by Fuller—to be able to do more with less. As humanity produces more and more, with the temptation to see the whole of the physical universe as food, might we begin to approach the more spiritual sense of dematerializing the material world as a whole?

To recall the Hebrew word pesolet, the worthless matter mentioned above, we may also note that this word stems from pesol, meaning idol, graven image or statue. This etymological link suggests that the fixing of matter, the concrete and static perception of material objects that we are in danger of becoming beholden to, locks the true potential of that object by fixing its form. The substance of the object either conforms to its ideal/idol form or it is dismissed as waste. To smash the fixed image of the object allows its material to be recycled. It can become something else. It can become something more, something different.

The Sabbath, as a model for a redeemed world, renders everything in that world redeemable on some level. Everything may be elevated. Kabbalistic teachings impart the notion that on the Sabbath all of the ‘worlds’ ascend. This elevation might be said to be the equivalent of an anti-entropy principle. This same tradition foresees a time when the whole of our reality becomes Sabbath like. Then perhaps all that we previously regarded as waste might be reintegrated in some way, in some new form, in a world of ever expanding horizons.

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