More Than Enough
Long ago, before the age of refrigeration, a family would not be able to freeze food for later, or even keep it edible at cool temperatures for long. Instead, if you lived in the city, you had your milk delivered fresh every day and picked up a newly baked loaf of bread from the local bakery each morning. You bought just enough to get you through the day, because there was no practical way to stockpile for tomorrow.
Out in the country, farmers’ wives toiled through the autumn to preserve fruits and vegetables in jars in the cellar, while their husbands hurried to fill the barn with hay for the cattle before the first snow fell. In some areas men would go out and hunt meat which, when cured and dried, could feed their families through the cold months when nothing grew. All those old-timers prepared what they could and prayed that it would be enough to see them through the winter.
But winter doesn’t always cooperate. Remember those children’s books about the family that lived on the prairie? One episode that stands out in my memory is the terrible winter whose blizzards lasted so long the townspeople simply ran out of food. Intrepid young men had to be sent out to scour the countryside for a farmer who had some sacks of wheat kernels he’d saved to plant in the spring. Those kernels were never planted. Instead, they were used to feed the starving town until spring finally made it possible to grow food again.
Village folk throughout history would wake up each morning grateful if they had enough food to survive for one more day. In general, the more primitive the culture, the less emphasis there is on saving for a rainy day. It was a cause for celebration if you simply had enough to survive. But times have changed. With the industrialization of society and the explosion of capitalism in the Western world, the emphasis has shifted from having enough… to having more than enough. If one item is good, why aren’t two even better?
Advertising blitzes urge us to try every new product on the market, without which, we are assured, our lives will be sorely lacking. Unless we have a great many things and plenty of money salted away for a rainy day, we feel poor. We are no longer content to survive day by day or subsist paycheck to paycheck. We want more. We feel that we need more.
I used to love the streamlined simplicity of Pesach, when all the products you bought for yom tov could fit on a couple of shelves. These days, you can fill a whole room with Pesach products and still wonder if you have everything you need…
Once upon a time, having three square meals on the table each day, a roof over your head and a change of clothing was a reason to be glad. But our ambitions have broadened. Having enough is no longer good enough.
What once made a person feel satisfied and grateful has become nothing more than a starting point. The first step on the way to having more than enough.
Consumer Anxiety
The plethora of goods on the market, along with the earnest money talk you hear everywhere, leads to heightened consumer anxiety. Instead of feeling good about what we have, we start to feel as if we’re barely making it. What ought to make us feel comfortable makes us feel insecure instead. We become like empty containers, always hungry for more.
The media and its ever-evolving technology bring the world right into our homes, showing us how much stuff there is to be had, and how much others have that we don’t. Talk about a recipe for envy and anxiety! The envy feeds the hunger, in a vicious cycle of unhappiness.
In extreme cases, this anxiety can lead to the phenomenon known as hoarding, where a person feels a need to accumulate mountains of stuff. Letting go of any of the unnecessary detritus leads to even more anxiety. Serenity is buried, and contentment becomes harder and harder to find amid the clutter.
Even without going to such an extreme, many of us accumulate far more than we need for either our aesthetic comfort or our emotional tranquility. Every now and then, we’ll go on a “decluttering” campaign to oust as much of the extra stuff as we can… only, in time, to launch the next cycle of shopping, and stockpiling, and feeling as if we just don’t have enough.
It can be exhausting.
An Open Palm
I think I’ve mentioned on these pages how, some years back, the school in which my husband had been a longtime rebbi suddenly closed its doors. With his paycheck abruptly cut off, I not unnaturally felt worried. How would we pay the bills? Fix up the house? Send our daughter to seminary?
One day, as I was driving, I had an epiphany. I realized that Hashem’s hand is open wide and that all of us, the whole world, feed out of it every single day. He has the wherewithal to keep us afloat. As long as we have access to that outstretched Divine palm, we will never be lacking. It was that image, and that realization, that kept the worry from messing too much with my head.
Of course, it’s necessary for us to do our hishtadlus. But that’s a relative term. I recall the story of R’ Yosef Sonnenschein, whose wife came to him one day with the news that there was absolutely no more food in the house. Whereupon the rov set aside his Gemara and went outside, walking with his head down along a heavily trafficked pedestrian path. Soon he reached down and picked a coin up from the path. This he handed to his wife to purchase food, and went calmly back to his learning. Rav Sonnenschein had known that Hashem’s bounty was waiting. All he had to do was make some token effort to fetch it.
Interestingly, it’s only in the realm of the material that the concept of overconsumption applies. In the spiritual realm, there’s no such thing as “more than enough.” There’s no cap on spiritual yearning or deveikus to Hashem. When it comes to physical stuff, it’s better to declutter. But in terms of our divine service, we are encouraged to fill all our empty places with His light.
Feeling Safe
Ultimately, our need to buy and save and worry comes from the same source: a lack of security. And that, turn, stems from a lack of trust. It’s been demonstrated throughout the ages, including this one, that the more we turn to Hashem for sustenance, the more He provides it.
I’m not talking about extraordinary wealth; that’s a blessing (or a curse) reserved for the few. But for the rest of us struggling to feel safe in a world overflowing with plenty, the test is to recognize the beauty of eating out of Hashem’s hand. We don’t really need sixty days’ worth of canned goods in our basements to make us feel secure. We don’t require bulging retirement accounts to help us face the future with equanimity. We have daily proof that Someone loves us and is looking out for us.
This beautiful awareness should be enough to keep us on an even keel, even if we don’t have basements overflowing with just-in-case items or our financial futures entirely nailed down. More than enough!
