You may have new year’s resolutions. But do you have Jewish new year’s resolutions? Erin Beser, a Jewish educator and rebbetzin, does one each year with her family—sometimes just for the year, sometimes forever.
First they gave up meat. Then they gave up screens. This year? Shopping—no more impulse buys, extra clothes or excessive gifts. In 5786, they’re only buying what they need.
Beser drew attention to this cause by outlining her plan in a recent JTA article, in which she outlined the steps, logic and limits of paring down her family purchases. (“I’m not canceling Hanukkah,” she writes, “because I am not a monster.”) She hopes to guide her family toward community connection, self-reflection and appreciation for what one has, while learning about the role of Jewish women in the evolution of 20th-century capitalism. She joins Phoebe Maltz Bovy on The Jewish Angle to explain more.
Transcript
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Hi, I’m Phoebe Maltz Bovy, opinion editor of the Canadian Jewish News. You’re listening to The Jewish Angle, the podcast where we look at the issues of the day from, guess which angle? Foreign. My guest today is Erin Beser, an educator in suburban Philadelphia. Her JTA article, called “Why My Family Is Giving Up Impulse Purchases For Rosh Hashanah This Year,” is a moving personal account of grappling with consumerism, a very relatable topic, I’m sure, to many of us. It also has Jewish and female angles that we shall explore in further depth. Erin Beser, welcome to The Jewish Angle.
Erin Beser: Thank you so much for having me.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So my first question for you is, people decide to pare down their shopping for all sorts of reasons. You know, you see things like no-buy projects on Substack more recently, where people are only going to buy used items, or just not going to buy anything. People have written, I’m sure, books at this point, like “My Year Without Shopping.” This has been a whole thing for quite a few years. But what were your reasons, and why tie it to the high holidays?
Erin Beser: Yeah, for my family, Rosh Hashanah is always a good opportunity to revisit our family’s values and practices and to take on a kind of New Year’s resolution. So in previous years, my husband, who’s a rabbi, decided to give up meat coming into the Shemitah year, where we sort of give the Earth a rest. He was thinking about the environmental impact of eating meat. So he just declared in a sermon that he’s giving up meat, and the rest of my family kind of followed suit, and we stopped eating meat.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Can I just interrupt you with a question about that? Did you know he was going to say that, or were you like, “Oh, my goodness, I have to make something different for dinner tonight?”
Erin Beser: Yeah, I mean, I didn’t think it was going to stick. He was like, “I have this idea, I want to give up meat. I really want to be vegetarian. I really think it’s the right thing for the planet, and I’m going to do it in a sermon so that it’s public and there’s some degree of accountability.” And I was like, okay, you know, for the Shemitah, like for the year, we’ll go back to eating meat as a family. Then my kids totally loved the idea, too. Whenever I’ve tried to serve meat, they’re like, “No, remember, we’re vegetarians.” And I was like, we weren’t, though. We weren’t, but now we are. It really stuck. So this idea of what does it mean to Cheshbon and Nefesh, to take an accounting of your soul and to think about who you are and what you want the new year to bring. I try to think about the foundational behaviors that drive the other behaviors that I exhibit, right? So, if there’s something that I really want to work on around, you know, eating healthy food or being a sort of calm, patient, less reactive parent or a sort of present spouse, I’m trying to think of, like, what are the behaviors that really drive the other behaviors. And those are the things that we’ve targeted in our sort of Rosh Hashanah New Year’s resolutions. So, the following year, we decided as a family we were going to reduce our use of screens, right? Like, we don’t have casual TV watching or iPads. My kids are in elementary school, and they know that their friends come home and watch TV, and they’re like, “Why can’t we watch TV?” And I’m like, TV wasn’t really working for our family. Figuring out when we were going to watch TV or how much TV to watch was stressful. It kind of drove and took over everything. So taking TV or screen time just kind of off the table and out of the conversation gave our family life at home a deep sense of calm and presence. So, thinking about that project of going into the new year, I started to think about buying new things. I love buying new things. I love shopping, I love giving my kids new things. Something they don’t always prepare you for as a parent when you have kids is how much you’re going to love spoiling them. You think in your head, “I’m not going to spoil my kids, only bad parents would spoil their kids.” Then you realize how quickly you can fall into this trap of bringing new things into your family’s rhythm so unintentionally and absentmindedly. That all of a sudden, it’s just natural that you go to the store, and you get a treat or something new. So pulling that back, using Rosh Hashanah as an opportunity to say, we have this new year coming, we’re going to try this new thing as a family. We’re going to buy less, and we’re only going to buy what we need.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: It’s really interesting because you’re writing both as a parent and as a woman, because these are related in various ways. But you write about your plan for the year. I’m going to quote from your article: “I’m going to take a hard look at the role Jewish women play in American consumer culture and the impact American consumer culture has had on the identity of Jewish women.” So what do you see as specifically Jewish or Jewish and female about shopping?
Erin Beser: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s very American, right? And so I think to look back, we have…
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: We have malls in Canada, too.
Erin Beser: North American.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah, fair enough. It’s okay, right?
Erin Beser: The North American project of, you know, the culture, right, Western culture, right? This idea that capitalism is democratic, like the free market is going to liberate us all. But it actually traps us, particularly women, and particularly Jewish women. I think in that sort of intersection between the role that Jewish women played in an outsized, overrepresented way in American feminism, second-wave feminist movement, that sort of liberated women from the house to the workplace. So, if you sort of look at these great leaders of this great feminist movement, and so many of them were Jewish, you have to go back and ask, as many Jewish historians have asked, why were Jewish women so overrepresented? I think a lot of that had to do with the leadership that Jewish women were empowered to have in synagogues or community organizations. It was natural for women to be in charge of the sisterhood or the parallel organizations that existed for women in the Jewish community but were coming out into public spaces in the 70s in second-wave feminism. And I think a lot of that was that women deserve access to income, right? Equal income. They can work, they can work outside of the home, and they can have their own financial buying power to make their own choices. They don’t have to rely on their husband to open a bank account for them. These were laws that were passed that liberated women, both in their ability to go out into the world and work, but also the ability to then keep and decide how to spend their discretionary income. I’m over 40. My Instagram wants me to spend money on my face so that it doesn’t look wrinkly or old in any way. It doesn’t tell the truth about my age.
Erin Beser: And I’m wondering if that’s a value that I should be spending both my hard-earned money on and also my time and attention, which is an even more precious resource in this attention economy.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Since reading your article, I’ve been thinking about just sort of the what is and isn’t Jewish. Specifically, because I’m thinking about my in-laws, who are Belgian and not Jewish. And they like to go shopping no more or less than anybody else. You know what I mean? There’s plenty of shopping happening in Belgium. I think about “The Ladies Paradise,” the Émile Zola novel from 1883, about mid-19th century Parisian women so excited to the point, in some cases, of really like getting their families in debt at the existence of the then-new phenomenon of the department store. So there’s obviously something beyond the Jewish-specific. And there’s the thing of like, my culture is the one that likes food.
Erin Beser: Yeah.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: You know, it’s like, yeah. However, I do think there is something there, and I tried to write down what makes me think is more Jewish. And you could tell me if you think this is anything but sales, bargain basements, sample sales, maybe luxury in some cases, but also used clothes, schmattes. I was also thinking that there’s this kind of “retail is for the gentiles,” like the female equivalent of the self-deprecating nebbish. Maybe this is just my very specific New York Jewish upbringing that makes me think like this. But does any of that resonate?
Erin Beser: Totally. I mean, if you go back to the origin of our economy, that was dirty work that Jews could do. The function of the economy needed to be upheld by Jewish money lending that would make the economy sort of work. The way that Jews were dispersed throughout Europe meant that you could have this kind of flow of trade that was all in the family, and you could kind of pass it around. I think it goes back to something very Jewish about being deeply integrated into the way the economy functions, which is both stereotypical and something we wouldn’t want to advertise, like, “Jews control the banks.” No, Jews don’t control the banks, but Jews were forced into banking historically, and it became a profession that Jews had access to when they weren’t allowed access to other professions.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So you’re saying that that explains how Jews came to be in the garment industry so much, is what you’re saying.
Erin Beser: Jews were on both sides of.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: The garment, and as consumers, yeah, right.
Erin Beser: We like to tell the story that Jews were in the factories and Jews were marching for labor, organizing, but against Jewish factory owners, right? This was all in the family. There were Jews on sort of all sides of every part of history: Jewish gangsters, Jewish police officers, Jewish labor organizers, Jewish factory owners. So, I think this understanding that there’s industry, right, and there is this sort of, within our scriptural tradition, there’s a lot of guidelines and framework for how you navigate industry. There was something very practical about the teachings of the rabbis in the Talmud and later interpretations of Jewish law, applying Jewish ritual law to the marketplace. Some of that was a practicality about survival. What does Judaism value above all things? Your life, staying alive, right? Judaism wants you to stay alive, physically alive, and the ability to navigate a marketplace and earn a living to support your family is part of surviving, part of thriving. There’s a necessity to participating in the marketplace, and there’s also a cultural resonance where we thrive. The common labor organizing trope was bread and roses, right? If we’re surviving by participating in the modern American economy, North American economy, then we’re going to thrive by being artistic, by participating in a way that celebrates what is uniquely Jewish and a cultural inheritance, but also what is part of the human experience of why we love buying new things, and why we love to adorn ourselves and participate in that.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So I want to talk more about the gender aspects of this because I think it obviously all intersects. Fast fashion has bad elements for labor and the environment, and also the quality of clothing itself and overspending is bad for personal finance. There’s no disagreement; that’s just the way the world is. I feel torn because I think there is a way that clothing as an interest, specifically clothing or shopping generally, gets denigrated because it’s associated with women and especially with Jewish women and the so-called princess trope. In households, women tend to do the purchasing, which can be a guilty pleasure and a chore that you get shamed for. The question is, do you see a way to be thoughtful about one’s own purchases without falling into that terrain? This is something I struggle with, too: a non-self-hating woman’s critique of consumerism. How does one arrive at that?
Erin Beser: That’s an important framing to remember. If the economy was dirty work for Jewish men, then punching down from Jewish men involved denigrating Jewish women, who were really the ones behind the scenes moving the economy through. We have memoirs of Jewish women from the medieval period, like Gukul of Hamlin, who was entirely running businesses, and we have a record of her, which is miraculous, but there were many more like her without records. Knowing Jewish women have been running households for millennia highlights that work and equalizes it, saying this is what it takes to run an American household. If I only buy for my house in North America and not thinking collectively, that company can earn more profit because I’m not sharing with my neighbor. We all spend more because we’re culturally afraid to ask our neighbors to share, draining public resources, which only emboldens private corporations to fill the need. It’s inefficient, like having your own swing set only used by you, not shared publicly or with anybody else.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: If we had one, it would only be used by raccoons. Raccoons? Yeah. That’s just a Toronto thing, I guess. What may be asking kind of the same question in a different way, but I mean, you write a very personal story about your late mother, and I’m really sorry for your loss.
Erin Beser: Thank you.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: How shopping is a love language and how complicated that is, you know, because I think this is something. And I don’t think it’s just Jewish families, although I think it may be more so in Jewish families or in different ways, whatever. I think that this is a real thing. But also, I guess I’m wondering, do you see anything positive in the Jewish female shopping tradition? When I think about this, I’m thinking about, like, you know, things from life. But I’m also thinking of the TV show from a few years ago now, Broad City, where there’s a scene where the Alanna Glazer character is going knockoff handbag shopping with her mother under a manhole somewhere around Canal Street in New York City. I can’t describe this scene in a way that does it justice, but I’m also thinking of The Nanny, right? Which is like if Lomans were a TV show, kind of. Or even to some extent, something like Say Yes to the Dress has kind of that cultural vibe to it. So I guess I’m wondering, like, is there sort of a joyful element to this that can be honored in a way that doesn’t necessarily involve buying anything or too much or whatever? You know what I mean?
Erin Beser: Yeah. I think a lot about how that act of being able to buy something beautiful that you want for your children or your grandchildren was miraculous to my mother and her mother, who grew up in the Depression, right, where people really struggled financially. They were the working class of immigrant-born parents. The idea that you could have enough to sustain yourself and then a little extra to buy yourself a doll or to buy something beautiful and new for Rosh Hashanah was such a celebration.
Erin Beser: And I think that’s the mindset that I would like to cultivate in myself and my children. It isn’t that I’m going to erase that language completely and that we don’t extend our love to one another through things because I think my mother thought things were miraculous. She also always said, love people, not things. This was just something she used to say. It’s just a thing, right?
Erin Beser: And things were very important to her because they were hard fought, not easy to come by. And she tried to maintain that idea that, at the end of the day, the things that really do matter are the people. And so I think that balance of, we work so hard to have what we have both as a people, you know, to survive, to still be here, and to have achieved a certain level of economic prosperity that most of the Jewish community, not all, because there are still Jews who experience and live with poverty in both of our countries, right.
Erin Beser: There are Jews who live like that too, and we have to as a community sort of extend to that as well. But the idea that you could have worked so hard, made it to a certain point, and celebrate something as beautiful and simple as a new dress for Rosh Hashanah. And I think it’s because the other things come so easily and quickly, like a fire hose towards us, that we lose the ability to appreciate something that used to be quite singular and hard to come by.
Erin Beser: And because of the ease in which we live in our world, this is where I feel myself as a Jewish mother caught between a rock and a hard place. There is no more wall that exists as a natural boundary between the getting of things, right, and my children. I am that natural wall. I am that boundary between the getting of things. And my parents, when my kids look at me, they go, just make it. Come get your phone and get it here. That’s so possible.
Erin Beser: And you’re like, yes, it is totally possible. And I’m going to try to explain this to you in a way that doesn’t give you a deep sense of economic insecurity, which is how I grew up and how my mother grew up, that we just couldn’t afford it. What do you mean we can’t afford it? Are we poor? No, we’re not poor. Thank God we have enough. You do not need it. And to negotiate with an eight-year-old about what he does or doesn’t need, you know, is exhausting.
Erin Beser: And so sometimes we’re like, okay, fine, click, here it comes, it’s on its way. And sometimes we have to ourselves be that boundary of you do not need it, I know you want it, it’s not coming today. And hold that boundary because the world isn’t going to hold it for them.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, it’s interesting. Yeah. I mean, I have kids in elementary school myself, and I can relate to a lot of this. But I’m also thinking about how in Canada, in some ways, because we have, or at least until the tariffs screwed things up in the States, but like, we don’t have American-style online shopping to quite the same extent. There is online shopping, but it’s maybe a little bit less. My kids are used to me saying, like, yes, I have ordered something. I don’t know when it’s showing up, like, don’t get your hopes up. But I was thinking, though, about just the whole concept of materialism, because I’m somebody who likes clothing a lot. Very specific about clothing, though. And I’ve always sort of resented the idea that to like clothing is to sort of like, amass it in some kind of uncritical way. Because if anything, I feel like if you are very specific about stuff and if you care about the beautiful dress. And I did an earlier episode of The Jewish Angle with the novelist Joanna Rackoff. We talked about these sort of Laura Ashley prairie type dresses that we both really very coincidentally enjoy getting from vintage shops. But anyway, if you’re into the very specific stuff, maybe like, materialism can almost like, of a certain sort can kind of save you from overconsumption. Maybe, or maybe not. Maybe I own too many of, and I know I own too many of those dresses, but yeah, I don’t know.
Erin Beser: I mean, I think what I’m after is that feeling in your brain when you want something new, because our brains crave novelty. And some brains are more wired for wanting novelty than others, you know, neurodivergence and all that. And I’m wanting it, but I don’t need it because I have enough. And then I’m starting to investigate, well, why shouldn’t I trade with a friend? Or why shouldn’t I wear the same thing? It’s perfectly good. It still fits me. It doesn’t have holes in it. And then I get into these social rules, and then I’m like, well, you know what? I have this position in my community where people look at me, what I’m wearing every Shabbat when I walk in and everyone’s giving me compliments about what I’m wearing, and that feels wonderful. And then I’m wondering if with my position, I can start to model. I’m going to be wearing less new things this year, or I’m going to be sharing, or when someone says to me, oh my gosh, I love your dress, I’m going to say, oh, I borrowed it from so and so, and I’m a 40-year-old woman and I’m not at summer camp. Is that going to be, can I normalize that? Can we just have less things brought into the world because we don’t have room for them in our own homes and we don’t have room for them on our planet, and none of it is necessary? And if I can retrain myself to not immediately go for something new because I want it, what will I do with my brain in that moment? I don’t know. Maybe you and I should talk next August.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Yeah, I mean, I have a question that’s just like, do you have buy nothing like that type of group where you live? Because swaps come to mind as kind of an answer to this. Speaker A: I mean, I also do think it’s interesting, like these subtle cultural distinctions maybe between, like, mainline Philadelphia and Toronto, because, like, is there much used clothing shopping where you are? Is that a big thing?
Erin Beser: So the “Buy Nothing” is cutthroat and a little bit scary to me. We do have a “Buy Nothing” group in my community, and I can’t troll Facebook all day to look for the things. Now, when I want to give, I give.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Sure.
Erin Beser: I think it’s like micro-communities. I think it’s like…
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: But like, do people, do people buy used clothing? Is that like a big thing?
Erin Beser: I think it is bigger in New York than it is in Philadelphia. Right.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: So like…
Erin Beser: But. And maybe, you know, normalizing clothing swaps or normalizing that type of thing. But then, you still… I don’t know if this has been your experience, but in mine, you have a clothing swap, and then there’s still things that nobody wants, and they go to the bin in front of the supermarket. And where does that bin go? I’m terrified to find out. You know, having worked in the developing world, you see the end of the line for some of these things, and it’s… We will run out of room. We will. In our lifetime, probably. So someone, and preferably a lot of us, has to slow it down. And I think that part of the legacy of Jewish working women in New York, and those who were in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, and sort of the legacy of the fire, there was a foundation that was set up. What is the legacy of that? It’s both to educate people about fast fashion globally and to slow that trade down so that people who are creating clothes that we need can earn a sustainable wage. And we also have to create less demand. Part of that flow of economics is that we have to want things less. And part of that is teaching our brains and continuing to talk about it. And I think the thing that we all find so exhausting is there are so many things to care about. Like, this world is full of our cyclical vigilance of worrying about this or that or this thing. And this year, this… This was my turn. My mother died. I didn’t see that coming. You know, she had pretty advanced dementia, but she could have lived for another decade. It wasn’t clear to me that this was going to be the time when she was going to die. And so for me, this is my year to reflect on this thing. And, you know, John Green, who’s an author and an activist around tuberculosis, he says that, you know, tuberculosis is going to be my thing. I’m going to fight and worry about tuberculosis, and you can kind of go about your day fighting and worrying for the things that you’re going to fight and worry about. And one of the things that I fight and worry about, and as I know you do as well, is the Jewish people. And this year, I’m going to take on this thing of examining myself and using my small position of leadership in a Jewish community to encourage those around me to try to. Let’s buy less.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Well, that was beautifully put. Thank you, Erin Wieser, for coming on The Jewish Angle. Where can people find you, and what would you like to promote?
Erin Beser: People can find me. I have a few pieces on JTA, including the one that you’re referencing. Where people can find me is on my Instagram account, which is called Hot Rebbetzin. I might need to explain that to people.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Oh, please explain it to me. I. I’m learning this now. And I had looked you up. I did not know that.
Erin Beser: Okay. So I created an Instagram account called Hot Rebbetzin, because Rebbetzin is the traditional name for the wife of the rabbi. And there was a Netflix show, as I’m sure you’re an expert on Jewish culture, you know, Nobody’s Watching, which is about a non-Jewish woman dating a rabbi. And she calls him, with her friends, Hot Rabbi. So he goes by Hot Rabbi in the show, played by Adam Brody. He is, in fact, a very hot rabbi. So I thought it would be funny to create an Instagram account that is Hot Rebbetzin, because Rebbetzin is the name for the wife of the rabbi. So do I think I am a Hot Rebbetzin? No. I think Hot Rebbetzin is an aesthetic. It’s not my personal identity. It’s like a mindset. It’s like a vibe. It’s something that anybody can do. Like Hot Rebbetzin’s like being nice to everyone at Kiddush, right? Like Hot Rebbetzin is like hosting a Shabbat dinner where it’s like five o’clock, and everybody’s like feral, and like the adults are drinking wine before anybody’s blessed anything.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy: Thank you so much for coming on, Erin Beser.
Show Notes
Credits
- Host: Phoebe Maltz Bovy
- Producer and editor: Michael Fraiman
- Music: “Gypsy Waltz” by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective
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