As the song — or maybe it’s a commercial for laundry soap or allergy medication — goes, it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new time. And that means we have a new way to discuss our lives numerically.
Every five years or so, it seems, we have to be ready, whether at family gatherings or cocktail parties, to publicly reveal how we fare and compare vis-à-vis the significant numbers du jour.
In the 1980s, it was cholesterol. Since no one really knew the difference then between HDL (good) cholesterol and LDL (bad) cholesterol, the chatter centered on total cholesterol. As someone who was raised by people who had a firm belief in the wholesome and restorative powers of chicken schmaltz and sponge cake, these were not good times for me. While trim, welterweight-size runners would pat their washboard abs and declare, “Mine’s 120,” I would frantically try to find a dark corner where I could scrape the shmear off my bagel.
In the late 1980s, cholesterol readings were replaced by real estate appreciation, which was then replaced by low interest rates on loans, buckets of money made on stock options, percent body fat and body mass index.
Once again, given my food-centered Jewish upbringing, these were not particularly good times for me.
For some time now, I’ve been wondering what new status numbers of the ’00s would be. Now I know: our carbon footprints. Carbon footprints, of course, refer to the total amount of CO2 any given human being cranks into the environment each year as a result of driving, flying, running the air conditioner and so on.
As someone who has essentially been hiding out for the past 20 years, I felt ready for this one.
So I went to an online carbon calculator and learned that my personal carbon footprint is 0.7 of a ton (the average American has a carbon footprint of 7.5 tons a year). Theoretically, those numbers are low enough for me to go into the “offset” business. (My secret? No car and a clothesline.)
Like emissions trading programs for international companies, offset programs allow individuals to “offset” their excessive carbon emissions by funding green projects elsewhere. In essence, one man’s altruism is another man’s smokestack.
But at levels both deep and superficial, the whole business of offsets bugs me. For starters — let me put this as it bluntly and childishly as I can — not fair! Since when do we get to hire a proxy to expiate our sins?
I mean, this couldn’t have happened sooner? I can’t tell you how much I would loved to have had the opportunity to buy a body mass index offset from, say, Kate Moss in the 1980s, or real estate investment offsets from Donald Trump in the 1990s, or HDL cholesterol offsets from the Dalai Lama in 2000.
But not only do offsets seem not fair, they also seem not Jewish. Am I the only one thinking we are reentering a time warp of medieval Catholic indulgences?
According to Rabbi Judah Dardik of Oakland’s Beth Jacob Congregation, my suspicions about the un-Jewishness of offsets isn’t all that far out. “No indemnities allowed,” he said. “If you do something wrong, you can’t buy yourself out of that wrong. That’s not a Jewish concept.”
There is another fundamentally Jewish concept at work here, he notes: that of environmental responsibility. “If you look at the second chapter of Genesis, one of the first things God tells Adam in the Garden of Eden is of his responsibility to work and tend the garden. We as Jews have a planetary obligation toward environmentalism and stewardship.”
So where does that leave the modern Jew who wants to do the right thing environmentally, without turning to offsets? Walking more, consuming less and tending our personal and global gardens.
“It’s a mitzvah to plant trees and do good things for the environment,” Dardik said.
There’s also the less noble but tremendously satisfying activity of being able to one-up people at cocktail parties by patting your not-entirely-washboard abs and shouting out your trim, taut carbon footprint.
Diane Sussman is a copy editor at j. She can be reached at [email protected].