When I throw out my back and someone tells me to put the pain in perspective, I feel the urge to throw a table at them. When my neck hurts, I don't want to hear about people killed in the tsunami, nor could I care less about starving Africans. Still, once we do get some distance from an event, most people realize we can count ourselves lucky: we're alive, we have a family, we're reading this column. We get perspective on our mouselike troubles by putting them next to the elephants of others. Having trouble in your marriage? Go to a singles event. I recently lectured at one. There was so much beauty there as well as so much sadness and loneliness. As soon as I got home I hugged my husband, who has a thousand flaws, and felt like I had won the lottery. Are your kids driving you crazy? Spend half an hour in a fertility clinic. Frustrated by skyrocketing prices? Go shopping for Shabbat in Kiryat Sefer. Kiryat Sefer, officially known as Modiin Ilit, is a very poor ultra-Orthodox town five minutes from Modiin and a half hour from Tel Aviv. Do yourselves a favor and get your weekly groceries there some time. I stand there on Thursday evenings in the check-out line surrounded by empty carts and carts containing only staple foods, and feel embarrassed by my brimming cart. A young woman stands behind me, probably the mother of several children, and her cart contains five loaves of staple bread and a sack of potatoes. A 40-something man in front of me argues with the cashier over a can of tuna. She says he has to buy it in a pack of four, and he says he can't pay for four cans. Waiting there with my cornflakes and three types of cheese, I feel very wealthy. Amid all the media reports of the high price of cottage cheese, what stood out were photos of supermarket dairy cases packed to the brim. While you deliberate between chocolate-covered pecan yogurt and and goat's milk yogurt with honey swirls, and end up buying them both, people in Kiryat Sefer deliberate over whether or not to buy leben (plain cultured milk). The reasons behind this community's shameful poverty are not pertinent to this discussion. Rather, the supermarket in Kiryat Sefer is a reflection of our lives: a society of plenty caught up in a consumer daze, paying way too much for too many products that we don't really need. We could do without half our shopping carts and live comfortably. Aside from women's clothing (a psychological necessity), I could probably cut back on most purchases and still wonder whether we need another cabinet. As charming and folksy as it may be, the cottage cheese protest is also a political one. Whoever took another Facebook group and turned it into headlines wanted us to feel like everything is awful, everything is collapsing, and we have to change the government. Amid reports of blameworthy politicians, greedy supermarkets and industrialists who deserve to be shot, what about us? A man cannot live on bread and salt alone, but does he really need six-grain tomato bread? We demand price reductions on staples, but it's been ages since we've only consumed staples. Rather, we like to buy the million play products that are anything but staples. Prices went up because we agreed to pay them. We agreed because we've been convinced that the thousands of unnecessary products in the supermarket are essential. It's time to get some perspective: It's not the end of the world if we don't eat cottage cheese.
Cottage cheese? Ask Kiryat Sefer
מערכת היום
מערכת "היום“ מפיקה ומעדכנת תכנים חדשותיים, מבזקים ופרשנויות לאורך כל שעות היממה. התוכן נערך בקפדנות, נבדק עובדתית ומוגש לציבור מתוך האמונה שהקוראים ראויים לעיתונות טובה יותר - אמינה, אובייקטיבית ועניינית.
