This is my D’var Torah for Parashat Vayiggash in 5779, December 15, 2018 — during thick of the season of gift giving and shopping.
In 1912, Francis Collins published The Boys’ Book of Model Airplanes: How to Build and How to Fly Them. It was about a decade after Kitty Hawk, the first successful flight of a real plane by the Wright Brothers. In front of the title page is a photo of a boy who looks about 18, holding above his head about to launch a model that’s about three feet long, with three very simple cross pieces like wings cut kind of roughly, linked by three sticks going front to back – two of them look like dowels and one looks like something you’d pick up in the woods.
The 1912 book is engaging and meaty and easy to read, with instructions interwoven with stories about how real planes work and how one day planes might be used in war. In explaining the materials you need for the simplest model, Collins mentions dowels and reeds that might be picked up at the hardware store for a few cents. Or even better — bamboo, which was harder to find locally except if you just took a fishing rod you already had and stripped it. Also, says the author, the frame should be covered with fabric, and I quote, “Such scraps as may be found in the family piece-bag will answer every purpose. In sewing the cloth…the advice of some big sister, aunt or the mother may well be taken.”
The Boys’ Book of Model Airplanes from 1912 goes from there to much more complex construction, and explanations of how real planes and gliders work – still, it’s a model of simple explanation of physics and engineering. According to a sociologist named Richard Butsch, the book is a great example of what hobbies and leisure activities look like before the process of commodification takes over. Professor Butsch says that the 1910s were a time when airplane modeling was organized and dominated by older teenagers and their creativity. Boys –it was boys then – could organize flying contests easily with their friends. People who were really into it went into the new field of aviation.
What there wasn’t in the 1910s was any sort of model plane industry. People tried to create businesses to sell the kinds of material that could be useful by mail-order, but they didn’t succeed. It was perfectly easy to find things for free at home or for cheap in town.
Professor Butsch writes that between the wars, the hobby began to change. As airplanes themselves became more sophisticated, the interest in the models required more skill, more dedication, and materials beyond what you could find around the house. Three types of groups tried to capitalize on the interest and organize young people – professionals in aviation, local civic groups and stores sponsoring contests, and bigger businesses looking to make money by selling to hobbyists. Even after Lindberg crossed the ocean, the businesses still didn’t make much money off of the hobby. The only enterprises that were successful, publishing hobbyist magazines or selling some materials, were created and run by people who were really gaga over aviation – often men who had been hobbyists as boys and teens.
But eventually that changed, after World War II. Professor Butsch explains that two factors changed the hobby of building model planes – plastic, and large corporations. There is a whole other story to tell about why the war led to more plastic in our world – but after the war, there was a lot of capacity to make things out of plastic, and unlike metal it was fairly easy to retool plastic factories to mold almost anything. Corporations that had nothing to do with aviation or modeling, but could make things out of plastic, began to create model kits – but they didn’t focus on planes. It was model planes, model cars, model anything. By the 1960s, the hobby of building model airplanes had been transformed – it was dominated by plastic-making companies that made all kinds of things, and the main buyers were now kids and tweens, not older teenagers and young adults.
What started as a hobby that you could pursue more seriously or less seriously, with things lying around the house – became one more commodity. One more place where the economy became the basic logic, where a hobby or a leisure time activity was no longer separate from buying and selling.
One of the most intriguing hobby companies today to me is Klutz. Klutz is a great name, sounds so informal, but actually it’s a part of Scholastic, the big educational publisher and there is nothing informal about Klutz as a juggernaut of turning hobbies into commodities. Klutz sells combination instruction book-kits for $10-20 to help you draw, watercolor, make things with beads, decorate your nails, learn to juggle. They sell you the paints, the beads, the bean bag balls as well as the instructions.
Klutz has a book and kit for $10 if you are interested in, of course, paper airplanes. They sell you the paper! What ever happened to just, you know, taking some paper that costs a few pennies and making a paper airplane?
This is the season when the logic of commodification of leisure, fun, love and even religion is on us with a vengeance. It is easy to decry it. But it’s also important to understand what actually happens to us when we live in that world, what happens to us that we might not even notice. And believe it or not, the story of commodification is the story of Yosef.
We first met Yosef a couple weeks ago in Parashat Vayeshev as a kid, a tween or a teen. He was carefree, his older brothers had jobs, he tagged along sometimes. His father made him, with his own hands, a coat, k’tonet pasim, a coat of stripes or a coat made out of strips of something — I don’t know, it could have been something whimsical sewn out of scraps lying around, like the covering for an old model airplane.
When the brothers threw him into the pit, Yosef was suddenly and violent thrown into the world of commodification. He himself was bought and sold many times, from trader to trader. He got bought by Potiphar, who made him the manager of his household and the investor of his assets. Everybody thought Yosef was blessed by God, not because of his spirituality but because what he touched turned to gold. Potiphar’s wife treated him as a commodity too, as one of the interchangeable boy-toys her husband would buy for her.
Then in last week’s parasha Yosef became Pharaoh’s chief of commodities, the one who focused all of Egyptian society into one giant supply operation, transforming grain into a commodity that could be easily bought and sold and stored and distributed in new ways. To carry this out, Yosef was himself commodified again, dressed up as Tzafenat-Paneach, cookie-cutter Egyptian aristocrat.
In this whole process, Yosef was cut off from his individuality. He was cut off from his original faith – the only way God seemed to speak to him was by making the people around him financially successful. He interacted with the world as a broker in food, as the head of a kind of Chicago Board of Trade in Egypt. Even during the years of material prosperity before the famine, the years when he might have had some leisure, the commentaries say his life was only about the things he could buy up and store, and the planning for how to sell them later. No wonder his father Yaakov had this prophecy at the start when he saw the bloody cloak, the remains of Yosef’s last days as a playful tween. Tarof toraf Yosef, “Yosef is torn into pieces” (37:33); only this one part of him remains.
When Yosef saw his brothers coming to buy food, he was suddenly unable to be just the food broker, to take their money and give them what they came to buy. But it took him some time to disentangle himself, to reconstruct what it would be like to live in more than the commodity world.
When he finally revealed himself to his brothers, Yosef said: “I am your brother Yosef, whom you sold into Mitzrayim. Do not be distressed or reproach yourselves because you sold me here; it was to save life that God sent me ahead of you” (45:4-5).
There is a jarring juxtaposition here, the language of selling, saving life, and being on a divine mission all in two sentences. Phrase by phrase, Yosef was trying to extricate himself – you sold me, you sold me, to save life, God has sent me.
And we all need to extricate ourselves, to prevent ourselves from falling into the pit, the vortex where the commodity culture tries to pull us. It’s so easy to get swept up even in our free time into a world where having fun involves buying a ticket or paying for admission. Even in religious life, we talk about shul-shopping, no?
The model plane story isn’t just about a hobby costing money. It’s about one more thing vanishing from the realm of freedom and choice for its own sake, into the world of commodities for sale. I think that what commodification does is to make us less free, by keeping us busy thinking about what to buy and where to buy a ticket to relax. If we go too far, if we lose too much in that direction, we are flattened as human beings in that process. We lose dimension, we become less real, less free.
The commodification of leisure, fun, friendship, religion keeps us busy with choices, but always mediated as choices of how to spend. But there are more profound choices first – not just serious ones but simple ones like how to spend time with the people we care about when it’s not at a restaurant or a movie or an attraction. And of course more complicated ones like whose lives are we being sent by God to look out for and save.
Yosef tries to make that turn. Into the pit, he is subsumed in the culture of commodification. In daylight, at last, when he shows his face to his brothers, he realizes that he is in both worlds, and he needs to hold them in the right proportion.
It’s not easy. Yosef ends up in his life as both. He tries to add joy and family back into his life, to take care of his father and brothers, to leave deeper blessings for his children and grandchildren. He also takes the commodification of Egypt all the way to the end, buying food and property and even people for Pharaoh. He is so far down that road; Yosef is a cautionary tale.
This time of year – always, but especially now — we are bombarded with the force of commodification. Our free time is being commodified; if not our faith, the faith life of many people around us. We need to hold the line. This is the time of year to think about how much to spend our time outside of work at the mall vs. doing things that don’t cost anything. To make choices not only about what’s on sale, but about what the people in our lives and world need from us, and what we need for ourselves just to relax. Take some time, a few sticks and some fabric scraps, just what’s around the house, and try to make something that flies.
Shabbat Shalom!
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