The Jew in the Prius

Back in October, I asked the kids to stay inside while my wife and I had a serious conversation on the front lawn. Later my oldest reported what he told his siblings: “They’re getting a divorce.”

Not quite. We were getting a Prius.

The last time we bought a new car was in 1994, and that workhorse Toyota Corolla was on its last wheels. Still, it was hard saying goodbye. We are both a) loyal and b) cheap. We agreed on a new Toyota, but how much did we want to spend? A new Corolla was the right price, but the Camry had room for the kids. As for the Prius, it was as roomy as the Camry and got even better mileage than the Corolla, but it was pricey.

And then there was the pressure. Gas prices soared after hurricane season, and dealers couldn’t keep the gas-electric hybrid Priuses on their lots. When we had our talk, a dealer had just called saying he had a silver Prius in stock, and we had to come down that instant to claim it.

I wanted that Prius. I loved the idea of minimal emissions and maximal mileage. I wanted to do my bit to break America’s dependence on foreign oil. I wanted to pull up alongside a Hummer and smirk. (The name “Prius,” I suspect, is from a Latin root meaning “self-righteous.”)

We talked long enough to guarantee years of therapy for all three kids, but in the end we agreed to buy the hybrid. (Actually, we agreed to wait until the dealer got a blue one. When you are paying full sticker price, you have a right to be choosy.) And in the past few weeks, as the price of a gallon of gas in New Jersey climbed close to $3 and beyond, I felt vindicated. Just this morning, in 22 miles of highway driving, I averaged — according to the nifty dashboard computer — close to 58 miles per gallon. That’s more than a lot of automotive writers led me to expect. But I’m easy on the gas pedal and lock in the cruise control at the speed limit or slightly under.

I bring this up not to gloat (okay, maybe a little) but to ask a question about Americans and consumption. It’s not popular to talk about doing with less or smaller, even though so many indicators suggest we are paying the price for our super-sized lifestyles. Childhood obesity. Unchecked sprawl. Tract mansions heated and cooled by a plant that could serve an elementary school. We fret about the costs of health care, high taxes, and soaring energy bills, but seldom with a thought about how the choices we make as individuals contribute to the problems we face as a society.

I know I sound like a scold. A little Bolshie, even. But that’s the problem: Consumerism is too often confused with patriotism. And when someone does suggest that less is more, they are apt to hear responses like that of Vice President Cheney. “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue,” he once said, “but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”

Except, of course, when it is. Jimmy Carter lately sounds like he’s running for Palestinian foreign minister, but his energy policies deserve a second and third look, as writer Gregg Easterbrook has pointed out. “During his term, Carter deregulated oil and natural gas while imposing a big increase in vehicle MPG,” wrote Easterbrook. “These actions converted the oil and gas shortages of the 1970s into the surpluses of the 1980s, and cracked the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries’ (opec) ‘price maintenance’ monopoly.”

The irony is that Carter is today lampooned for his sweaters and thermostat obsession, even as our dependence on dangerous and unstable suppliers in the Persian Gulf grows. Since 1990, when Congress capped the average fuel-economy standards for passenger cars at 27.5 miles per gallon, Americans have gone nuts for heavier, thirsty SUVs and other light trucks.

What I know about energy policy can fit in the glove compartment of my (did I mention “incredibly fuel-efficient”?) Prius. But I’m talking about individual choices, not public policy.

Automotive writer Joseph B. White of The Wall Street Journal recently put the current gas shocks in perspective.

Reducing gasoline consumption in the United States doesn’t depend on a technological leap, he writes, but rather a “more-challenging effort to recalibrate culture.” Detroit and Japan are producing cars that get 40 MPG, but what will it take to put more Americans behind their wheels?” “The question,” writes White, “is whether more American consumers will put aside habits acquired over the past 70 years and rethink their obsession with speed, size and status.”

It seems to me that as soon as you start talking about “culture,” “habits,” and “status,” you are moving into the territory of organized religion. Not that Judaism is an ascetic faith, but it does teach principles that are germane to the current energy crisis. There’s bal tashchit, the mitzva that prohibits wasteful consumption. Pikuah nefesh, or saving a life, demands we pay attention to a toxic environment. And, as Rabbi Lawrence Troster of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life has pointed out, “In the Jewish tradition, the public good overrides individual desires.”

Outside of COEJL and some other environmental groups, I don’t hear many Jewish leaders talking in these terms. Maybe it is time they did. If the Jewish tradition teaches nothing else, it is that sometimes, personal virtue is sound public policy.

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