Think outside the bottle

A few years back, my son Daniel converted me about bottled water. I had thought that drinking pure and healthy water was an act of environmental awareness, but he helped me see it the other way around. Spending resources to make little bottles that could only hold one long drink, to put water into those bottles, ship them all around the country, put them on shelves and sell them one by one, could hardly be corrected just by recycling the bottles after we used them. Better to stick with plain old tap water, or tap water we filter ourselves, and a reusable bottle that might last years. If frugality is a virtue—and Mussar insists that it is—it applies especially to the earth resources that Hashem has entrusted to us. As rebbetizin Malkah points out in her article  entitled “and to keep it” (at www.rivertonmussar.org where this blog appears too), “Being frugal with the resources of our planet is not political—it is theological.”