We've been going through books and seforim trying to weed out those that need to leave. We have thousands of volumes in the house and there is no way we are going to take all of them with us when we move. Besides, even for the time we are still here, the shelves are more than overflowing and some culling is necessary.
We ended up with three boxes of shaimos. About one carton's worth of the books were still in good condition and useable, and we found a place to give them to. The other two boxes are not useable by anyone and have to go to shaimos. And we've discovered just how much that is going to cost and are floored. One organization quoted us $5 per sefer in the boxes. Oh yeah, and they considered those bentchers you get at weddings as one sefer. 33 bentchers equals $165?! Another place gave us a "bargain" rate and would only charge $50 per box no matter how many seforim are in the box.
When we were in the process of making over our backyard we buried our shaimos ourselves. Unfortunately there's no place to dig up right now, certainly not for two boxes worth of seforim. So, anyone have an idea of where we can take these boxes that won't cost $100 at a minimum? Are there any other options regarding shaimos?
Posting Addition: For a discussion of what shaimos is and how it should be removed, see http://www.shaimos.org/guidelines.htm According to what I read on the site, articles discussing Torah that are printed in the various English language newspapers should be cut out of the newspapers before you dispose of them, and these articles are also considered as shaimos. Remind me that I'm not buying any of these newspapers any more.
20 comments:
If you find anything out, please let us know. With the proliferation of Jewish publishing, this is going to become more and more of an issue. My shul has hundreds of old machzorim and siddurim that are gathering mold on shelves. Nobody uses them, but getting them formally disposed of is prohibitive. I find this denegration of our sacred objects horrifying, but can't think of any appropriate alternative.
Is burying the absolutely only permissible way? My husband took a few books to shul to put in their shaimos collection to be picked up and the shul also charges $5 per book. They told my husband that that is what they get charge by the organization that picks up the shaimos. There has to be a better way.
Agree with Efrex that there is so much more now that is shaimos and we don't have any workable solutions about the burial of it. Our area just doesn't have all that many options as to where we are going to find open land that could be used for burial. And, ironically, there just aren't enough people dying so that grave sites aren't the complete answer.
We've basically been using our attic to store shaimos for almost 20 years. It represents a fire hazzard at this point and we have to do something with it, but the options are very limited and the cost is out of sight. It could easily cost us in the thousands to get the shaimos buried properly. I'm sure we aren't the only ones with this problem, but I don't see this on any radar screen among the rabbanim.
Can't believe the costs I'm reading. Was on my to do list to remove all the shaimos from the house this summer, but I straight can't afford what they are going to charge for the amount we have. And to hire someone to dig up a pit in the backyard big enough for all we have would also cost a fortune. And then we'd have to do it again in a few years for the shaimos that is coming.
Could be a budget breaker that no one thinks about and certainly doesn't plan for. Thanks for ruining my Tuesday morning--something else to worry about.
If memory serves, there was a small kerfuffle in Lakewood over a rabbi's dumping thousands of bags of shaimot in an undeveloped lot: the DEP considered it an inappropriate landfill.
This might be a relatively minor issue in klal, but it is a significant one, and one that is only going to grow.
As land gets more expensive and environmental concerns and permitting costs grow, it is not going to get less expensive. No one is saving money by delaying the inevitable.
some people have mentioned burying it in their backyard. how is this a respectful way to dispose of it? burying it in a cemetery makes sense, because it will not be distubred, but in the backyard? and then someone puts a swimming pool over it? or the next owner does renovations and digs it up?
also, there are different opinions as to what consitutes shaimos, but like everything else these days we try to be maximalist, which is part of why we have so much of it now.
(and remember, for much of our history it was prohibitively expensive for us to own books and most people probably didn't. think how much it costs to write a sefer torah. yes, some of it is for the skill of the sofer, but a lot of it is for his time and the materials, which were even more expenseive then)
"With the proliferation of Jewish publishing, this is going to become more and more of an issue."
with the proliferation of the digital world this may become less and less of an issue. sure, for now there are plenty of people who print out what they read, which exacerbates the problem, but i suspect that over the next generation people will get used to reading everything on a screen.
"i suspect that over the next generation people will get used to reading everything on a screen."
and i have faith that apple will come out with a shabbat app at some point so we can read digital material on shabbat as well!
Lion,
But you can't read things on a screen on Shabbat. I think we'll always be publishing books for that reason no matter how digital the rest of the world goes. I always thought shamos was only for the explicit name of God, not just for any Torah material. I think what's really going on is that a lot of shamos is probably going into the garbage as people don't know what to do with it all or when there's a death or people move, etc. Maybe there should be a push to not print things with God's name. If you can use a wedding bencher regardless of whether or not it has God's name, why not just print it without and save everyone the trouble down the line?
I am confused by the guidelines on the link you provided. It says that certain objects should be double wrapped in plastic. Apart from the fact that plastic is a new invention and therefore unlikely to be part of halacha (although some people consider tin foil to be mandatory, so why not hefty bags), one would think the wrapping should be biodegradeable so the buried item will quickly return to the earth, like the way a body is treated at burial.
And a good reason Efrex for why if the rabbis want to do something practical (never mind money saving)they should say that printed bentchers for ANY simcha are not allowed. A catering hall could have X number of bentchers on hand that could cover all the simchas taking place there for years. Instead, everyone prints up a bentcher and those who have been married for a while can have a collection of 100s, most of which never get used but what are you supposed to do with them given what shaimos disposal costs?
LOZ, you can't rely on cemeteries alone--there just isn't enough room for what is produced. Shuls surely don't have enough room for a geniza big enough to hold a communty's worth of shaimos for one year, never mind for years. We saw the problem in Lakewood with getting a parcel of land and using it as a shaimos landfill--government and neighbors were upset. Besides, who says that property won't get sold later on and the new owners won't dig it up?
Someone has to go back to the issue of shaimos and come up with a practical solution that won't break the bank. Back when there weren't many books this wasn't so much of a problem, but today this is a mega problem. Instead of producing the next weekly chumrah, perhaps the gedolei yisroel could get practical and look at this matter as being important.
I'd never seen the site linked to before so I read through pretty carefully. Did raise some questions I'm going to speak to my Rav about.
But I found this which was interesting. The OU has shaimos boxes that are 12"x7"x15" in size. You buy them for $10.95 a box. When they are filled you mail them back to the OU which promises burial. You pay the postage on the box. This means added expenses since seforim can weigh a lot, and even a bunch of smaller pieces can weigh a lot. Figure another $8-10 for postage. But that box doesn't hold very much if you look at all the things they say should be in shaimos. If the kids school material counts as shaimos, as the site says most of it does, you are going to need way more than 1-2 boxes per year.
JS:
"But you can't read things on a screen on Shabbat."
it took us a few centuries before we joined our non-jewish neighbors and took the leap from scroll to codex and i'm sure we'll eventually go mostly digital as well. maybe some stuff will be printed for shabbat use, but most won't. and i do have faith that apple will develop a shabbat mode for it's products.
LEAHLE:
"My husband took a few books to shul to put in their shaimos collection to be picked up and the shul also charges $5 per book."
i own thousands of books, the majority of which i acquired for less than $5 per book. i can't imagine that if i ever decided to discard the books that i'd have go into debt to pay more for shaimos than i paid to acquire them.
How about minimizing what actually constitutes sheimot and recycling the rest? Maybe there should be special recycling programs for seforim.
See Rav Nahum Rabinowitz "Siah Nahum" for a tshuva which is very lenient on which papers require "shaimos" disposal.
I remember when a shul addition was being built in Elizabeth and I volunteered to collect the shaimos to take it there to be buried. I was amazed at some of the stuff people think is shaimos: kippot, tzitzis, broken plates with a Shabbos motif... R. E.M. Teitz said that unless there is an actual shem Hashem on it, it does not need to be buried. This includes most parsha sheets, the Jewish Press, even a page of Gemara. Yes, there are stricter opinions and even opinions that go so far as to say that anything written in loshon haKodesh is shaimos! (I believe that R. H. Shechter is particularly machmir).
R. Teitz said to put the "pseudo shaimos" in a plastic bag and throw it in the garbage. I just put it in my paper recycling.
zdub, interesting that R'H. Shecter considers that everything written in loshon haKodesh is shaimos. I have to imagine that even he makes some exceptions to that. Otherwise we are in really big trouble in finding places to bury shaimos. There is loshon haKodesh printed all over labels for products that are sold, on posters and flyers, even on storefronts. It appears on menus. It's on kids game boxes. And then look at Israel. Virtually everything that has print on it is all in Hebrew. Does that mean that street signs have to go into shaimos? How about cereal boxes and the labels from every single product sold? Want to tell me where we could possibly have enough land to bury this type of shaimos, never mind all the shaimos coming up in the future?
Tuvi: I doubt very strongly that R' Schachter believes that ANYTHING written in Hebrew is inherently Sheimos ("Lashon Hakodesh" is a very interesting expression, but that's a discussion for another time).
There are several shiurim on yutorah.org that deal with sheimos issues, for those who are interested.
I run a major sheimos operation in France. Cost seems to be much lower here. Re: bentchers - you would not want to see what I see (thousands upon thousands of unused bentchers sent to burial). I try my best to find them a new home, but it is really mission impossible. I do get rid of some. And the others .. well, I have them stored in boxes. When I run out of room, I'll have to consider what to do with them.
I had a very good experience with 866shaimos they didn't charge to pick up usable seforim and were very reasonable with the shaimos. they are also under hashgacha
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