I loved my local Buy Nothing group from the moment I discovered it, sometime early in 2020, when the world was cloistered and quarantined. There was something compelling about the slivers of other people’s lives it offered, the photos that captured items but also beige carpet or a cat in the background. And its mission is an aspirational one. Yes, the thousands of Buy Nothing groups that have proliferated on Facebook are a way for people living in close proximity to circulate and recycle things, but, if you ask the founders, “the true wealth is the web of connections formed between people who are real-life neighbors.”
But perhaps what drew me the most to Buy Nothing groups is how they echo for me a virtual version of a very real place of my childhood: the gemach.
The word gemach is a portmanteau of the Hebrew phrase “gemilut chasadim,” meaning acts of loving-kindness. It is essentially, as My Jewish Learning writes, “a Jewish recycling agency of sorts, a repository of useful items that people may borrow and then return.”
Gemachs proliferate throughout Orthodox Jewish life, especially in the more Haredi communities, where social capital — indicated by the trust and cooperation between people within networks — is higher than average. A search for “Monsey gemachs” on one website yields 77 results for the large community of Haredi Jews in New York town, with a variety of offerings: feeding tubes, blue lights (“to aid with sleepless nights”), wedding dresses, baby formula, space heaters, maternity clothing, gowns for brides and family members, school supplies, skin healing (“information on how to relieve eczema type rashes without steroids”) and tablecloths. Some gemachs are located in synagogues or community centers, but most are in the garages, basements, attics and spare bedrooms of the generous people who store the items.
I have been the knowing recipient of gemach items since I was a young child. I grew up in Oak Park, Michigan, a small city adjacent to Detroit. We, like many other community members, patronized the local food-and-clothing gemach. My mother volunteered there, and she kept strange hours because of it; she often came back with bags of slightly overripe fruit or boxes of graham crackers which would serve as our school snacks.
The functioning of the gemach was impressive, I learned as a teenager: The gemach’s founder, a formidable woman named Mrs. Schwab, frequently contacted neighborhood grocery stores, kosher food suppliers and food banks to request donations of products on the verge of their sell-by dates. Then, an army of volunteers organized and disseminated the items to the many gemach visitors. It is a place of what Erich Fromm might call “motherly love” — a love that wants nothing for itself.
On Thursday nights, we would line up in minivans down Mrs. Schwab’s street. When it was our turn, my sisters and I would jump out to help my mother load the goods in. I would wave to the girls I knew from school, who were still in the same school uniforms as I was, helping their parents, too. We would bring the food home, and some weeks new Shabbos dresses too, and we would bake and cook and clean and bicker.
When I look back on my experiences at the gemach, I don’t remember shame. I think it’s that we didn’t patronize the gemach because we didn’t have enough. It was the enough — we weren’t needy, we weren’t ashamed, because of the gemach.
In this, my childhood was charmed. There was something shtetl-esque here, something radically unusual that flourished in the chaos of the culture I grew up in. The gemach, I know today, is an artifact of a different time.
Academic discussions of the gemach are few and far between. It’s not entirely clear where it originated; several websites claim it was a medieval practice, but there’s no clear evidence to support that. Still, the most well-researched of the recent journals I found on the subject, a 2008 paper written by Donna Shai and published in the Journal of Religion & Society, speaks to the various reasons gemach use has become more prolific in recent years. The gemach, she explains, functions as “an informal banking institution,” a way to recycle items within the community, “an employment clearinghouse,” a place to lend items for religious rituals, and even as a lost-and-found.
“The gemach provides help, while understanding religious requirements,” Shai concludes. And this, I would argue, is the crux of it. What makes the gemach so profoundly important is what makes it the product of a highly observant community to begin with — self-discipline, self-consciousness and a trust between members so devout it might even be holy.
These days, I don’t frequent a gemach, but the Upper East Side Buy Nothing group, my current haunt, has over 21,000 members. Items most in-demand include designer clothes, handbags and shoes (a quilted green Valentino handbag with tags, for instance, had 361 comments) and the Stokke Tripp Trapp high chair, which is gifted quite frequently, sometimes with the hashtag “curb alert.”
Does it make the Upper East Side feel like a neighborhood? Not exactly. Any New York City neighborhood is big and transient in nature. Still, I recognize some of the people who come to pick up items from me now, and our small apartment is marked by the contributions of many of my neighbors. Perhaps we will never have more than a cursory conversation as we make the handoff, but my daughter draws on an Ikea table that their son once used, and our dog tries new treats that another pickier dog rejected. And the items I give, too, are perhaps, in some real way, becoming a part of another family’s ecosystem.
That, at least, is what I hope for.
