SUKKOT, the harvest holiday, provided a good time to remind ourselves about how much we depend on petroleum products for our industrially-produced food — for the fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides, and for the fuel to power irrigation, farm machinery, processing plants, shipping and distribution systems, and the car you drive to the store to buy it.

Sukkot was also a good time to look at the s’chach draped over our sukkah roofs, and remind ourselves of our available local resources. 

See the contrast?

Depending on the distance your “conventional” food travels, 50% to 90% of the price you pay for it simply covers its petroleum inputs.

HUMANS are miracles of creative energy. Since the Industrial Revolution dawned 150 years ago, we have devised wonderful inventions to improve and lengthen our lives, marveled at our newfound abundance and thrilled to new possibilities.

So during the High Holidays, writes Rabbi Paul Cohen of Temple Jeremiah in Northfield, Ill., “we must look around at the miracle of creation, and rejoice that we are a part of it.”

Then we must use that joyous energy “to repair the damage we have caused through mistakes and intentional acts of transgression.”

On the High Holidays we recite, “Repentance, prayer and charity (teshuvah, tefillah and tzedakah) temper Judgment’s harsh decree.”