happy birthday, sarina!, feb 2014

A ‘Sweet Sixty’

Celebration

for the world’s sweetest sister

When I was at Brooklyn College back in the early 1970s...

I was quite the tree-hugging environmentalist

Recycling was just taking off, and Savta...

...might recall that I would spend hours in the basement breaking up

hundreds of Tab, No-Cal, and other diet soft drink bottles because

breaking them up was the only way that I could fit a couple of

months’ worth in my little Renault R-10.

Ema, do you remember me crushing bottles? I often left a mess of

glass shards on our Torginol basement floor back on East 7th St.

The Renault R-10 was a tiny car and I must have stuffed dozens of

shopping bags full of crushed glass in it, all but obstructing my

view, schlepping the glass to one of the few recycling centers in

the city (located by the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge)...

so that I could carry a much larger load and keep these

time-consuming trips to a minimum. At the time, I was

also involved in the Sierra Club...

lobbying in support of the clean air act. I was also

involved in trying to enact bottle bill legislation.

But of all of these, the issue that I was perhaps most

involved with was overpopulation.

I volunteered with the organization Zero

Population Growth (AKA ZPG)

They are an organization that believes that the root of many problems

facing the world, including hunger, pollution, energy and water scarcity,

climate change, is in overpopulation, and that the solution for

overpopulation is to use persuasion and public policy to encourage people

to have no more than 2 biological children.

I volunteered for ZPG for several years during college, serving as

an office volunteer, writing letters to the editor, etc. In fact, I was

so passionate about the issue that I went to visit the Yeshiva of

Flatbush...

from where I had graduated several years several years

earlier, and I met with my old nemesis Rabbi David

Eliach...

in order to ask him whether I could speak to some of the

senior classes about ZPG. He politely declined. Many of my

friends and family knew about my passion, too.

Several years went by after I graduated college, and I

was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I was taking classes at the University of New Mexico

towards a Master’s degree...

and I was also working at the Inhalation Toxicology Research

Institute, studying the health effects of air pollutants

It was Thanksgiving of 1979...

and I was delighted to be getting guests: Harvey and

Sarina, for a pre-wedding visit!!

I picked them up at Albuquerque Airport

As soon as we got to the house, my sweet...

sister pulled me aside and told me the following: “Rafi, I know that

you decided you did not want to have any children due to your

concerns about the environment. Well, Harvey and I have been

thinking about it and we came to a decision.”

“Yes,” I replied?

“Well, we decided that we will have one less child than we

planned to so that you could go ahead and have a child.”

This little story says it all: My sister, the most generous,

big-hearted, naïve person on the whole planet!!

Happy birthday, Sarina, as you enter into this, the second half of

your life, may you always be as generous, as big hearted...and as

naïve as you were on that 1979 Thanksgiving day!!

We all love you!

Rafi, Elizabeth, Sarah, and Talia