The local Blockbuster video is closing down in our area. This store, the last of the video rental store Mohicans, is the most recent in a long line of movie rental stores I have visited since the days my older brothers and I first searched the aisles at Errol's video in Rockville to rent only VHS tapes. When Rachel and I lived for a year in Jerusalem in 2004-2005 we occasionally rented a movie from a small store on Emek Refa'im. We have not yet started on Netflix or other on-demand movie services (mostly because our TV and DVD/VHS player are both tech dinosaurs), but we did go from time to time to Blockbuster when Redbox did not have movies we, or the kids, wanted to watch.
This extended introduction, a walk down memory lane, is secondary to a great lesson that we can learn from the video store (and also the Redbox machine). We learn the lesson that what we want is not always available for us, that we need to be flexible, and even when we are looking, or hoping, for one thing we may be surprised and find something else. We learn that someone else may have arrived just a few minutes before and taken the last copy of what we were itching to see. In a world that favors our unlimited ability to choose our entertainment and receive it instantly at any time of day, the values addressed by the character building trip to the movie rental store will need to be addressed elsewhere.
Where will the 'location' to teach these values? The Supermarket? The clothing store?
And so we say 'Kaddish' for our local video rental store, and we hope to keep the lessons of patience, flexibility, and more, alive.
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