In the 1950s, the British naval historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson advanced, in a satirical and somewhat cynical form, what he called the “Law of Triviality,” which asserted that the amount of time spent discussing an issue within an organization ran in inverse proportion to its actual importance. This law also became known as “bikeshedding” because of the anecdote that Parkinson used to demonstrate his point.

He asked his readers to imagine a committee meeting where there were three items on the agenda: 1) A proposal for a £10 million nuclear power plant 2) An idea to build a bike shed 3) A small annual coffee budget. Parkinson envisioned that the committee would race through the plans for the nuclear power plant but then spend an inordinate amount of time haggling over the bike shed. And the longest discussion of all was over the coffee budget. Parkinson’s point? People know relatively little about nuclear power, and the details of building a plant are very complex and incredibly detailed, so the committee quickly gives up and moves to the easier items like bike sheds. And when it comes to coffee, everyone has an opinion, so the meeting would take much longer.

Recently, two news items captured the imagination of the Jewish world. The first story involved 17 year old Jacob Steinmetz who, with a blazing fastball and wicked curve in his repertoire, was drafted by a professional baseball team. Ordinarily, this would be thoroughly unremarkable news, except for Jacob and his family. But, as it happens, Jacob Steinmetz was raised as an Orthodox Jew, who keeps kosher and is Shabbat observant. How would Jacob reconcile the life of a major league athlete, with games on Friday night and Saturday? But Jacob seems prepared for this apparent contradiction, saying that he intends to pitch on Shabbat: “The plan is to keep doing what I’ve been doing my whole life, where I’ve stayed nearby to the field and walk to the game on those days.”

The second story concerned an announcement by Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. Here is the company’s tweet: “Ben & Jerry’s will end sales of our ice cream in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Sales would continue in “Israel proper” for the time being.

Much discussion, on social media and in other corners of the Jewish world, ensued about the choices made by the young pitcher and the established ice cream manufacturer. I do not mean to downplay the gravity of these developments. The first story is, for some people, reflective of a lager tension between honouring Jewish law and the seduction of modernity. Can the two worlds be reconciled? And the furor over the Ben and Jerry’s story took place under the overarching shadow of the BDS movement, and the question of boycotts of Israel and their potential relationship to anti-Semitism.

But, at the same time, the world is shuddering under the press of weightier matters: poverty; climate change; health care and education; racial and gender oppression; global injustice. So if they are not analogous to discussions about coffee, neither do heated conversations about baseball and ice cream compare to building a nuclear power plant, regardless of their Jewish twist or Israeli politics.

Yet it turns out that triviality isn’t trivial at all, but a powerful symbol of a universal tiredness, the sense that the bigger issues–the ones that truly require our time, attention and passion–may just be too big and too difficult not only for us to correct, but even to talk about. Our strangely intense obsessions with sports and food and celebrity perhaps reveal our deeply held suspicions about how little we can control. Recycling my water bottle; giving to a charity; a coin in someone’s cup on a grey morning in the midst of a biting wind; an empathic ear for a friend as she bemoans her inability to break it off with an unfaithful partner. A few actions, here and there. But in the main, we find ourselves overwhelmed by the larger forces–political, natural, historical—such that our distractions are not just a balm for tired minds and bodies, but a tacit admission of surrender.

A century ago, Virginia Woolf conveyed the feel, the smell of that non-coherence at the center of our lives, in To the Lighthouse. The painter Lily Briscoe is trying to paint, but she is thinking and lamenting over the death of her friend Mrs. Ramsay. She is sitting next to a poet, Augustus Carmichael, and Lily imagines that she and Mr. Carmichael might demand that life account for itself:

“For one moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it with violence, as two fully equipped human beings from whom nothing should be hid might speak, then, beauty would roll itself up; the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs. Ramsay would return. `Mrs. Ramsay!’ she said aloud, `Mrs. Ramsay!’ The tears ran down her face.”

But is it really so? Can we do nothing to effect the larger problems of the world? And even if we could, doesn’t it have to be when we are in the so called prime of our lives? If you feel this way, then let me introduce you to Francis Townsend (1867-1960). Francis was one of six children who grew up poor in Illinois and Nebraska and contracted malaria as a child. He did not finish high school; started a number of businesses that failed, and lost several jobs in the course of his career. So why can you find this obscure and seemingly failed life with its own Wikipedia entry? Because in a small but tangible way, Francis Townsend made a contribution that changed America.

In the midst of the Depression–September 1933–Townsend wrote a letter to the editor of his local newspaper in Long Beach, California, where he was by then living. Thus was the “Townsend Plan” born, a proposal that asked for every citizen over 60 to receive $200 a month. Townsend recalled in his memoirs that the origin of the plan was when he looked out his window one morning and saw two old women, dressed in tattered clothes, picking through his garbage cans looking for food.

Within a couple of years of his letter, there had sprung up thousands of “Townsend Plan Clubs”, all over America. These clubs pressed Congress to pass an old-age pension plan. Finally, President Roosevelt admitted to Frances Perkins, the Labor Secretary, that “we have to have Social Security. Congress can't stand the pressure of the Townsend Plan unless we have a real old-age insurance system." At the age of 66, Francis Townsend’s moment had arrived. The president’s plan looked very different than the original idea, but Townsend’s initial impulse, not to simply succumb to the larger forces of reality, led to one of the economic revolutions of the modern Western world.

Doubtless Francis Townsend liked his baseball and ice cream, but fortunately for all of us, he was able to start a more important conversation.