Collaborative Consumption is an intriguing idea. It is based on the realization that many of us have too much and that perhaps we can put that excess to work.

For example, if I have a drill that I rarely use, perhaps I could rent it to you for when you rarely need it. Or perhaps I work at home and have a car that sits idle for most of the week. And perhaps you have no car but only need a car for discrete times of the day. I could, if I were entrepreneurial, create a web presence to publicize these excesses, and invite you to rent my drill or my car.

Friends do this all the time. Now this style of resource-sharing is becoming big business - person by person on a global scale. These peer-to-peer enterprises are popping up all over the place and being aggregated and promoted on dozens of websites. It is a groundswell of a movement that seeks to use well the dormant resources we already have. And that is very good.

(It also, as the authors of the book of the same name tell us, both assumes and builds the social capital of trust. None of this would happen if we did not have a propensity to trust one another and these transactions would not continue without both parties honoring that trust. The track record of collaborative consumption transactions so far has been remarkably good. I don’t know how the insurance companies are going to handle this, though. And a quick search on Google doesn’t seem to indicate any problems yet - but I would bet that sooner or later insurance companies will try to use this to jack up rates and make even more money. But then, again, maybe I am just jaded.)

But there is another point I wanted to make. While the upside of all this is that we are becoming better at using the excess “resources” we have, perhaps this peer-to-peer movement can help us rethink how we create and come by those excess “resources” in the first place.

Today, most of us, including me - I am sad to say - tend to build, buy and own for maximum need. So we build houses for the biggest family and crowds we imagine hosting; we buy plates and silverware and cups and mugs and kitchen utensils for the maximum kind of entertaining we imagine doing; we buy wardrobes and shoes and handbags for the maximum kind of adventures we imagine having.

Yet, while we expend - in aggregate - millions or billions of dollars warehousing stuff we rarely use, millions of people right here in America - never mind around the world - walk around daily in a state of need. (And then of course there are the environmental costs we incur in having mined, manufactured, packaged, transported, and marketed these items that we hardly ever use. Let’s not even talk about off-site storage units for the moment.)

I remember reading about how, years ago, people who attended weddings and holiday celebrations would bring their own utensils, knowing that the host family did not have service for the hordes invited. And favorite dresses or purses would be borrowed for women did not have wardrobes sufficient to cover every celebrated adventure that came their way. And Dagwood and Herb are forever borrowing tools from each other.

So what if, in addition to using well the excess that we have, which is wonderful, we also work on building a world that has less excess, less waste and greater equity?

It seems to me that this is the kind of world that the laws of shemittah, pe’ah, and tzedek (equity) were meant to build.