If You Were a Rich Man

It’s not like this is the only issue we’re facing, but it seems like it gets more airtime than many others.  We’re a community almost completely split between haves and have-nots. That reality keeps creeping up in different incarnations, and so many of the other issues we struggle with (shidduchim, school acceptance, over-spending) are just an offshoot of the gap.

Of course, you can never know who belongs in which box. There are haves who are really have-nots, meaning that they have the house, vacation home and car, but l’maaseh, they don’t have… what’s the word, give me a minute, it’s at the tip of my tongue. Oh right, I have it. The money.

They don’t really have any money.

Then there are the have-nots, with the small, simple, overcrowded homes and outdated cars, but capable of writing out bigger checks than their counterparts on the other side of the dividing line.

Still, the massive influx of wealth into our community in recent years has brought us to this point, with many people in one category or the other.