Growing Gap [Voice in the Crowd / Issue 898]
Kudos to Rabbi Besser for willing to tackle a big issue in our community. We’d love to pretend jealousy isn’t an issue, because it makes us look petty, but we all know it’s real and inevitable, really.
Rabbi Besser is right. Life is better when we concentrate on our own blessings. But there are wider communal points that are affected by the growing flaunting of wealth, and the connected pursuit of pleasure and adventure.
- Telling children that certain pleasures and spending habits are not for “us” is easier to pull off when you are separating your values from the world around us. When it is a classmate or a family member, it’s much harder to delicately walk the line of telling your children that chasing certain pleasures and vacations are not what we should be doing with our money and time, without putting your friend or family member in a negative light. It’s hard to be mechanech children to respect their neighbor and reject their high-end lifestyle. This is the dilemma so many are facing now.
- As the high-end lifestyle gets more prevalent, I can’t help but point out the gap between what our mechanchim and mechanchos are getting paid to educate children who are spending Chanukah in Miami, midwinter in Cancun, and Pesach in Costa Rica. What does it say about the value we accord to those that teach Torah, and by extension, the Torah itself? Of course, everyone knows chinuch salaries are not indicative of the value of chinuch at all, but as the gap widens, it gets harder to justify the growing spending on everything else except chinuch.
- This is probably the most important point: We have been here before as a nation. We settle somewhere, make it, and promptly forget that we are just guests in this land. This has happened time and time again in our past, and each time it ends badly for us. We shouldn’t be building ostentatious mansions when it brings unwelcome non-Jewish attention to us.
They are suspicious of us as it is. Should we be making it easy to make them more jealous of us? To perpetuate the lies that we take their money, that we buy politicians, that we control the banks? Because that is what flaunting does. Where is our seichel, and sense of history?
So yes, we all should be focusing on our own blessings, but what wealth is doing to our community needs a long, hard look.
