What happens when money reshapes not just our definition of success, but our very identity?
Avi looked up from reviewing the numbers for the third time, his face ashen. “We’re not going to have enough for the car payments if we continue like this,” he told Malky. “Are you sure we need everything that party planner said?”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You make a nice salary — a very nice salary. And we’re making a normal, standard bar mitzvah. It’s not the party planner who’s making the decisions; this is what everyone in our neighborhood does. Do you want to look like a nebach? Do you want Menachem to feel ashamed in front of his friends?”
It’s a story that’s become more common in the younger frum community in America. And it’s one that is taking a heavy toll.
“The silent majority are choking. Pashut choking.”
This is the stark reality described by a Rabbi A., a prominent rav based in Eretz Yisrael who is consulted intimately by hundreds of bnei Torah in chutz l’Aretz. Daily, he hears from couples being strangled by an impossible choice: Keep up with the spending habits of their peers, or suffer the ignominy of being seen — in their own eyes, if not that of others — as miserable failures.
Preferring anonymity, he shared some of his experience and insight with Mishpacha. “I can’t afford to send my daughter to camp this summer,” one mother told him. “We’re barely surviving. I would do it anyway… because I have to. But then I’ll have to find the money to buy her a full new camp wardrobe, or she’ll be mortified in front of her friends. What am I supposed to do?”
It used to be “luxury living” when someone had the means to park a new high-end vehicle in the driveway every year or two, or drop $100,000 on a Yom Tov vacation to an exotic destination, or dress their children in designer wardrobes. Today, though, many of those expenditures have come to be seen as basic and normal. These come on top of the traditional large drains on a frum family’s finances, such as tuition, and people are choking.
Rabbi A. sees the expanding trend as frighteningly dangerous. It places a strain on people’s shalom bayis, families, and avodas Hashem — and that isn’t even the worst part of the problem. Not one to use the term “crisis” liberally, he doesn’t mince words. “If this doesn’t stop in the next few years, we’re heading toward a mega-crisis that risks destroying everything that Rabboseinu have painstakingly built over many decades. It shakes the foundations of our existence as a tzibbur and prolongs the galus.”
America’s frum community is built on Torah values, shaped by Torah hashkafos, and driven by the rhythms of Torah life. It’s a hub of mitzvos and yiras Shamayim, a bastion of sanity in an increasingly depraved world. But in too many circles, the proliferation of wealth has raised the standards of living, and — more dangerously — made it seem downright beggarly to live anything less than fabulously.
The result is a powerful pressure to spend, driven by a social dynamic that redefines success and pushes the bar of living to unsustainable heights, leaving a significant portion of the community in a state of acute financial and emotional distress. We talked with three prominent rabbanim who see and hear the widespread suffering daily, searching for an understanding of what has gone wrong and how it can be put right.
