We are weeks into what for most of us has been the most tumultuous period of our lives. We all know people who have, r”l, passed away, people who are in need of our continued tefillot for a speedy recovery, others who have lost jobs or seen their pay cut dramatically, worried over how they will support their families. Our lives have been upended. These times are anything but normal.

While the duration of these difficult times is unknown, they will eventually come to an end. Weeks or months from now, perhaps even longer—life will return to some semblance of normalcy. There will indeed be changes in society, some predictable by most already today, some less obvious to the casual observer. But much like after the global financial crisis of 2008, life will go on. The question for us as a Jewish community is whether we will seize the opportunity this crisis has given us to rethink certain things we take for granted in order to put ourselves on solid footing for the next several decades or will we squander it and go about “business as usual,” which will inevitably lead to much pain and suffering in our community in the years ahead.

At this point, you’re probably wondering what in the world am I talking about? It’s simple—I’m referring to the basic price of entry to live in a Modern Orthodox community like Teaneck today—you simply have to be wealthy.

Many readers might be thinking, “I’m not wealthy. We have a household income of $300K and we barely scrape by. We can barely make ends meet. After paying the $90K tuition bill for our four kids and then summer camp and the mortgage and the weekly grocery bill and making Yom Tov, etc., we have nothing left over.” But I’ve got news for you. You are wealthy. Very wealthy. And very fortunate. You have a household income that’s higher than 98% of American households and higher than 99.9% of global households.

Our entire community is built upon the premise that most of our families need to earn incomes in the top two percent of American households. Those that really make it big and earn many multiples of that typical $300K family need to subsidize those families who, “nebech,” only earn something less than a “wealthy” type income.

This is a communal financial structure that can’t and won’t endure. It would have taken years to unravel without this crisis but it would have been inevitable. The next generation is very unlikely to have 60-70% of families earning top 2% incomes. Structural changes in society already well underway make that highly improbable. But we need to ask ourselves if such a way of life is even desirable. Do we all benefit from a system where we expect all of our children (regardless of ability or desire) to go into one of only a handful of professions that make the “big bucks”? Besides the many obvious reasons this is unhealthy, I would argue that this implicit pressure in our community has crept into our educational system as well, where we have prioritized intellectual achievement above all else, something which—as many parents can attest to—is leaving far too many of our children behind. But that is a topic for another time.

This is not just about the future—it’s also about the present. As any rabbi in this community can testify, financial stress causes so many families to have shalom bayit issues. As someone who has been on scholarship committees for 15 years, I can speak to the number of families who are deeply in debt, maxed out on credit cards and worse. The next generation isn’t asleep at the switch either. Young adults in their late teens and early 20s openly talk about how they won’t be able to afford more than a couple of kids, how they can’t pursue their dream of studying or pursuing a career in field X because it won’t support a “frum lifestyle.” How sad! Is it really the case that in order to be a frum Jew, one has to be wealthy? Is that really the Torah way?

There simply has to be another path. We have an opportunity here as a community and as individuals to re-examine how we live our lives, how we make our spending decisions, and most importantly, if the communal norms that we have become accustomed to—some of which are tremendous financial burdens—are really necessary.

Rabbi Larry Rothwachs gave an amazing Shabbos Hagadol Drasha a couple of weeks ago in which he spoke about rethinking our approach to a wide range of communal norms we take for granted including how we approach various spending decisions around things like weddings, bar mitzvahs etc. If you haven’t listened to it, it’s worth the hour. It’s available on YouTube. I’m not a rabbi and I certainly don’t live up to the ideals he espouses, so I’m not going to preach the religious aspects he refers to about how it’s a Torah value to live modestly. I’m simply going to come at it all from a financial vantage point.

I’ll start with simchas. Has everyone seen the videos of one of the weddings from the past several weeks? Simple affairs without all the fancy trimmings we are accustomed to where people attended in a socially distanced way? I, for one, thought they were beautiful. And I was wondering, do you think these couples are going to have any less blissful marriages because they didn’t have their wedding in some fancy hall? Will their children be any less cute because they didn’t spend $10K on flowers? Will their shalom bayit be negatively impacted because their guests didn’t have 25 dishes to choose from at some elaborate smorgasbord?

I’m sure some in the food preparation business wouldn’t be happy if people toned down their weddings. But I have spoken with someone in the business who has told me that it pains him tremendously to see how people put themselves into debt just to make a wedding. It has to stop. And I actually think the greatest responsibility is on those who have the means to spend. Those who are blessed with the most material wealth have to set the example for others and change the community standards. And then there are the l’chaims and the vorts and the sheva brachot—the amount of money spent is truly incredible. And the same goes for bar/bat mitzvahs. We have lost our way. We have forgotten what’s truly important.

Let’s move on to what is the largest expense for most of our families—the cost of Jewish education. We seem to have learned nothing from 2008. My good friend Dror Futter penned an op-ed in this very newspaper a few months ago making the point that our community did not learn the lesson we should have from 2008 and the schools are even less prepared for the next downturn (which is about to be much worse than 2008) than they were last time. There’s been no re-think of the way Jewish education is delivered. No differentiated funding approaches. No innovative cost models. Fewer and fewer families are able to pay full tuition. And this all happened during the boom years! We’ve gone from an average of 20% of families needing financial aid to over 30% in the past decade. And no re-think of anything.

One exception. Yeshivat He’Atid. Forty percent cheaper than the other elementary schools. Ninety-seven percent pay full tuition. Yes, I’m biased. I was one of the founders of the school. Everyone said it couldn’t be done. Well, it’s eight years later. We will have over 600 children registered for next year. Graduating our first class in June. Tuition started at $9K in 2012 and has only increased with inflation as promised. School is running at a break-even level. Parents are very happy. This is not an advertisement. In fact, He’Atid is almost at capacity.

The question is, why hasn’t any other school copied He’Atid’s very successful model? Or experimented with some other educational model to lower the cost of education? Why is every high school $25-30K? There is zero chance of these schools being sustainable at these price points. Why is there no sense of urgency? Why is there no thought given to innovative ways to do things better and more cost effectively? Lots of talk about how we need to be “cost conscious” but no real action on making a real difference.

I’d be remiss if I placed all the blame here just on the leadership of the schools. Parents are often complicit in demanding all sorts of “bells and whistles” that simply contribute to ever-increasing baseline expectations, further driving costs higher. This too has to stop. Much like when it comes to weddings, this mindset needs a reset.

The question is asked all the time why so many people with financial means don’t contribute to Jewish education. I’ll tell you why. Nobody likes to give to causes that aren’t enduring. People who have made lots of money are generally able to do simple analysis, and anyone who takes a basic look at the economics of an institution that charges a price that fewer and fewer people can afford every year knows that they aren’t supporting something that is sustainable in the long term. I believe that funders will step up big time if the lay and professional leadership of the schools in partnership with parents get their collective heads out of the sand and commit themselves to restructuring and significantly lowering their cost structures. It can and must be done.

I’m running out of the space that the esteemed editor of The Link so graciously gave me. I could write paragraphs and paragraphs on a host of other issues. I’ve covered a couple of the really big ones but there is so much more to say. I’ll just throw out some more questions for consideration. Do we really need so many large and elaborate shul expansions? Does every child at every age need to go to an expensive summer camp for two whole months? Is it a “right” for every young couple in their late 20s to buy a house? Is tzniut (modestly) really just a rigid set of halachic rules defining what body parts need to be covered, or is it a much broader area encompassing our spending decisions make regarding our houses, cars, vacations etc? (Hint: It’s a rhetorical question).

Although he surely wasn’t the first to say it, Rahm Emanuel is the most recent to be credited with saying “Don’t let a good crisis go to waste.” While every sane person wishes the COVID-19 pandemic had never happened, it does present a golden opportunity for the lay and rabbinic leadership to get together to seriously tackle the financial structure of our community so that we can preserve what we have and ultimately have it thrive for generations to come.

I’ve lived in the greater Teaneck Modern Orthodox community for almost my entire life. And I love it; our community is such a great blend of Torah, chesed and so much more. It took the hard work of so many to get our community to where it is today. I consider myself fortunate and blessed to live here—there’s no other community in which my wife and I would prefer to raise our children. But I fear greatly for the future of the community we are all so blessed to be a part of. I am afraid that it can and likely will unravel quickly if we don’t start to tackle the issue of financial sustainability head-on, and time is of the essence. For the sake of our children and grandchildren, I sincerely hope that we don’t squander the opportunity currently before us. ?אם לא עכשיו אימתי

The author can be reached at [email protected].

By Gershon Distenfeld