Yasher koach to Yair Daar in his letter last week (“Thriving Jewish Communities are for Everyone” May 21, 2020) and for even (possibly unintentionally) connecting it to his Kids Link story (“What Are You Worth?”) that each person is important and counts even if you only give a half-shekel (which was the reason for the half and not whole shekel for those who couldn’t afford the whole). To be clear, and referring to the letters to which Daar referred, it is not necessarily the fact that people want to make community-wide changes because the “have-nots” are jealous of the “haves.” What if people are worried for their children’s sake? Children have a much harder time understanding certain things that are “fair” or “not fair” in life and don’t always understand subtleties. It is unfair to tell people to move and say they’d have a great life in South Bend, Indiana. Maybe we choose to live in one place not only because it means something to us but also because of its proximity to a lot of kosher food, good yeshivot, job opportunities and family and friends. If you went to your doctor with shoulder pain and said, “Hey, doc, my shoulder hurts when I do this,” and your doctor’s advice was, “So don’t do that,” would you trust that doctor or would you try to get to the root of the problem with your shoulder? Someone sees a “problem” in the community and voices said problem and the response is, “So move.” That is not taking care of the issue. This is a potential for so much opportunity and change for the better, it would be such a shame to let it go to waste.

As an aside, I was so hoping that Dr. Barvaz would turn out to be an ornithologist at the end. Oh well.