Poverty

This week's Mishpacha Magazine had two remarkable articles on poverty. One was an opinion piece by Yonason Rosenblum (available here) and the other was a "true story" written by the brother of a mechanech who died of a heart attack at a young age purportedly from the stress of the debt he incurred in marrying off his daughters.

That Mishpacha, a "progressive" Chareidi magazine printed these articles is a good thing; a society won't change unless it admits that all is not well.

What disturbed me, however, is that Rabbi Rosenblum's article did not go far enough.

He skillfully described the scope of the problem:

The poverty figures are well known. What is less frequently discussed, however, is the toll that crushing poverty takes on individual lives and our society as a whole. I would not go so far as the talmid chacham who recently told me that poverty underlies every one of our problems as a society. But I would say that poverty exacerbates, sometimes greatly, every single problem from drop-out youth to marital discord. Speak to any chareidi social worker, working mainly with low-income clients, and you will quickly understand all the multiple consequences of never-ending financial stress.

Every expert in the field of "at-risk" youth, for instance, will tell you that learning difficulties are a leading predictor of later drop-out. Many early learning problems can be overcome. Tutoring, different forms of remedial therapies, and sometimes drugs or alternative medicine remedies can all play a major role. But tutoring is expensive, often prohibitively so for a family struggling to put food on the table. And even where therapies are covered by health plans, stressed parents, with multiple children to attend to and no car to easily transport the child in need, may simply not take advantage.

If lack of money is the subject of perpetual discussion, not to mention fighting, between parents, then chareidi life may come to be associated in the children's minds with deprivation and strife. No matter how much genuine mesiras nefesh the parents have made for Torah, the children may focus more on their own deprivation and reject the way of life that they associate with being constantly denied.

Severe financial stress intrudes in many intangible ways. Constant money worries present challenges to one's ehrlikeit in financial dealings. It makes us, as a society, extremely vulnerable to con men offering unbelievable returns on one's money. And the long-term dependence on others for support – often given grudgingly or not at all – drains self-respect.

Considerations of money have distorted the shidduchim process beyond recognition and led to many ill-suited matches. Even where a young couple is well-matched, early financial pressures can make it difficult for them to get their bearings and establish a firm bayit ne'eman b'Yisrael in which to raise children.

And those pressures take their toll on our health. When I read a glossy flyer in shul about a family in which 13 kids are sitting at home because they cannot afford school or yeshiva tuitions, it is no surprise that the family breadwinner has collapsed under the strain. Illness, it has been said, is the vacation of the poor.

But he did not go far enough.

He concludes:

The widespread poverty in the chareidi world – according to government statistics 18% of Israelis living below the poverty line are chareidi – will only worsen, as the parental resources to assist each successive generation become thinner and thinner. What the solutions might be I do not know. But it is clear that we cannot afford to hide our heads in the sand and not address the issue. (emphasis added)

"What the solutions are I do not know"?

Please.

The solutions are obvious. Achieving them will take courage and leadership, something appallingly lacking in the Chareidi world.

I hope to focus on solutions in my next couple of posts.