After many discussions and much thought, we still decided to move ahead with this project

INthis week’s magazine, you’ll find extensive and multi-layered coverage of the communal pressure to overspend on what used to be luxuries, but are now considered must-haves. Like much of our coverage, it’s not a definitive treatment of the trend, but rather the beginning of a discussion. We don’t have all the answers — it’s possible we don’t even have all the questions — but we think it’s a conversation worth having.

As our editors and writers discussed possible approaches and pieced together the material, I kept a list of questions, concerns, and personal takes. Here are some of the issues I wondered and worried about.

If you belong, you will pay.

Along with overwhelming gratitude and humility in the face of Hashem’s great kindness, one of my takeaways from marrying off a child was this: If you’re part of a society, you will pay into the system. Even if you don’t endorse or agree with it. Even if you actually disagree.

When you’re young and idealistic, you think you’ll somehow buck those established simchah trends that don’t make much sense. Everyone knows that all those formulaic gifts and prescribed presentations don’t convey much heart. That boiling down a promising young yeshivah bochur’s value to a number is shortsighted and ugly. That there are few people above the age of 23 who actually want to get dressed up at night to attend a vort. That no one is quite sure why they must obey every dictate and detail on the list of engagement and wedding must-haves composed by some amorphous force called Society.

But you learn, very quickly, that even if you don’t fully agree with all those “musts” — even if you cannot find a single person who fully agrees with them — you’re part of something bigger than you. And also, more critically, that ignoring or defying any of those expectations can result in real hurt to the young people embarking on this very momentous and vulnerable venture. And so for better and worse — when it comes to weddings, bar mitzvahs, or even high school shabbatons — you will bow your head and pay.

People are in pain. We minimize that at our peril.

When our editorial board began discussing the topic of social spending pressures, we zoomed in on a bigger question. True, there’s lots of murmuring about oppressive social norms that are choking your average, not-quite-wealthy but not-quite-under-earning Jew. But so much of today’s financial load is systemic and structural. Why talk about the frivolity of an Alo sweatshirt when people are scrambling just to pay tuition?

As popular as it has become to decry “the people who vacation in Cancun,” most people with limited means and real discipline aren’t dreaming of a vacation in Cancun, or a vacation at all. They’re trying to pay their mortgages and tuition bills, while hopefully putting away enough to afford a basic bar mitzvah. Decrying the purchase of $1,000 coats doesn’t only sound alien to them — it sounds offensive, like their painful struggle is being ignored. And the last thing we want to do is ignore people’s pain.

After many discussions and much thought, we still decided to move ahead with this project. The systemic burden is real, and crushing, and we devote significant space and resources to cover it.

At the same time, this doesn’t mean the issue of social-induced overspending isn’t real, or worth its own discussion. So our focus in this edition is not necessarily the structural, built-in costs, the big-ticket nonnegotiables — it’s the cultural and social pieces of the puzzle, presented with the understanding that they are just that: elements of a complex picture.

Our self-definition isn’t easily separated from our societal context.

As I reread two of the pieces in this edition, I felt a tension between them.

In one piece, several rabbanim focus on the interconnectedness of different sectors of the community. I would add that not only are we connected, we are also conformist. While families at the highest incomes occupy a remote financial bracket, the ebb and flow of their lives — and their children’s lives — unfolds in the same public space as ours. On a logical level, their simchah or vacation standards shouldn’t really affect the rest of us, but in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the standards seep down to those in different orbits.

There’s also a distinct pressure — some might even call it a panic — of living in a culture where rejection is a constant possibility. Gone is the era when every striving Jew was embraced and welcomed to the local school, camp, shul, or shadchan’s list. Today, with so many barriers to entry, so many gates and gatekeepers, there’s an increased urgency to “present right.”

In contrast to that broader societal focus, the piece on financial coaches pushes for a different mindset — empowering individual families to buck societal trends that don’t serve their needs and values. That approach is important, empowering, maybe even lifesaving. But it’s also, if we’re being honest, very challenging.

Because when a frum Jew in 2025 tries to pinpoint who am I as an individual? he or she has no choice but to include all those other layers of self: Where do I daven, which schools do my children attend, who is my rav, who are my friends, where do I spend my summers. Carving out a self-definition — and as an extension of that, building a realistic budget and financial strategy — is all the more challenging when so many aspects of our identity stem from our communal connections. Being “an individual” is not as intuitive as it sounds in our world.

Our relationship with materialism tends to be murky.

It’s always easier — ideologically and often practically — to live in a binary world where the only choices are black or white, good or evil, permitted or forbidden. But we can’t neatly slot money and the world of materialism into either category.

As frum Jews who’ve been directed to harness the material world in service of spiritual aims, we don’t condemn materialism outright. We have a place in our mesorah for a serene home, a beautiful Shabbos table, a simchah that uplifts and satiates on all levels. We are not communists; we don’t believe that everyone has to live a uniformly spartan existence. It would be a lot easier if we could just dismiss all material pleasures as forbidden, evil, tainted… but that wouldn’t be true.

Instead, we have to navigate the murkiness of that gray area, constantly recalibrating our relationship with money — all the benefits it can procure and all the damage it can wreak. We struggle to plan simchahs that feel expansive and joyful without being over-the-top. We struggle to outfit the family in good taste without creating snobby, entitled children (or selves). We struggle with just how openly to enjoy the blessings we’ve been given without causing pain to people who have less. And when our reality seems constrained and limiting — when our children suffer and we don’t have the means to easily help them — we struggle to extend unjaundiced grace to those clearly gifted with much, much more.

Independence is not a supreme value in our circles.

There are so many financial gurus and systems out there; why, when it comes to frum finances, is the discussion always so tortuous and complex? Why can’t we just run with the Dave Ramsey approach and call it a day?

Whenever we discuss secular systems for achieving financial stability, there are some notes that always sound a bit off-tune. The most jarring discordance is the absence of the Divine Banker in those models. As believing Jews, we know that our efforts to make, save, and grow money have limited efficacy. We know there’s an inscrutable spiritual calculus determining how much we will receive. We know that even with the most sophisticated Excel sheets and the most lucrative investment plans, we will never throw off our dependence on the ultimate Provider.

Beyond that, on a cultural and emotional level, the American model of paying your way or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps doesn’t always ring true for our community. While we hope and daven that every young couple will find their way to financial security, for many of us, total independence is not an immediate expectation. Nor is it the feature that marks a young adult as a “great” boy or girl, or even as “marriage material.” As a society we don’t encourage independence — financial or otherwise — as a supreme value. We place far more value on connection and interdependence.

Our children get married young without necessarily having a solid plan, relying on the assumption that we’ll be there for them. According to the secular gurus, that’s magical thinking at best, a roadmap to disaster at worst. In their world, that might be true. In our world, things are different… because of both our relationship with the Divine Banker, and our view that independence isn’t the most crucial of values. That might be why those gurus and their systems aren’t the perfect fit for our specific scenarios. And it might also be why we shrug off some of their well-founded advice as “not relevant” or “not realistic.”

If your class is jumping off a cliff….

If, over the past two decades or so, you’ve been listening to expert panels, reading magazines, or following chinuch columns, then you’ve been hearing a certain piece of advice: “If the whole class has it, your child has to have it, too.” I’ve heard this from too many experts to count. I appreciate the thinking behind it. But I wonder if it’s time to reevaluate.

No one wants to endanger their child’s social integration. No one wants to be the reason a vulnerable little girl finds herself the only one in the schoolyard with the wrong coat, or a tentative teenage boy shows up on that critical first day of yeshivah with the wrong shoes. We’re not against conformism per se. But what happens when that standard we’re conforming to is way beyond basic, even beyond reasonable? What happens when you really, really want your child to fit in to her class, but you also suspect the class is marching — in their matching, on-trend hair ribbons — toward a gold-paved cliff?

When the “right type” is a luxury item that can only be purchased in a high-end store… when teens are literally spending over $100 on a hoodie or sweatshirt… when a newborn’s very first take-me-home outfit has a three-digit price tag… when parents who’ve scrimped to send a daughter to seminary have to scrape even further so said daughter can join her friends in a rented Yerushalayim apartment on Succos rather than spend Yom Tov in a quiet, lonely dorm… maybe the experts have something else to offer us? Maybe instead of telling us to pay up, they can offer us ways to build resilient children capable of finding belonging without this slavish conformity?

Or maybe they’d just direct me, with a sad smile, back to the first point on this list.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1092)