It’s hard enough when your close friend or next-door neighbor is wealthy and you’re struggling. But what happens when the person rolling in the dough is your sibling?

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here’s a legend about how the site for the Beis Hamikdash was chosen: Two brothers farmed side by side on that land, one single, the other a father of a large family. When both enjoyed a bountiful harvest, the single brother thought, My brother has a large family to feed. Let me transfer my excess to him. The married brother reflected, My brother has no children to support him when he gets old; let me give him my extra grain. At night, each would steal out and add grain to the other’s pile, waking up the next morning to find the grain he’d given away had been mysteriously replaced. Finally, one night the two bumped into one another, realized what had been happening, and fell into each other’s arms in loving embrace.

This show of brotherly love, the legend says, inspired Dovid Hamelech to choose that site for the Beis Hamikdash. Though the veracity of this story may be questionable, it remains an ideal model for sibling relationships: each brother considering the other one’s needs and doing his best to anticipate and fulfill them.

Following this archetype in modern family life, however, may be a little more complicated. In an economy in which the middle class has become an endangered species, it’s become increasingly common for siblings to have widely disparate income levels. How does that play out in family relationships? What happens when siblings have a harder time sharing — or not sharing — the wealth? How does a struggling couple give gifts to the nieces and nephews who have everything? Can parents prevent hard feelings when their resources are mainly directed at one financially challenged sibling?

Family Fair Play

According to Dr. Dalton Conley, Professor of Sociology at New York University, the differences in wealth among siblings are greater than differences in wealth when you compare most other social groups to each other. For every power sibling pair like President George W. Bush and his brother Jeb, the former governor of Florida, you have many more pairs like Bill Clinton and his unsuccessful brother Roger. (President Jimmy Carter’s brother Billy was also a general public embarrassment).

After analyzing large sets of sibling data, Dr. Conley found that siblings from small families tend to resemble each other in terms of economic level. But families that are larger and poorer produce greater diversity. “Social class also influences how parents allocate funds to their children,” he explains. “Higher-income parents tend to use money in a compensatory way, they’ll give money to the child they perceive as being at a disadvantage. But lower-income families act in the opposite way; having limited resources, they’ll invest whatever they can spare in the child who looks like he’ll make something of himself.”

Dr. Conley’s research was the basis for his book The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why. He points out that while we like to think of families as giving equal treatment to all, it’s not always true, and siblings themselves often compete for success. “The family is no shelter from the cold winds of capitalism; rather it is part and parcel of that system, rat race and all,” he writes. “Inequality starts at home.”

“People expect families to be equitable,” elaborates Dr. Yisrael Feuerman, PsyD, a psychologist who specializes in the psychology of money. “But families are anything but fair; in fact, they’re a microcosm of society at large. You typically have one sibling who’s prettier, one sibling who’s a better learner, one who has a better head for business.”

In an optimal situation, Dr. Feuerman says, the family serves like a greenhouse, an enclosed environment that “metabolizes” these inequalities. During childhood, parents can do much to mitigate potential jealousies and insecurities by making sure that all the children feel equally loved. Some inequalities, however, may always stick in the craw — especially if they’re particularly large. “You often hear that the youngest or oldest ‘always’ gets preferred treatment,” Dr. Feuerman says. “Sometimes there’s one sibling who’s more demanding or needy, and the others keep hearing, ‘But he needs more.’ ”

Most parents tend to give financial help to children who need it most, which is easier for siblings to accept than apportioning more out of favoritism. “If parents give more to one child because they seem to prefer him, rather than because he needs more, the others feel slighted and less valued,” reports psychologist Dr. Yael Respler.

“Money equals love in the minds of many people,” Dr. Feuerman agrees. “If a parent gives more money to one of the siblings, it’s perceived as though he loves that child more — although there are those occasional cases where the unloved child receives more money because his parents feel guilty.”

The Rich Brother

The way family relationships are affected by financial differences has a lot to do with the behavior of the sibling who has “made it.” “Some siblings lord it over the others when they find themselves with money,” says Dr. Respler. “But others feel guilty when they have more and will do their best to minimize the differences.”

Baila and her siblings had always gotten along pretty well, until her sister’s in-laws died and left a lot of money to her husband. “Suddenly they were in possession of a small fortune, and they were like kids in a candy store,” she says. “They bought themselves a big house, leased fancy cars.

“That alone wouldn’t have been so bad,” she continues, “except that they seemed to forget that the rest of us were still struggling. My brother-in-law would make tactless comments to my husband like, ‘You really should replace your car! You should see how well my Lexus drives!’ My husband would feel like a loser because he still drives a clunker. One day he got fed up and yelled back, ‘If you’re such a gvir, and you want me to get a better car, then buy one for me!’ ”

Economic success catapults people into a different social class, points out Dr. Conley, which may broaden the distance between siblings. Successful sibs may choose to vacation with people who can afford the same places they can; even among the family, they will gravitate toward members who share their situation. “My research shows that if you have a pair of spouses, one from a poorer family and one from a wealthier family, the couple will spend more time with the wealthy side of the family if they themselves have money,” he says.

Dr. Conley adds that it can feel humiliating for less-wealthy siblings to confront the fact that a sib has succeeded in ways they have not. “You can attribute the success of someone like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg to luck or chance or advantages you yourself never had,” he says. “But when it’s a sibling who grew up in exactly the same household and shares at least half the same gene stock, the disparity seems to be more attributable to your own choices and behavior. That’s harder to take, because it can feel like a condemnation of your achievement or ability.”

Better to Give Than Receive?

According to Dr. Conley, Americans fully expect to help out their less-fortunate siblings. His data indicate that 13 percent actively help siblings, and 51 percent report feeling responsible for their siblings. Though these figures represent a decline from the beginning of the 20th century, when families were tighter (and there were many poor immigrant families who depended on each other’s help), most people still feel it’s natural for sibs to help each other.

A sibling who’s become financially comfortable may be perceived by the others as a parent figure, the one who’s expected to take care of everybody else — although, as Dr. Feuerman clarifies, “You can love a sibling without being obliged to give him money.”

Ruchie F.* found herself caught in the confusion between love and giving when her younger brother began asking her repeatedly for money. “I don’t make millions, but my husband and I have steady jobs while my brother started a business which failed,” she says. “At the beginning I didn’t mind helping, since he had really fallen on hard times. But after that, he started working — he just wasn’t making as much as before. His wife expected to be able to live at the same standard they’d lived at before, so he kept asking for help.”

Ruchie didn’t mind bailing her brother out of an emergency, but she had plenty of her own expenses to deal with. “I wasn’t interested in sending my brother money so his wife could buy designer dresses!” she says. “I don’t buy designer dresses myself. He would plead that his shalom bayis was suffering, but I just had to draw the line — maybe his wife needs to learn to scale back.”

Ruchie’s feelings recall the old-fashioned distinction between the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.” When her brother lost his business, it constituted a real emergency, so she felt he was “deserving.” But once he was bringing in enough for necessities, Ruchie considered his stay-at-home wife’s needs “undeserving.” “Why can’t she get a job and work as hard as I do?” she says. “I’m not interested in working to pay for her to spend her time shopping.”

It’s all too easy to fall into situations where the poorer sibling views the wealthier one as selfish if he doesn’t share, or the wealthier sibling views the poorer one as someone who doesn’t pull his own weight. In a Forbes magazine piece entitled “When One Sibling Has A Lot More Money,” writer Laura Shin gives the example of two sisters, one of whom directs software operations for a company and the other who went to art school and supports herself as a barista. “I’ll be totally honest with you… I worked really hard and she did not,” the richer sister told Shin. “When she comes to town [to visit] and wakes up at 2 p.m., and half the day is over in my opinion — little things like that build up.”

In Jewish circles, with its tighter family ties and emphasis on tzedakah, it’s often assumed siblings will help each other generously. (It should be noted that halachah does in fact give precedence to siblings with regard to giving tzedakah.) But derech eretz and hakaras hatov do much to sweeten the burden. “I have clients who made a lot of money, and their parents and siblings expect them to help marry off the rest of the children,” says Dr. Respler. “Many of them accept this graciously; they believe Hashem gave them money so that they could help others. But others resent the immediate assumption that because they’ve done well they should automatically hand over large amounts, especially if they never hear a ‘Thank you.’ ”

Dr. Respler avers that she’s constantly amazed by the generosity of her clients, many of whom come from the chassidic community. One client is helping support the family of a relative serving time in prison; another client routinely gives his parents the money to make Pesach for the entire extended family. “Often siblings will promise to pay it back, but never do in the end,” Dr. Respler says. “I think the sense of entitlement bothers me more than it bothers my clients!”

Some successful business owners help out siblings by offering them jobs in their company. It’s a way of sharing the wealth without making it a direct gift, but it takes wisdom and sometimes rabbinic guidance to negotiate the issues that arise when employing family members (salaries, raises, ensuring productivity, and so on).

Picking Up the Kollel Tab

Every frum schoolchild knows about the pact between brothers Yissachar and Zevulun: Yissachar would labor in Torah, while Zevulun, the merchant, would bring in the income that would support them both. Since the arrangement was explicit, with expectations clearly spelled out from the beginning, both brothers were happy.

That’s how it happened in the Brown* family. Baruch Brown, a hedge fund manager, has a brother who teaches in a local yeshivah. Rabbi Don Brown, his brother, has a large family and a small income, and Baruch offered to give all of his substantial maaser to his brother.

Both Brown brothers are comfortable with this arrangement. But in many families, no such formal pacts are ever drawn up. One sibling may choose a simple kollel lifestyle, while the other goes into business. But what happens if the kollel family has an unexpected medical expense and can’t pay the mortgage? What if it’s time to make a bar mitzvah and there’s no money to buy a new suit and pair of tefillin, let alone make a seudah? Couples may turn first to their parents for help, but if that’s not an option, siblings become the next line of defense.

Zev and Chanie were the only members of Zev’s family that chose to remain in a kollel lifestyle after they got married. Knowing that they were usually strapped for cash, the siblings took it upon themselves to “help” by not asking them to contribute to family gifts (weddings, Mother’s Day, anniversaries, etc). “The problem was that they didn’t inform us in advance,” Chanie relates. “So we’d get these calls from relatives thanking us for the flowers or chocolate or crystal goblets, and we’d answer, ‘Huh? We bought you a gift?’ It was embarrassing, and a little patronizing — we would have preferred to chip in at least something or not chip in at all, but to at least have been given the choice.”

While kollel families may feel embarrassed when they have to ask family for a handout, it can also be embarrassing to be the sole sibling who’s working and making a good living when all the other sibs are still in learning and struggling. Yehuda B. opened a successful business and is the only one of his siblings making a comfortable living. “It’s a challenge for me not to flaunt my success in front of everybody,” he admits. “But I try to use it in good ways as well, like offering to pay for a niece’s day camp or buying bikes for my nephews when I know my brother can’t afford to buy them just now.”

Gracious Giving

Giving to less fortunate siblings requires a delicate hand to avoid coming off as patronizing or condescending. Bruria L.*’s husband spent many months out of work and chose to spend some of that time in a kollel while Bruria worked full-time in a government office. Mr. L.’s sister was married to a retail giant and, knowing that Bruria’s salary couldn’t possibly cover all the family’s expenses, she would often send them large orders of meat and fish and come over with new clothing for the children. “On the one hand, we appreciated the help and really needed it,” Bruria admits. “On the other hand, it was hard for my husband to accept her handouts. He felt diminished by his brother-in-law.”

For many men, their ability to provide for their family is a point of pride. “A husband will often feel inferior if his wife’s brother or sister’s husband is making millions,” Bruria remarks. “Even if he can handle it, sometimes his wife will be jealous that she doesn’t have what the others have. Some women compete over who has the fanciest home or most stylish outfits — sibling rivalry still plays out after all the kids are grown up!”

Parents exacerbate these jealousies if they openly brag to friends about their child who “really made something of himself.” Similarly, spouses can stoke the resentment or downplay it. A man who feels insecure relative to his wealthy brother will feel even worse if his wife compares them or criticizes his brother for not helping them more. Conversely, she can soothe his feelings by letting him know she admires the effort he puts into making a living, and refraining from demanding more possessions than he can give.

The spouse of the wealthier sibling may similarly encourage giving to poorer relatives, or, if necessary, demand a stop to it. Faigie’s husband had begun giving money regularly to his younger brother, but when Faigie realized the boy was using it for drugs, she called for an immediate halt. “I refused to let my husband enable his brother’s destructive habit,” she says.

Who Pays Mommy’s Bill?

As siblings move into their “sandwich” years, they are typically still paying a mortgage, marrying off (and supporting) children, paying tuitions, attempting to save for retirement, and then, on top of it, elderly parents may begin to require care.

Often, the unspoken assumption among siblings is that the couple who lives closest to the parents takes over the lion’s share of the care. In general, according to Professor Conley, “the biggest predictors of who takes care of an ailing parent are gender and social class. It’s usually daughters and lower-income siblings who assume the care for parents; the higher-income children are usually the ones who have moved furthest away from home.”

Whatever the reason higher-income sibs move further away — relocating for a job, choosing a fancier neighborhood, etc. — the greater distance means that when parents need help, their participation may be more economic than hands-on. “There’s a bigger opportunity cost for a high-earning sibling to drop everything to care for a parent,” Dr. Conley says. “It makes more economic sense for a less-wealthy sibling, who may not be employed or only partially employed, to give more hands-on help.” Hence, it makes more sense for the lawyer who bills $300 an hour to give $15 of it to a home health aide and count on his homemaker sister to supervise.

In the same way that parents don’t always allocate resources equally during their lifetimes, unequal allocation of their money after 120 years can also create strife among sibs. “Sometimes parents leave the most money to the children who took care of them,” Rabbi Paysach Krohn told Mishpacha. “But it creates too much jealousy, in the same way favoritism of Yosef led to jealousy, and ultimately to the exile of the Shevatim.

“It’s better for the parent to quietly help out the caregiver while he or she is alive, compensating them for the time and money laid out. But when it comes to the will, things should be divided evenly.”

Tensions between siblings are as old as Yaakov and Eisav, or Yosef and his brothers. Life isn’t fair; some of us have more and some less. The trick is to maintain the right attitude, keeping in mind that Hashem gives each of us what we need and no more, and that when He gives in abundance we’re meant to share it. Then maybe our own homes will become sites worthy of constructing a Beis Hamikdash.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 421)