Me Again

Me Again, originally uploaded by Reva49.

I just thought I'd whine instead of rant today. Actually, I've been thinking of saying this for a while, but now's the time. It's about the sad tendency of American Jews to obsess over wealth. Now, wait a minute---I know what you're thinking, but hear me out.
Synogogue membership is perhaps the biggest headache for most of us "average Jews"; we're the ones who aren't doctors, lawyers, or married to one, and our incomes just can't take that $900-a-year whallop to belong to a shul. Fortunately for some of us, there's a Reform congregation nearby that kindly "overlooks" our lack of money, but not always. I'm one of the lucky ones, and for that I'm grateful, yet for years my husband and I could not join because he was out of work on Compensation, so my son never finished Hebrew School. Worse yet, the president of the shul(not the one we currently belong to)insisted we remove our son IMMEDIATELY when he learned of our circumstances, then was awarded the "Mensch Of The Year" award! Mensch, shmensh, as we say. At any rate, to be cut off from the Jewish community out here in "the boonies", so to speak, was devastating. My son only managed to attain his Bar Mitzvah through the kindness of our local Lubavitcher rabbi. To have hosted this event in the shul would have cost around a THOUSAND dollars, no less. How can people like us afford that?
This is what I mean by "obsession" with wealth. In America, Jews seem to have fallen into the goyische attitude that Jews HAVE to be rich, that all Jews MUST go to prestigious colleges, and that anything less is apikorsus(heresy). How sad.
Does no one care to know how many of us have LESS than genius-level children, or that thousands of Jews like us struggle to keep family intact through such crises as unemployment, death of a spouse, or divorce? I guess not. Here in America, that just DOESN'T HAPPEN to Jews, they seem to think. Proper Jews, that is. We, unfortunately, don't qualify as "proper", and you'd be surprised to know how many of us are shunned by our fellow Jews as "embarrassing", sometimes even as "lazy". Thank God, I never experienced that here in NH; many of our former congregants expressed outrage when they learned why we had "left". Still, it happens elsewhere, and it shouldn't.
Maybe, it being so close to Yom Kippur, some high-ranking shul member will read this, feel ashamed and outraged, and finally DO something about it, but I doubt it. Far too many of us have had it far too good for far too long to understand (or even WANT to comprehend) the plight of , I would estimate, a good 60% of us, if not more. And every year around this time the rabbis moan and groan about the Jewish "defectors". Well, hey, do you know how much cheaper a CHURCH membership is? Think about it.