QUESTION
How does one curb the desire of his family to keep up with the Joneses?
ANSWER
Let them listen to these tapes. Play the tapes in your home for your family.
It’s of the greatest importance to create an atmosphere of independence in the family: “We don’t follow the crowd.” It’s very important.
Here’s a man who is financially on the verge of bankruptcy but he has to marry off a child. It costs him 50,000 dollars. He can’t help himself. His wife is pressing him. “How can we have less? We’ll be ashamed to face our friends.” And so he goes even more deeply into debt. He borrows to make an expensive wedding.
What a shoteh that is! Who cares what the relatives will say?! You can make a wedding even without the smorgasbord. Of course that’s ‘apikorsus’ to say such a thing. But say you’re a German. German Jews don’t make a smorgasbord. And therefore you have a good model to follow.
In every aspect of life, we have to learn to be independent because constantly we’re under pressure to spend money and to keep up with the relatives and with the friends. And therefore it’s a treadmill. You’re a prisoner of nothing, of a false ideal. You’re laboring and spending your substance for something that Hakadosh Baeuch Hu never required you to do. You won’t get any reward for in this world or in the Next World for keeping up with the so-called Joneses or Levys.
June 1986
