When I was a senior at Northwestern High School in 1971, I was taking a class called “Modern Problems.” The teacher was a marvelous man by the name of Mr. Grant. I don’t remember his first name.
There were two great parts of his class. One, the class reflected the demographics of the school at that time. It was about half Jewish from the adjacent neighborhoods and half black, with black students coming in from as far away as Cherry Hill. The black kids traveled long distances to get to Northwestern because it was a new school, and a good school.
What I loved the most of this class was that we would talk to one another. I mean really “talk” to each other.
We had classmates who had babies. I remember the courage it took for the Jewish kids to ask the black kids simply “how could this be? And why should there be a welfare system in place to pay for those children?”
The answer that came back to us was angry and direct. It wasn’t so much mind your own business as “who are you to question the love I have for my baby.”
But we were asked questions as well. Usually it had something to do with the myth that every Jew was rich. My classmates wanted to know why I was in public school, not in private school. I lived by the way, four blocks from school in a semi-detached house. My parents paid a mortgage of $124 a month. We were rolling in the dough I told them.
I guess what I’m writing here is that there was a freedom in this class for the black kids to ask Jewish kids and vice versa about stereotypes and prejudices.
Don’t forget we were just three years outside of the racial riots in Baltimore. Many of the Jewish kids in that class had parents whose businesses were burned to the ground by neighborhood blacks. And as it was handed back to us, there was a feeling by some of our classmates that maybe our parents had been ripping them off for all of these years.
That class was my favorite all time class in high school or college. It was a safe room, where culturally we could step over the line. And if you’ve never been over the line of “life’s authenticity,” let me tell you it’s something that we never learned in the pages of any textbook.
Okay, so I don’t know how this all relates, but why do I think of this?
Recently, we were invited to a Shabbat lunch. The host went overboard, inviting tons of people from different generations.
My wife and I started listening in on one particular conversation involving two sets of young, frum husbands and wives. They were talking about how best in their words “to beat the system” when it came to benefits for health and for food subsidies offered by the government for the poor.
Both couples were hardly poor in the classical sense. They were both from families where a home was owned and a couple of cars were parked outside. But hubby in both cases wasn’t working, he was learning in kollel. Wifey was having babies. Both sets of “parents” were pushing 21.
What concerned my wife and I wasn’t the aid they were getting as much as the calculating arrogance of the way they described their aid. They were “beating the system.”
My brain switched back to Mr. Grant’s Northwestern High School class in 1971.
Wonder what the kids from Cherry Hill would say about this one.

Sadly, what you describe is all too common in the yeshivish and kollel world. As a young married man, I try very hard to do the opposite of what these moochers do.

These folks, the product a frum community, frum homes and years of education in the yeshiva and seminary world, are not exceptional. Their attitudes and behavior towards the American system and its citizenr—an attitude rampant in areas of NY, NJ and Israel—is the quintessential example of chillul hashem:  when Jews who project themselves to the world as its most dedicated, pious and G-d-fearing practitioners act in such a way, it causes other Jews (never mind non-Jews) to look at them and their frum lifestyle (supposedly dedicated to doing G-d’s will) with contempt and embarrassment.  So careful about tznius and shabbos, yet so casual about ethics and morality towards the “outside world”. An example of why FAR RIGHT-WING Orthodoxy (which MUST be distinguished from MODERN, Centrist Orthodoxy) and its leaders, who indeed encourage such behavior/attitudes, are so spiritually irrelevant and anti-inspirational to other Jews and the rest of G-d’s world.  When so-called “Torah true”, “most halachically observant” practice of Judaism seems to lead to morally barren, and therefore, un-G-dly behavior towards any institution or even human being who is “not a part of the community”, it diminishes Judaism and G-d weeps.

Let’s hope they remember the generosity of the taxpayers when they too become taxpayers. 

HH