Politics and Policy Archive

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Toy Story: The $17,500 Birthday Bash

By Andrew Silow-Carroll

Here's a confession: I'm addicted to the New York Times Sunday "Styles" section, a celebration of the lives, marriages and purchases of the city's very rich. From lavish parties in the Hamptons, to the nightlives of this season's newest celebutantes, to the opening of the latest architect-designed, celebrity-endorsed boutique, the section reads like a print version of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," only without the irony. It's my weekly opportunity to wax righteous over the latest fin-de-siecle excesses of our day- trading, white-truffle-eating, air-kissing, SUV-driving, party-hopping, dot.com society.

Very rarely do the lives of those profiled in "Styles" intersect with my own. Until a recent Sunday, that is, when an article discussed the lavish sums parents are spending on their children's birthday parties. The main subject of the article was a father who had rented out the famed F.A.O. Schwartz toy store on Fifth Ave, at a cost of $17,500, so that his 12-year-old daughter, her sister and 13 friends could have a slumber party there. The pleasure I would normally have taken in trashing this excess was dashed when I read that most of the guests attend the same Jewish day school where I send my kids.

When the first waves of shame, embarrassment and self-righteousness passed, I began to wonder why I was so exercised about a $17,500 slumber party. Somehow I felt implicated. I imagined some non-Jewish reader, straight out of a William Hamilton cartoon, sipping his coffee and chuckling over the latest antics of the nouveau riche Jews. Then I imagined a Jewish reader, biting into a bagel, and chuckling over those awful religious Jews and their hypocrisy. Finally, I imagined the religious Jews, with kids in day schools and yeshivot of their own, gloating over the kinds of families sending kids to our school.

But mostly I began to imagine those who wouldn't be outraged by the gross expense of the birthday party, and would find a dozen excuses to get the family off the hook. After all, the father, identified as a divorced entrepreneur with businesses in America and Israel, acknowledged that the party was an unusual gesture on his part, and that his daughter never before asked for something so lavish. He also said it was intended in part to celebrate the girl's bat mitzvah (and $17,500 is a modest expenditure when it comes to New York-style bat and bar mitzvah celebrations). We don't know how much he gives to charity, but we should judge on the side of merit and allow that he gives his share. Finally, a millionaire may consider a $17,500 birthday party the way your average wage earner considers a $1,750 trip to Disney World-expensive, yes, but within the budget.

I'm willing to concede all these points to the father, who at least had the modesty not to be named in the article. But I still think we need an ethic of consumption that puts a $17,500 birthday party into a religious and communal context. Jewish communities no longer have the authority or cohesiveness to shame or censure those who run afoul of communal standards-thank goodness-but we at least have the ability to hold conversations about what the range of acceptable standards might be.

We can start by acknowledging that nothing in Jewish law or tradition argues against the accumulation of wealth. "Mainstream Judaism saw man's material welfare as a reward from Heaven, a gift of the Deity, and therefore as something not intrinsically bad, but rather to be valued and prized," Meir Tamari points out in "With All Your Possessions": Jewish Ethics and Economic Life.

Tradition does, however, place limits on economic activity. Most Jews are familiar with the complex and insistent laws of tzedakah that call for individuals to share their wealth with the needy. Less familiar are the traditional laws and attitudes against conspicuous consumption, social competitiveness and the financial deprivation that comes from trying to keep up with the Cohens. Tamari cites the 17th century Synod of Frankfurt that enacted a severe decree against those who "dress themselves and their daughters in costly clothes," and the modern-day Gerer Rebbe, who limited the number of guests at his followers' weddings to 300. These enactments are in part about tzniyut, or modesty, which extends the idea of moderation in dress and sexual behavior to how we display our own wealth. Tradition also sees displays of wealth as a distraction from the study of Torah-or, to translate into our own Westernized language, as an emphasis on the material over the matters of the soul.

Jewish educators may ask what message the birthday girl received about the uses of wealth. $17,500 may not be missed in her home, but what difference would it make in the lives of other, less affluent children or institutions? She might also think about the feelings of children of more modest means who might stumble across the article, or hear about it at school, and compare their own family celebrations with hers. In Luxury Fever, a new book about the economic consequences of our age of excess, Robert H. Frank argues that conspicuous displays of wealth create a kind of consumer arms race, in which the threshold of individual happiness is relative to the spending habits of others. That explains why, at a time when the average new home is twice as large as the average house built just after World War II, a three-bedroom Cape feels a bit cramped.

With this in mind, how can I justify my family's inevitable trip to Disney World when some families barely make it from welfare check to welfare check? A reductive answer is that our week in Disney World is unlikely to make it into the pages of "Style." In the current economic expansion, the cost of such a trip is within the reach of enough families that it is no longer considered "conspicuous" enough to merit attention. That's not to suggest that the "Style" section become the arbiter of consumer ethics, but only that we allow for a certain amount of luxury spending in people's lives. By the same token, we may need to define conspicuous consumption the way Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined pornography: we know it when we see it.

As Jews we are justifiably proud of our attitudes toward money, and our communal record for giving it away to the neediest. And a certain amount of reveling in our material comfort, after millennia of material deprivation, is justified.

The blessing of wealth, however, challenges us to act responsibly: that we not taunt our neighbors with our good fortune; that we not hold our community or its institutions up for ridicule; and that we teach our children that money is a blessing, a source of dignity, and an engine for justice.