Dear [email protected],

Every summer I ask myself the same question: Is this really what we have become?

We spend ten months a year speaking about ruchniyus, shalom bayis, family values, chinuch, and living simply. Then July arrives, and suddenly an entire segment of our community embraces a lifestyle that seems to contradict everything we claim to believe in. We call it “going to the bungalow colony,” but for many people it has become something far uglier. It has become two months of prustkeit, materialism, social climbing, and endless comparison.

Let’s stop pretending otherwise. Walk around many bungalow colonies. You’ll find groups of women sitting on porches or around tables for hours upon hours every single day. The conversations are rarely about anything meaningful. It’s who bought what, who renovated, whose husband is making more money, whose daughter is dating, whose son got into a better yeshivah, who is wearing designer clothing, whose bungalow looks nicer, who hired which decorator, who is serving what for Shabbos, who has the bigger deck, the nicer swing set, the newer outdoor furniture. It’s an endless, exhausting culture of comparison. People don’t even realize they’re doing it anymore because it has become the air they breathe.

And what is perhaps even more tragic is that nobody seems embarrassed by it. We have somehow transformed idle sitting and endless fatzing into an accepted way of life. Hours disappear every day. Entire mornings. Entire afternoons. Somehow there is unlimited time to sit and talk. And let’s not kid ourselves that it’s all innocent conversation. Anyone who has spent time in these settings knows that gossip, judging, and comparing are woven into the fabric of the culture.

Meanwhile, the husbands are nowhere to be found because they’re back in the city all week. This is perhaps the craziest part of the entire arrangement. We have normalized husbands and wives living separate lives for two months every summer. The husband works, eats supper alone, sleeps alone, wakes up alone, repeats that routine all week, and then drives for hours on Friday just to spend barely a day with his family before getting back in the car on Sunday morning. (We’re not even talking about those men who may engage in unbecoming behavior. I won’t elaborate here, as Matzav is a family forum.)

We speak endlessly about strengthening marriages, about communication, about shalom bayis. Then we voluntarily choose a lifestyle that keeps husbands and wives apart for the majority of the week and somehow convince ourselves this is ideal. Since when?

And don’t tell me it’s all for the children. Children need fathers during the week, not only for forty-eight rushed hours. They need to see their parents together. They need to watch a father come home from work, eat supper with the family, help with homework, learn with them, and simply be present. Instead, for weeks on end, many children grow accustomed to a father who exists mainly on weekends. We have accepted this as normal only because many people do it. If someone proposed such an arrangement from scratch today, most people would call it unhealthy – or insanity.

Then comes Shabbos, and instead of finally reconnecting as a family after five days apart, the social circus goes into overdrive. Every meal becomes another opportunity to entertain, to visit, to be visited, to see and be seen. There are “toamehas,” Kiddushim, porch hopping, backyard gatherings, and endless social “obligations.” The comparisons continue. Who has the nicest table? Who invited the “right” guests? Who has the fanciest food? Who bought new dishes? Who has the best location? Who’s the prettiest? Even Shabbos, the one time when families should simply enjoy being together, gets swallowed up by the social scene, not to mention men talking to women, women talking to men, and more details that I’d rather not get into on a forum that is read by all ages.

What frightens me most is what our children are learning. We think they don’t notice. They notice everything. They notice what excites us. They notice how much time we spend talking about people instead of ideas, possessions instead of values, appearances instead of character. They learn that success means impressing others. They learn that happiness comes from having what someone else has. Then we wonder why so many young people struggle with contentment, why they feel pressure to spend money they don’t have, why they measure themselves against everyone around them. We spent the summer teaching them exactly that.

Before anyone writes in accusing me of painting with too broad a brush, let me say it myself. There are beautiful bungalow colonies. But let’s stop pretending the culture I’m describing doesn’t exist. It does. Everyone knows it does. People complain about it behind closed doors every summer, yet nobody seems willing to challenge it publicly because they’re afraid of offending people.

Maybe it’s time someone said it. People have built a summer culture that encourages precisely the values we spend the rest of the year fighting against. They’ve accepted a lifestyle that breeds jealousy, gossip, overspending, neglected marriages, absent fathers, and endless pressure, all while convincing ourselves it’s somehow wholesome because it happens in the Catskills instead of the city.

I don’t know exactly how to fix it. But I know one thing. If this is what you proudly call our summer, then you shouldn’t be surprised when it follows you home in September.

H. L.

A Disturbed Reader