Bouncing Sheks

Hillel Halkin makes an interesting observation about life in Israel:

It's a funny thing. Many of us who came to this country did so because, apart from an intense feeling of Jewishness, we felt that we wanted to lead lives that were less materialistic, more driven by ideals, than those we would have led in the Diaspora. And in important ways, we have succeeded in doing that. Yet in other ways, we have ended up leading lives that are far more bound to material concerns, for the simple reason that we are forced to think about money - or rather, about not having enough of it - all the time. Since settling in Israel, there hasn't been a day - well, anyway, a week - in which I haven't worried about our finances. There's nothing spiritually uplifting about this. In fact, it's spiritually debilitating.

Well, I'll second that. And it's a big mistake to obscure this (potential) reality for new Olim ('Don't worry about money, no one has any'; 'The money always turns up from somewhere'; 'you're not going there for the money anyway.')