That network – like that of virtually every other sector of our society – is increasingly dependent on government spending. For all of the talk about taking care of our own, maintaining the human-service safety net is something that requires federal money. The system as we know it simply can’t work any other way.
Americans, be they rich, middle class or poor, may say they want government out of their lives but in the same breath they also have come to depend on it for social services and subsidies for a variety of things that they cannot imagine paying for out of their own pockets. In response, government has grown, and despite its conservative cast, the Bush administration and the congressional Republican majority, like their Democratic predecessors, have spent like drunken sailors to accommodate us.
But until the arrival of the Messiah, when a real revolution in federal governance might be possible, Jewish groups must sit up and beg along with everyone else. And since everyone, from farmers to urban commuters, is a member (whether they know it or not) of one special interest group or another, the scrum that decides who gets the money gets more complicated every year.
But there is one final irony in the Jewish hypocrisy about federal spending. One item in the Bush budget specifically aimed at helping the poor will probably be opposed by liberal Jewish groups: a piddling expenditure of $100 million that would allow students in some underperforming schools to attend religious or private schools.
This limited proposal that would allow the low-income parents of kids trapped in failing public schools to escape to better religious or secular alternatives will, no doubt, be bitterly opposed by groups that see it as a fatal threat to church-state separation. They are prepared to sacrifice those children in order to preserve a principle they cherish. They believe that strengthening religious schools – at the expense of failing public schools – is simply unthinkable.
That many of the same Jews who will oppose giving these kids a break by letting them go to mostly non-Jewish religious schools will also be advocating that lots of federal money go to social-service institutions connected to the Jewish community is a bitter irony that ought not be ignored.
The federal budget appears to be the point where principle always dissolves into self-interest. The Jewish community is going to use whatever leverage it can muster to save institutions that need saving – and who can reasonably blame us for doing that?
But if, as the vouchers proposal seems to indicate, we only rediscover our ideology when our own ox isn’t being gored, then something is deeply wrong with our moral compass.