A few days ago, I returned from a family trip to Switzerland.

You can’t spend much time in Switzerland without noticing the watches. They are everywhere. Storefront after storefront displaying famous Swiss brands, including watches that cost more than some cars. My wife developed something of an obsession with one very particular watch that was nearly impossible to find, so we ended up spending quite a bit of time wandering through watch stores.

And somewhere along the way, I remembered an old watch of my own. A few months after we got married, a close childhood friend, received a beautiful watch as a gift from his wife. My wife liked it, so I bought one too. It cost about 400 shekels. At 25, that seemed like an astronomical amount of money to spend on a watch. So I wore it only on Shabbat. Over the years, I gradually discovered that, contrary to what my 25-year-old Jerusalemite self had believed, in the wider world a 400-shekel watch isn’t exactly a luxury item. Perhaps the opposite. It can look like an attempt to wear an elegant watch without actually owning the real........

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