Encore Archive

Welcome to Encore, the place where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on topics of the moment. Each week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

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(This week we reprint the second installment in a three part series, originally published in 1979, on the Jewish birth-rate, and on the putative obligation to bear Jewish children. Last week we published the first in the series, next week we shall publish the third.)

... Or Should I Have a Third Child?

Judith E. Zimmerman (Sh'ma 6/168, February 16, 1979)

When Kira was four and a half, the call began in earnest - the call of the third child - specifically, the desire for a third child. I heard its still small whisper steadily and in the months to come, relentlessly. It was only I in the beginning who heard it. My husband, Shelly, heard a different tune, a tune of doubts, and fears and of stark reality. If my melody had sharps, his had flats: we have two children - one approaching adolescence, the other entering a full school day. One has been in a day school, the other is entering a day school. That is a long and expensive commitment.

Besides that, Shelly has lived with my conflict, my longing. On the one hand, I want to be a loving, nurturing mother and on the other I need to set sail into the world, the world beyond my family, the world where I take my knapsack of talent and ability and achieve fame and fortune. For though I feel sensual and maternal, I have the same intelligence as a man, precisely the same. My Phi Beta Kappa key assures me and reassures me of that. And so the two meet, the maternal and the worldly, in their own corners of the ring - the champion and the contender. They always shake hands and the match is often close but inevitably one trounces the other, and the cry for a rematch resounds in my ears.

We Have Found Family Life Rewarding

Shelly's melody grew modern and dissonant when it recalled our last birth. Our beautiful unharmed child arrived in a flurry of emergency Caesarian and surgical complications. The promise of natural childbirth dissolved in a truncated symphony.

Still, the call continued and throughout the following months we explored and grappled with its drumming. Marriage and parenting has been to us a peak experience, rewarding us with intense satisfaction and insights, bringing us ever closer to each other and to Judaism. Shelly is a rabbi. The crisis in Jewish population is real to us. The achievement by our people of negative population growth is ominous to us.

Conceptualizing about the third child caused me to have divergent and also cosmic concerns. The concept of the child was not static, I realized, but fell into three different categories: Ideal Child, Real Child, No Child. The Ideal Child conjured within me the most serene and satisfying feelings. I thought about it during services at synagogue when I felt at one with the congregation; I experienced it at the conference concerning the crisis in Jewish population. Clearly this child would be perfect. It would fulfill my Jewish communal responsibility, make my previous childbirth trauma as a passing shadow, and with this new life, I would be reaffirming the commandment, "Choose life that ye may live."

We Must Replace Holocaust Victims

The Real Child, on the other hand, brought with its undeniable joys, equally undeniable problems - increased expense, decreased freedom, deferred career, medical anxieties.

No Child signified a kind of death. That is, it forced me to encounter and confront endings -- finity, finiteness, finitude. Victims of the Holocaust have still not been replaced, Jewish population is still on the wane, childbearing stops, youth departs. Mortality is ours, no exceptions. That includes me. It can be deferred but not denied.

I believe that the third child dilemma is shared by countless Jewish women. Whether they turn the music up or shut it off depends on their individual circumstances. The ease with which they choose depends on how many voices they hear. As for me, the ringing is still in my ears.