Encore Archive

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We Need Quality More Than Quantity

Paula E. Hyman (Sh'ma 9/168, February 16, 1979)

The higher fertility argument is very seductive. How can it fail to appeal to members of a people who have experienced genocide within the past generation? Living, as we all do, in the shadow of the Holocaust, I find my own thoughts about appropriate family size influenced by my desire to make a personal - yes, a biological - contribution to the survival of the jewish people.

But the call for more Jewish babies is a simplistic solution to a complex problem. What is at issue is not merely the number of persons born as Jews, but the number of those who choose to live as Jews. A low birth rate among Jews is only one factor in the gloomy predictions of demographers about the size of the American Jewish community in the twenty-first century. The central factor is the high cost of assimiliation - either through opting out of the community or through minimal affiliation among nominal Jews. Attacking assimilation by producing more Jews is one way to deal with a serious problem but hardly the most efficient way.

What is particularly troubling to me as a jewish feminist is that many proponents of large Jewish families appear insensitive to those concerns and aspirations of women that are often categorized as self-fulfillment. Self-fulfillment, most Jewish feminists are quick to admit, can come through motherhood. We do not share the anti-family bias of one wing of radical feminism. But many mothers, particularly when they have attained the educational level of American Jewish women, will seek fulfillment outside the home as well as within it. Their schedules will be complicated. While our family roles may be more egalitarian than our parents', with few exceptions the daily responsibilities of raising children still fall far more heavily upon mothers than upon fathers. The fertility boosters rarely call for men to assume a larger share of child care.

Women Can Contribute More Than Babies

Asking all mothers to live up to the model of those few "wonder women" who somehow manage to do everything - care for half a dozen children while managing stimulating work outside the home - is to make unrealistic demands upon us. It is hard to do everything, and, all else being equal, women who work outside the home do have smaller families than their non-employed sisters. Proponents of large Jewish families thus implicitly reinforce traditional, and confining, masculine and feminine roles within the family and explicitly impose guilt upon women who choose to limit their childbearing. At the very least, promoters of high fertility among Jews should address themselves to the needs of those women who are not enthralled with the prospect of a decade of full-time care of small children.

More importantly, the fertility campaign carries the message that women can contribute best to stemming the tide of Jewish indifference in their biological roles as mothers. We are to be appreciated not for our individual and various talents but for our undifferentiated, gender-linked abilities. Yet many of the childless women (and men) that I know make significant contributions to thejewish community, and tojewish survival, contributions that might have to be curtailed upon assuming the responsibilities of full-time parenthood.

Strength Does Not Lie In Numbers

I am also disturbed in other ways by the numbers game. We certainly need sufficient Jews to maintain our communal institutions and to promote Jewish culture. In the past, however, we never succumbed to the notion that strength, not to mention rightness of belief, lay in large numbers. As a permanent minority, we learned, and perhaps taught others, that the few have much to say, and to give, to the many. The glorious Jewish communities of the Golden Age of Spain or of sixteenth century Poland were far smaller than the American, or Israeli, or French Jewish populations of today.

The Spanish Jewry that nurtured Maimonides and a host of other rabbis and philosophers consisted of fewer than 100,000 Jews (less than 1 percent of the total population) and grew to only 250,000 before its destruction in 1492. In 1648, at the height of Jewish creativity in Poland, Polish jewry numbered some 450,000 (about 4.5 percent of the Polish population). Individual communities were also tiny by today's standards. A community of 5,000 persons was a Jewish metropolis. Yet these relatively small Jewish populations supported synagogues, schools, houses of study, and a wide range of philanthropic and social institutions.

Child-Bearing Is A Personal Decision

What we need, in our much larger communities, is the concern for Jewish living and communal survival which motivated our forebears. Numbers are important, but they are not sufficient to promote vibrant and creative Jewish communities. Let us provide encouragement and communal support (including financial) for those who happily choose to have large families. But let us acknowledge that ultimately the decision to have a third or fourth child (or any children at all) is a personal one. It is affected more by considerations of a practical than an ideological nature: do the parents have the time, the energy, the resources to nurture another human being? Guilt, even in the best of causes, is a poor rationale for bearing children. We can provide a supportive environment for raising children Jewishly without waging a crusade for higher Jewish fertility. Concern with the size of the Jewish population should not obscure the realization that the campaign for Jewish survival can be waged on many fronts.