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Jewish World Review Nov. 8, 1999 /27 Mar-Cheshvan, 5760
FERVENTLY-ORTHODOX CHILDREN grow up knowing that their entry into
the world was not subjected to any cost-benefit analysis. They were not weighed against parental leisure time or disposable income
Do religious JewsJerusalem Street Scene by Binyamin L. Jolkovsky
make lousy parents?
By Jonathan Rosenblum
This past summer two young children died in Israel after being left in locked
cars. In both cases, the families involved were religious and large.
These tragedies were widely reported in the religious press. Readers reacted
with horror at the loss, and with pity for the parents involved, who will live
the rest of their lives with the knowledge that their carelessness resulted in
the deaths of their children. The cases also served as a stark warning to
other parents.
Surprisingly, those two incidents recently became the subject of a long article
in Time magazine by Jerusalem bureau chief Lisa Beyer. Hundreds of
children around the world die each day in accidents involving some degree
of parental negligence - fires, cars started by keys left in the ignition,
poisoning, electrocution, burns from pans placed close to the edge of the
stove, falls, bathtub drownings, and choking on objects within reach of
toddlers. Such tragedies never make it beyond the local press.
Beyer, however, is after bigger game. Based solely on these two instances of
children left in cars, she argues that haredi families are too large and haredi
parents are incapable of properly raising their children. Yet she does not cite
one statistic that the rate of accidents is higher in haredi households, or that a
haredi child is less likely to survive until his late teens than a comparable
non-haredi child.
Beyer's case rests solely on a "chorus" of voices that these deaths were not
"flukes" but rather the consequence of religious family size. (Only one of the
families, incidentally, was haredi.) To bolster her case, she cites the
"surprising" criticism from within the haredi community itself.
Upon closer examination, however, that "chorus" and the critics from within
turn out to be none other than Naomi Ragen and Tzvia Greenwald, two
women who have carved out successful careers by always having something
unflattering to say about the haredi community. Comments like these by
Ragen and Greenfield are as "surprising" and "from within," as those of
Beyer's husband, Ze'ev Chafets, the Jerusalem Report's resident haredi
baiter.
Moreover, two voices, no matter how loud and how repetitive, do not a
chorus make.
If a religious newspaper, written by those who never had the benefit of a
university statistics course and who never read David Hume on causation,
took such anecdotal evidence as proof, we would not be surprised, but how
did one of the world's most respected news magazines print such intellectual
claptrap?
Imagine "proving" that secular parents hate their children from two instances
of fathers immolating their children, or that rich parents cannot raise decent
kids from the murder of a taxi driver by two thrill-seeking teenagers from
small, affluent families. Anyone who did so would be rightly pilloried.
And if some intrepid soul argued for limiting Arab family size on the basis of
accidents involving children or a rash of drownings by teenagers, he would
be accused of advocating genocide.
Yet make no mistake about it, Beyer is laying the ideological basis for social
policies designed to coerce haredi families into having fewer children. The
Israeli feminists she quotes as calling for smaller haredi families apparently
see their role as telling other, less enlightened women how many children
they should want.
Perhaps they have forgotten that others in this century have used images of
Jews breeding like vermin as a prelude to some highly successful efforts at
population reduction.
MEASURING the quality of parenting or how happy and well-balanced
children are is a notoriously subjective matter. Yet the behavior of children
would seem at least as good an indicator of parental success as accident
rates.
Which community does Beyer think suffers from more self-destructive
behavior - drug use, premature promiscuity, eating disorders, suicide - the
secular or religious ? (Yes, I know, no community is free of these phenomena.)
Could any haredi child begin to comprehend why 60% of secular pupils and
teachers favor stationing policemen in their schools?
Parenting a large family obviously presents challenges that having a smaller
family does not. But haredi children grow up with the knowledge that they
are an incalculable blessing in their parents' eyes and that for their parents,
raising healthy, happy, and, yes, G-d-fearing children is the most important
task in life. Their entry into the world was not subjected to any cost-benefit
analysis. They were not weighed against parental leisure time or disposable
income.
Much of the animus towards large families derives from residual guilt of
those who sense that they live far more selfish lives than their own parents,
and that the interests of their children are not necessarily paramount. Read
this way, Beyer's attempt to portray haredi children as parental status
symbols and large families as a mere "fashion" are classic examples of what
the French call false consciousness.
A considerable body of social science literature in recent years documents
the devastating effects that divorce has on children, yet the divorce rates
keep climbing, as parents place the need to follow their individual sprites
over the good of their children. Not inherent incompatibility but the urge for
mid-life flings explain many of those divorces.
Among the religious, however, the old ethic of sacrificing for one's children still
holds sway. Haredi parents spend both more quality and quantity time with
their children. Families are together on Shabbes and holidays. And during
Hol Hamoed and summer vacation, everywhere one goes (besides the
beach) is teeming with haredi families.
A myriad of common activities bind the family together, and the generations
one to another. Peek into the shuls in a haredi neighborhood this Saturday
night and you are likely to see hundreds of fathers and sons learning
together.
Anyone who thinks haredi children lead miserable, unhappy lives should take
a walk through a haredi neighborhood any day of the week with open,
unjaundiced eyes. My wife and I did 20 years ago, and the shining faces we
saw had much to do with the large family we are blessed with
JWR contributor Jonathan Rosenblum is a columnist for the Jerusalem Post.
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