Rachel's Tears

In my entrance exam for rabbinical school, I was asked to recite the Talmudic debate on the proper sequence of family and career. As formulated by the gendered language of the Talmud: “What should a man do first, get married or study Torah?” Not surprisingly, the Rabbis disagreed. Some rabbis argued that a person should first study Torah, and only then get married. Rav Yehuda, on the other hand, stated in the name of Rav Shmuel that a person should first get married, and only then study Torah. I clearly recall reciting to my examiner Rabbi Yohanan’s retort to Rav Shmuel’s position: Rihayim b'tzvaro, v’ya’asok ba-torah? “With a millstone around his neck, can he study Torah?” In other words, how can someone be expected to commit to their studies when laden down by the burdens of family life? Rabbi Yohanan thus agreed with the first opinion: one should first study and only then look to marry. As confusing as this debate may be, what is even more confusing are the rationales ascribed to the respective sides. According to the medieval commentator Rashi, because the men of Babylonia would travel to Israel to study, they could focus on Torah free of family burdens (and, incidentally, lustful thoughts) and should therefore get married prior to leaving for study abroad. The men of Israel, however, who remained in Israel to study, should study first and only then get married. Were they to do otherwise, they would (as Rabbi Yohanan reasoned) be unable to focus on Torah with family in such close proximity. To make matters yet more confusing, the next generation of medieval commentators after Rashi, known as the Tosafot, offer exactly the opposite rationale. Namely, they say it is precisely those who travel from place to place who should not marry first, for were they to do so, they would long for their family left at home, to the detriment of their studies. And it is precisely those who study near where they live who should go ahead and marry and then study. (Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 29b)

Despite having passed that oral exam, I still find the particulars of that Talmudic argument somewhat confusing. My confusion is not simply because the arguments and rationales across the rabbinic generations are difficult to track and untangle. My confusion stems from the fact that to this day, the issue remains very, very confusing. In more egalitarian language, what should a person do first: family or career? What is the right sequence for us, and more importantly, for our children? Is it better first to find a mate, start a family, produce one, two, three or more kids? Or just the opposite? Get credentialed, get settled, get established and then and only then lift your head up and start looking for your beshert? As muddled and divided as the rabbis of the Talmud may have been on this issue, can any of us in this room, in this age, claim to have come up with a definitive answer?

I would claim that the debate continues unabated. The texts may not have the sanctity of a page of Talmud, but we need only look to two recent newspaper articles to see the flashpoints of this same conversation playing out today. The first article – you may recall it – appeared last summer in the Princeton campus paper, the Daily Princetonian. It was a letter from the mother of a male student advising campus women to “Find a husband on campus before you graduate.” “You will never again,” she wrote, “have this concentration of men who are worthy of you.” On and off campus, the letter stirred a firestorm of response, some praising the author for taking a courageous position on an “untouchable” subject and many, not surprisingly, assailing the author for her obnoxious, ill-considered and retrograde counsel to Princeton women and, by extension, achievement-seeking women everywhere.

The second article, a little more recent, a little closer to home, was a New York Times article about the dating habits of women at the University of Pennsylvania. The article described a culture in which campus women are so driven to academic and professional achievement that they have opted out of the burdensome emotional entanglements of committed relationships, preferring a hook-up culture of casual sexual encounters. Aside from resulting in a spike in applications to Penn this fall, this article also provoked a huge stir. Were we to accept the claims of the article (which many do not), is it a good thing or a bad thing to see conventional notions of sexuality overturned so that women can be all that they can be? Both the Princeton and Penn articles brought into relief all the gender double standards that are applied to the challenge of balancing relationships and professional achievement. Implicit in the Penn article is the assumption that there is something titillating in the discovery that women’s sexuality can function the same as men’s. Would there have been anything remotely interesting, the thinking goes, about an article describing a campus culture where men engage in casual relationships as they unflinchingly aspire to professional success?

I could go on, but the ultimate point is not whether you think these articles are good or bad, accurate or not. The point is that these articles somehow hit a nerve in our collective psyche, touching third rail questions that we don’t like talking about; that we dodge and duck, but questions whose answers play out in all our families and thus in the broader Jewish community. We want our children to be accomplished. We want our children to gain higher degrees. We want our children to pursue their careers. We also want our children to find their beshert. We want our children to marry a Jew. We want out children to give us Jewish grandchildren. We want a whole lot of things, and for that matter, so do our children. Then one day, we wake up and discover that – lo and behold – we can’t always get what we want. To use the rabbinic aphorism: tafasta meruba lo tafasta, if you try to grab too much, you run the risk of not grabbing anything at all.

For the last month we have been bombarded with article after article about the Pew study, specifically the shrinking non-Orthodox American Jewish population. Of all the analysis and articles, I’ll give you two statistics that will make you sit up. First, the fertility rate for non-Orthodox Jews is 1.7 as against a Zero Population Growth requirement of 2.1, meaning we are not reproducing at a stable or steady rate. Second, the intermarriage rate among non-Orthodox Jews has risen to 72 percent. Yes, you heard that number correctly: 72 percent. It does not take a rocket scientist, or even a mediocre sociologist, to figure out that if people put off marriage until later, put off child rearing until later, there are consequences to those choices. These statistics are not unique to the Jewish world. A rise in delayed marriage or non-marriage, a decline in fertility – these trends cross faith lines. It is precisely for this reason that those of us invested in the Jewish future need to appreciate the bigger picture of which we are but a representative part. Since the Pew study came out, the entire Jewish world has been thrown into a frenzy of soul searching and finger pointing over how best to address a contracting Jewish world. Some say we should circle the wagons, others that we should widen the tent. Some argue we should throw our efforts into the movements, others that we should throw the movements out altogether. Let me boil it down to a sentence coined by my friend and colleague Professor Steven M. Cohen: Im ein yehudim, ein yahadut. “If there are no Jews, there is no Judaism.” Intermarriage, low fertility – these are merely the symptoms of underlying systemic or structural conditions on which we continue to punt. And then we have the chutzpah to point fingers at everyone and everywhere, except of course for the demographic elephant standing right in the middle of the room.

Let me pause for a second and be very clear about what I am saying and what I am not saying, and let me say it with great sensitivity. After all, this conversation lies at the existential core of so many of us. I am not saying that that our young men and women must choose between professional or familial fulfillment. I also know enough to know that this choice is not altogether in their hands for them to make. I know, and so do you, that there are many in this world, many in this room, for whom the dream and desire to raise a family is for one reason or another painfully elusive. Would that wanting it were all it took to make it so! And similarly, there are many in this room, who have understandably correlated professional achievement with personal fulfillment, and go to sleep at night or wake up in the morning asking themselves all sorts of painful questions of self-worth. Nobody knows – not you and certainly not me – the juggling acts and internal struggles embedded in the person sitting next to you. So let’s agree that when we speak on this matter, we will do so with great sensitivity. During my years at the University of Chicago, I had an academic setback that resulted in a delay in my receiving my PhD. It was a crazy time of life for me – juggling a rabbinate, pursuit of a doctorate, and one child being born after another. Something was bound to give and eventually it did. I remember sitting totally deflated in the office of my advisor, who shared her sage advice: “Elliot, I don’t know if you will or won’t get everything you want in life, but I am pretty sure you won’t get it all at the same time.” Life, she counseled, was not always to be lived simultaneously, but sometimes sequentially. I licked my wounds, regrouped, recalibrated the road map, and picked myself up in order to march forward. All our lives have such inflection points; some behind us and most likely many yet to come. Some choices we get to make and some choices are made for us. The circumstances of our existence are not always ours to determine and more often than not, a lot just comes down to mazel, to luck.

But just because we can’t control everything, just because it is a sensitive issue, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it. We have to talk about it and more importantly we have to do something about it! Let’s start a community conversation on the most prickly issue of the day. Let’s speak openly about how to balance family and career. What is the corrective to our presently bipolar world that seeks to recreate an Ozzie-and-Harriet-like “golden age of marriage” in a time and place that is anything but? How is it that we live in country that does not see universal day care as a moral imperative? How is it that the Jewish community tells families to produce more than 2.1 kids, send those children to Jewish day schools and Jewish summer camps, hold down two jobs, and also be home for dinner? What would a Jewish conversation look like that offered differentiated and equal visions of gender roles? How do we go about creating a synagogue culture that fully embraces single parents, gay parents, multi-racial and multi-ethnic parents – any parents or families that look a little different than Great Neck in the 1950’s? How do we go about establishing a communal norm and funding structure whereby non-Orthodox kids could take not just ten days, but a full gap year in Israel with the implicit or explicit goal of creating more and more Jewish couples. Most of all, what does it mean to raise children capable of understanding that sometimes life is either/or and sometimes life is both/and, and sometimes the choices we make for ourselves are different than the choices others make for themselves, and that is OK, because all of us are just trying to do the best we can. We don’t need to have it all figured out overnight, generations of rabbinic sages have struggled with the same questions. But we do need to stop doing what we have been doing – avoiding the conversation. We deserve better, our children deserve better, and our actual or idealized grandchildren – they definitely deserve better.

The most enduring image of this week’s Torah reading is the heartbreaking death and burial of our matriarch Rachel . Her husband Jacob had toiled for years before they could finally marry. “Give me children, or I shall die,” she cried during those first years of marriage, as she endured round after round of unfulfilled dreams. The name of her long-awaited son Joseph derived from the Hebrew meaning “God has taken away my shame.” Now tragically she dies in childbirth, buried on the side of the road – on the outskirts of present day Jerusalem – to this day a holy site for those praying for children. The book of Jeremiah describes her weeping as the children of Israel, exiled into Babylon, pass by her grave. It is a weeping that we pray will one day be replaced by laughter and joy as the depleted ranks of her children are replenished.

Rachel’s tears bear witness to our ancient and ongoing fears for the next generation of Jews, and it would seem that these days those tears are justifiably flowing more freely. We could, and perhaps should, visit her tomb and offer prayers. But I suspect what would actually help her wipe her tears away, what would transform Rachel’s sorrow into joy, would be if we actually did something more constructive. To be totally candid, I am not sure what it is we must do and where we should start. There are lots of opinions on this one, lots of exposed nerves. As we take a step forward, we must do so with great care and we must be forgiving if well-intentioned words cause unintended offense. But staying silent, avoiding the conversation – for those of us invested in the Jewish future, that simply cannot be an option. Let’s do ourselves the dignity of being honest with ourselves and most importantly honest and good to our daughters, our sons, and most of all, to the Jewish people.