At first blush, the fact that such an essay needs to be written at all seems a little odd, in light of what might seem to be some obvious facts:
• The first mitzvah (commandment) in the Torah is “Be fruitful and multiply and fill up the earth” (Genesis 1:28). The minimum number of children required according to Jewish religious law to fulfill this mitzvah (with G-d’s grace) is “replacement level” — i.e., two, one boy and one girl.
There is no halachic maximum. Indeed, the traditional Hebrew expression for a family with numerous children is a mishpachah bruchat yeladim (“family blessed with children”).
• As we are all aware, within living memory the Jewish people have suffered a most grievous loss when, a mere 60 years ago, one-third of the Jews then alive perished at the hands of the Nazis and their evil allies. This is a loss from which we have not recovered to this day.
The purpose of the Nazis in perpetrating their monstrous crime was, of course, to wipe the Jewish people from the face of the earth, and thereby to enable the elimination of the uniquely Jewish contribution to world culture — namely, the concept of morality and its ramifications as they flow from the Torah, and from our mandate to be the standard-bearers of Torah in the world, G-d’s “kingdom of priests and holy nation” (Exodus 19:6).
It is through the rearing of as many children as possible dedicated to and in the spirit of this noble mandate, that we can achieve the best “revenge” against the Nazis and those people in the modern world who admire and would emulate them.
Given these two imperatives, then, it is worth asking why anyone might imagine (short of various medical conditions, G-d forbid) that there would be any reason deliberately to limit the number of children in a Jewish family.
No ‘population bomb’
The fact is, though, that there are some people who believe that they do have such reasons, which would seem to fall primarily into two categories:
• The “population bomb,” which became a popular notion in some circles during the 1970s and is still with us in one form or another.
The truth is that dire predictions of mass famine and ecological disaster due to overpopulation, from Thomas Malthus in the 18th century though our own time, have always proven unfounded.
Even if it is true that in certain highly unfortunate lands — blighted with grinding ignorance, oppressive governments and civil strife — there is still famine in the modern world, it is not for the most part due to the productive capacity of the earth and modern agriculture so much as to rapacity and the resultant corruption and failure of the distribution system.
In any event, it is hard to see that limiting the number of children amongst our tiny people, less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population, will have any appreciable effect at all on anything except the continued survival and viability of our people.
• Then there are those factors which may be classed as contemporary “lifestyle” issues.
It is unfortunately true that many of our people — under the influence of ideals and practices prevalent in the general society at large that are foreign to traditional Jewish values — marry increasingly late in life (or not at all), and deliberately limit their children when they do.
Whether due to careerist ideals born of feminism or to an excessive concern with all the materialistic trappings of the affluent society, the trend is lamentable.
There is no question that the decision to have children should not be taken lightly, as it imposes responsibilities and a discipline requiring self-sacrifice on the parents.
There is also no question that our holy tradition regards these life-transforming changes as good, desirable and wholesome things, the very definition of adulthood.
A little research by the curious will reveal that the vast majority of such “recidivist parents” (to borrow a phrase from a recent article by Rabbi Avi Shafran of Agudath Israel) will attest that the rewards and self-satisfaction arising from a mishpachah bruchat yeladim far outweigh the strains and are well worth the undeniable financial sacrifice.
This brings us to what the general Jewish community can do — and, in light of the imperatives listed above, ought to do — to promote such life-affirming values:
• Help relieve the financial burden of a serious commitment to Jewish education by generously supporting Jewish day care centers and educational institutions at all levels which inculcate a solid Jewish identity and traditional Jewish values.
This will both help the current generation of parents, and raise a new generation proud of their Jewishness and resistant to intermarriage and the blandishments of foreign ideologies. There can be no higher priority for contemporary Jewish philanthropy.
• Work, at both the communal and individual levels, to promote and support efforts to introduce young Jews to other Jews, and to discourage and limit such negative practices as abortion on demand (generally objectionable in and of itself on moral grounds, save in such cases that life of the mother be endangered).
In this way we can fulfill a vital imperative of our Torah, help spread its light in the world and honor the memory of the six million holy martyrs who were so cruelly prevented from doing either.
Rabbi Avner Zarmi is vice president of the Wisconsin chapter of Agudath Israel of America.
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