Chapter 1 - Preparing For Children: Life Questions

A: Background

8. THE CLASH WITH TRADITION

The result of all these factors is clear. There is a clash for many young Jews between the traditional, child-centered values of family that have developed over thousands of years of Jewish tradition, and their own conscious beliefs and needs. This conflict becomes an extremely complex issue, among other reasons, because the potential for guilt is so great. In a culture that has lost so many millions in recent generations through destruction and Holocaust, moreover, one that is experiencing constant problems in replenishing its own numbers, creating major question marks over the issue of future survival, it is no easy thing to come forward and say "I don't want marriage and I don't want children".

The pressures, direct and indirect, on people who adopt this position are likely to be immense and very uncomfortable. It may even lead to alienation. Those pressures exist, perhaps, for very good and understandable reasons, but they are pressures nevertheless and they may be considered unfair. This is especially true when the standpoint is one that affirms personal autonomy - the right of the individual to make his or her own choices. The result of all these pressures, it can be suggested, can be resentment on the behalf of the "non-conforming" individuals towards the Jewish tradition and the community that upholds that tradition. At the very least, it can provoke confusion.

A perfect example of the complexities and confusions of the situation of the Jewish individual (specifically, a woman for whom the questions are characteristically harder in most cases) who wrestles with the question of bringing forth a child is found in a short story written in 1980. The story in question, "The Phantom Child" (see bibliography), a presumably autobiographical account by Aviva Cantor, tells of the inner struggle of a modern Jewish woman who finds that she is pregnant and tries to decide whether or not to have the child. The narrator, an identified liberal Jew, brings in all the various considerations that go through her mind as she struggles with the decision. Among the factors that push her towards the decision to have the child are questions of Jewish continuity, the Holocaust, Jewish tradition, and her responsibilities towards those of her own family who were unable to have children. Her ultimate decision is not to have the child but as one reads the story, the immense pressures on the woman who "defies" the tradition and the norms of the community are made very clear. At times, the narrator almost seems to be nearing breakdown among the conflicting pressures, which are basically all in her own mind, in the sense that other people are not playing an active part in her decision. This is the conflict that exists today in the minds and the lives of many contemporary Jews, torn between the demands and expectations of their tradition and their sense of their own personal needs.