 CHAPTER
FIVE:Those Who don’t Fit the Model: Family Situations and Status
in Judaism and the Jewish World
4C. Socially Speaking…
So far, discussion has related almost entirely to the Halachic-legal
situation with regard to their status, which is crucial in terms of life
cycle examination. However, another important facet of the question of
widows and widowers needs to be addressed, namely: the sociological and
communal aspects of the issue.
The numbers of widowers, and more especially widows, who are part of
the community, steadily rises after the dramatic decrease in early life
widowhood. This is simply because the greater the life expectation of
the individual becomes (while there are still diseases which commonly
strike individuals when they are still young), the more likely it is that
there are larger and larger pools of individuals who find themselves facing
a potentially long period of widow(er)hood in later life.
Clearly, together with the ever-increasing pool of divorcees (see next
subject) this provides the potential for a large crop of new marriages.
Without entering into the fundamentals of a second marriage, it should
be noted that the dynamics of such a marriage clearly tend to be more
problematic than in most first marriages, at least when there are children
involved.
From a Jewish point of view, in addition to the normal adjustments that
have to be made in any second marriage (adjustments of two separate sets
of family norms; creation of new relationships between the children and
the step-parent and between the children and themselves) there is also
the added contemporary difficulty of creating common Jewish norms within
the new family. At a time when Jews lived within the traditional pre-modern
community, the difference between different degrees of Jewish observance
tended to be minimal. But today, with increasing differences of observance
of custom, tradition and law between different Jews, finding the right
level of Jewish observance for a new (second) family is no easy task.
There are also those who do not remarry – the widows and widowers
who stay just that. We are witnesses to larger and larger groups of older
Jewish people who remain widowed, especially in the senior generation.
Once these were cared for within the framework of the extended family
or failing that, within the institutions of the Jewish community. For
the most part, however, neither of those institutions are there today
in the same way for most of the widows and widowers, as they once were
for young widowhood or for the elderly widowed.
The question has to be asked: does the organised modern Jewish community
reach out towards its unmarried widows and widowers? The assumption
seems to be that it does not. While large outreach efforts towards singles
have been developed over the last twenty years or so, efforts or investment
directed towards those who have lost their spouses are virtually imperceptible.
Perhaps this is one of the large question marks that is facing the Jewish
community today.
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