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"The Future of Family and Tribe," a seminar of CLAL’s Jewish Public Forum held January 28-29, 2002 in New York City, brought together a dozen leading thinkers on gender, gay rights, adoption, reproductive law, bioethics, and aging. eCLAL is publishing a series of articles based on participants’ contributions to the seminar. This seminar was part of Exploring the Jewish Futures: A Multidimensional Project On the Future of Religion,Ethnicity and Civic Engagement. For more information about the project, click here.
Dr. David Kraemer, a professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a faculty member at CLAL, participated in "The Future of Family and Tribe" seminar. His contribution follows below.
Family and Family Values: Mutable or Immutable?
By
David Kraemer
“The
Family” is central to the contemporary American ethos.
To appreciate the degree to which this is so, one need merely consider the
evidence of the Great American Pilgrimage Festival, Thanksgiving. More Americans travel for the Thanksgiving holiday
than at any other time of the year. And where
do they travel to? Overwhelmingly, to be together with family. It is family—however they construe
it—that is the goal of their pilgrimage. Family
is the American “Temple,” the “holy of holies.”
There
should be no surprise, then, that as social and cultural pressures have challenged
conventional assumptions and habits concerning the family and its role, many spokespeople
(and not only conservatives) have expressed alarm, decrying the erosion of “family
values.” If this central institution of
American society is endangered, what will become of American society itself? If divorce increases and families splinter, who
will raise the children to be responsible adults? If
women and men choose to live together without marriage, who will teach children the value
of stability and commitment? Who will assume
the responsibilities that have “traditionally” been the business of the family?
But
this alarm is founded on a false assumption: that there is an entity, called the family,
that performs these functions and more, and that the absence of this very narrowly
conceived family would create an irreparable tear in the fabric of American society. History shows unambiguously that this is simply
not the case. In fact, historical perspective
forces us to recognize that there is no single model of
“family” that does what, in our experience, families are supposed
to do. Families have, through the ages,
assumed various shapes and performed various functions.
Our recognition of this reality will have important lessons for contemporary
discussion.
In
what follows, I will use the example of Jewish families through the ages. I do this not because I could not have found other
examples; indeed, there are more possible examples than we can count. I choose this course because Jews, through the
ages, have lived in many societies and civilizations.
The variety of Jewish families shows particularly well, therefore, how
varied and changeable families have always been.
Let
us begin with what is perhaps the simplest but most crucial observation: that there is no
single meaning of the word “family,” neither in English nor in the ancient
Jewish language, Hebrew. The modern Hebrew
term for family is “mishpacha.” This same term, often used in the Bible, can be
translated as “family,” but it certainly doesn’t mean what we mean by the
same word. In fact, “mishpacha” is used to describe a middle-sized
grouping, somewhere between a tribe, on the one hand, and a household, on the other (see
Joshua 7:14). It is more properly rendered as
“clan.” Furthermore, this is more
than a mere semantic issue, for neither is a “household” the same as our
“family.” It is, in fact, a more
pragmatic designation. Abraham’s
household, for example, included what we would call his family (his wife and children),
but it also included Sarah’s handmaiden (also a sexual partner for Abraham), as well
as Lot’s “family” for a significant period of time. It is not difficult to identify other biblical
families that look little like our own.
“Family”
also meant something very different in rabbinic times (that is, in the Roman/Byzantine and
Persian empires of the 1st-6th centuries). To begin with, though many marriages were surely
monogamous, polygyny was a well-known and approved reality.
Thus, when the Mishnah (the first book of rabbinic law, c. 200 CE) speaks of
a brother marrying the surviving wives of his three deceased, childless brothers, this is
not merely theoretical; the Talmud, in fact, recommends four as the ideal number of wives
(if a man takes more than one). And
acceptance of polygyny led to other, complex realities: in rabbinic, as in later Muslim
times, Jewish men were known to take different wives in different cities. Furthermore, rabbis even allowed themselves to
undertake “pleasure marriages”—temporary “marriages” entered into
for their own pleasure while they were traveling away from home. Not surprisingly, such “marriages” were
also known in the Persian Empire, as they were in early Islam.
Also
striking, when considering the rabbinic age, is the rabbis’ frequent inattention to
(or even neglect of) family as we understand it. According
to the well-known story from the Passover haggadah, rabbis spent the holiday with
colleagues and disciples, not with wives and children.
And when it becomes clear that they have spent too long discussing the
Exodus—so long that it is already time to recite the morning Shema—it is
disciples who come to complain, not family members. In
a real sense, colleagues and disciples are as much “family” for these
authorities as are their wives and children. We
may thus readily understand the rabbinic habit, in midrashic settings, of translating
biblical references to “father” as “teacher” and to “child”
as “disciple.” These are not merely
creative extensions of what were originally family-based terms. They are culturally appropriate translations.
I
could also offer examples from the Middle Ages and early Modernity, but the cases supplied
above should suffice. “Jewish
families” through the ages have assumed multiple and varied forms. And, inevitably, they have looked more or less
like other families in the society around them. Abraham’s
family was defined by the norms of ancient nomadic culture, and a rabbi’s family in
the Mishnaic and Talmudic periods by those of contemporary near-eastern Roman or Persian
culture. That each of these families was
different from the other was no cause for alarm. No
one condemned contemporary Jewish families for assuming the shape of families around them. As societies changed, and Jews were forced to make
homes in new cultures, they had no choice but to create families in the image of the
culture in which they made their home. It was
by virtue of this adaptability that they were able to survive.
What are the lessons of this “historical survey”? It shows, unambiguously, that while
“families” have been known as central institutions in societies through the
ages, the shape that families have assumed has changed constantly. And smaller groups within larger societies have
had little choice but to “go with the flow,” that is, to adapt to the trends and
assumptions of the societies around them. This
is not a lamentable reality. It is evidence
of healthy survival instincts within the human species.
We change with our environments, and our most intimate choices are therefore
profoundly influenced by those environments.
But
aside from the recognition that “change happens,” what does this all really
mean? When we say that families change, we
are really saying that both the shapes and functions of families change; indeed, shape and
function are, to a large extent, two sides of the same coin. Families have always concerned themselves with
reproduction (perpetuation of the species) but, needless to say, reproduction can—and
will—happen outside of family settings as well.
Families have often concerned themselves with providing appropriate
environments for raising children. But,
again, this can happen in other ways as well. Even
without the modern alternative of kibbutz child-raising practices, we will not have to
search hard for examples of communities taking responsibility for this task. Historically speaking, how can it have been
otherwise when early mortality was so common and children were so often left as orphans? In the abundance of such cases,
“parents” were the adults who agreed to raise you and “family” was the
grouping of individuals, whether related by blood or not, who by force of necessity found
themselves sleeping under one roof. Is
education a function of the family or of the community?
The answer is: either or both, depending upon the age and society of which we are
speaking. What about care for the elderly? The same.
The
simple fact is that families, with their host societies, are ever in the course of
transformation. And humans are
extraordinarily adaptable, so this is no cause for alarm.
Will families be different three generations from now? Of course. But
we need not worry about how they will be different. What
families do today, they may or may not do tomorrow. But
we will find ways to flourish in our new settings. We
may be among the most vulnerable of all creatures (we run slowly, we are thin-skinned, we
have little natural protection from the elements, etc.), but we are also the most clever. Openness and adaptability—these are good
family values.
To view other articles by David Kraemer, click here.
To view other essays from "The Future of Family and Tribe" seminar, click here.
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