THE JEWISH FATHER FOR A CHANGE

...Perhaps they will be more ready than their fathers to become Jewish fathers...

...Are there no Italian-American mothers like Sophie Port-noy, intrusive, bossy, complaining to their husbands, clinging to their sons...

...Check the society pages of Greek-American newspapers...

...One major difference was that the Jews placed almost the entire burden of moral teaching and discipline on the biological father...

...From an evolutionary perspective, those family systems which provided for a continuity of authoritative loving care (teaching, disciplining, nurturing and healing) for their young were best suited to bringing a large number of surviving offspring to an age when they themselves could reproduce...

...He is the author of FAMILY MATTERS, and has just completed a book on the history of the Jewish family...

...That is what the culture recognizes — not devotion to Torah, not a father-husband type modeled after the Yahweh of Jeremiah and Hosea...

...That ancient insight, embodied in the Talmud and repeatedly asserted in Jewish Wisdom literature (Proverbs, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Midrash, and Responsa), has been confirmed clearly by contemporary sociological and psychological research...

...While most third and fourth generation American fathers at least try to be good Jews and good fathers, they do not make connections between the two, except perhaps on special occasions such as Passover...

...The infant is being told he cannot lead a Jewish life without marriage, that there can be, as the Talmud says, "no joy, nor blessing nor good in his life" without it...

...TALMUD: KIDDUSHIN, 32 A The quotations are from Leo Rosten's Treasury of Jewish Quotations...

...A story in the Midrash tells that the Holy One would not accept the patriarchs' guarantee that they would guard the Torah but was pleased when they asserted that their children would be guarantors...

...Even now, when, at the age of eight days, a Jewish boy is circumcised, the celebrants in the traditional ceremony still chant on his behalf: "As he is entered into the Covenant, so may he be permitted to enter into the study of Torah, under the Chupah (marriage canopy), and into the performance of good deeds...

...Either punish him or forgive him," said another...

...Teaching is left for the most part to professional educators, counsellors, peer groups and mass media...

...Now, even the memory of those rules is gone for most American Jews, who seem helpless against the Americanization of family life...

...The reasons that strong parenting has become more important perhaps than ever before are, at least in part, precisely those which make it so dificult...

...There are still many cultures and sub-cultures where father-absent households are the norm...

...Naomi and Esther, to say nothing of the prophetesses through whom Yahweh spoke to his people...

...The Chinese, with their large extended family and .rigid distribution of roles and functions along hierarchical lines, were highly successful...

...Wherever Jewish fathers lived—Babylonia, Judea, Persia, Yemen, Arabia, Egypt, Rome or Greece — their daily lives centered around their synagogues...

...tucking in, touching and cuddling, dressing, comforting, ministering medicines...

...Such women are obviously compatible with strong fathering...

...it is to enter the process of self-fulfillment...

...V, Fathers are always trying to make their sons good Jews...

...What is not permitted for the man who loves his children is to abandon his responsibility for teaching and disciplining...

...Not so the Jews...

...But by the time of Hillel, Philo and Jesus, Jewish husbands were known for their faithfulness to the wives of their youth...

...Being a generous provider, a friendly playmate, and an imaginative storyteller are not enough to qualify as a Jewish father, nor enough to be an effective American father either, not if effectiveness is measured in terms of the emotional well-being of one's children...

...Scriptures and Talmud provided dozens of rules to regulate family life at home...

...But, if not the complaining mother, the spoiled princess, the ineffectual father, the good boy, what's so special about Jewish families...

...Yahweh, the source of all life, would protect his creation, Israel, if Jewish fathers would choose life and health for their children by nurturing, teaching, disciplining and forgiving them as Yahweh did his children...

...Contemporary American children are world-famous for their aggressiveness, siblings for their biting competitiveness, young men and ladies for their rebelliousness, and adolescents for their confusion, lack of self-esteem and depression as they struggle to work out on their own the crisis of shifting identities...

...but these did not bear the responsibility or carry the authority which was assigned almost exclusively to the father...

...Love, without admonition," the Talmud also says, "is not to love at all...

...But the energy which often used to be focused on the teaching and disciplining of children (what used to be called "guidance") is, in America, turned primarily toward providing for the family...

...Here was no male competition at sports, gaming, jousting, hunting, warring, chivalry, story-telling or leching...

...Portnoy, Kravitz and Morgenstern are second generation Jewish men who cannot even offer worldly success as an excuse for their insignificance at home (failure can be an excuse, too...

...and schools) or discipline (leave that to Mom) than to confront TISHREI 5736 MOMENT 49 their own confusion...

...Strong-minded, resourceful, selfOne of life's greatest mysteries is how the boy who wasn't good enough to marry your daughter can be the father of the smartest grandchild in the world...

...Better to provide clothes, food, liberal allowances, vacations and Bar and Bat Mitzvah parties...

...For that reason, Jews have repeated from the Talmud that "a man must not make a woman weep, for God counts her tears...

...In America, nurturance for busy, successful upper-middle class Jewish fathers often looks more like indulgence (the bike, clothes, summer camps...

...It was, said Yahweh, "for their sake," the sake of the children, that the Torah was given to the people of Israel...

...What is an aberration in the Jewish tradition is the father whose presence, to say nothing of values, is hardly felt by his children...

...The teaching need not be rigid (the text of life is not limited to Halachah...

...They give to the United Jewish Appeal, send their children to predominantly Jewish camps or on trips to Israel, and even belong to Jewish communal or religious organizations...

...Virtually nothing, so long as fathers focus their energy and attention on their careers apart from their families, preach platitudes and moral pieties without living visibly and consistently by them, or seek popularity from their children rather than respect...

...The discipline need not be harsh ("If one must strike a child, strike it with the string of a shoe," said a Talmudic sage) or inconsistent ("Do not threaten a child...

...The Jews traditionally encouraged marriage at any age for what the moderns call renewal and fulfillment: "An old maid who gets married becomes a young wife," went the Yiddish proverb...

...In the Jewish cosmology, one cannot be a man without being a father, not just in the biological but in the cultural sense...

...One thing that is special is that Jews talk, write and complain more about Lawrence Fuchs is Chairman of the Department of American Studies at Brandeis University...

...It is the wife who transforms a house into a home...

...families than others...

...With non-observance of the mitzvot at home — the Sabbath is the most prominent example — many Jews feel a spiritual loss even when they do not call it that, let alone understand it...

...Daughters learned from their mothers how to nurture, manage and even represent and provide for the family...

...But not just because women were weak and needed protection for themselves and their children...

...The model, beginning with Abraham, provides for a man to leave his father's house to set up an independent household where he — without much help from extended family or religious functionaries — takes on the responsibility for teaching and disciplining the young in loving cooperation with the mother of his children...

...Naturally, marriage was celebrated for women, too...

...After that, it became even more.im-portant that the religion of Israel be transportable...

...Messrs...

...The instinctive desire of the mother to nurture and protect her child was complemented by the belief of the Jewish fathers that, as expressed in Psalms, "children are the heritage of the Lord...

...Nor is to marry to be trapped, suffocated, restricted or chained...

...The involvement of Jewish fathers in activities often assumed by mothers or shared more widely with adult relatives of both sexes in other cultures remains the most distinctive characteristic of the Jewish family...

...50 MOMENT SEPTEMBER 1975 tinuity of authoritative paternal love for children growing up in Jewish homes in a culture which undermines the authority of parents in so many ways...

...In the mouths of the prophets, Yahweh also became a metaphor for a distinctive Jewish husband type...

...It is extremely difficult to be such a Jewish father in mid-1970 America not just because Jews are confused about what being Jewish means, but also because fathers in America generally are no longer sure of their own authority...

...Is it any wonder that middle class Jewish mothers have been throwing up their hands and increasingly throwing in the towel in the face of what has become, in the absence of authoritative loving from fathers, a near impossible job...

...Irony of ironies in these days of militant women's liberation...

...Mothers everywhere, until the twen46 MOMENT SEPTEMBER 1975 tieth century, were programmed to invest an enormous amount of energy in the production and care of a single offspring, but the extent and nature of post-biological fathering varied tremendously...

...But he is only a shadow of a Jewish father who invests considerable energy in nurturing, teaching and disciplining the young...

...How in this age of Freud, television and affluence — the age of individual expressiveness — dare a father attempt to teach his children his own view of right and wrong...

...How can a father who is himself uncertain discipline his child without confusion...

...But to be a loving father in these ways is not enough not only because Jewish tradition requires more, but because modern American life demands it...

...The religious Jewish male knew that he had one duty above all — to have children and to raise them in Torah...

...What can be done to restore a conWhoever teaches his son teaches not only his son but also his son's son-and so on to the end of generations...

...The tn48 MOMENT SEPTEMBER 1975 ditional Jewish distribution of roles and functions between parents may speak more constructively to the needs and desires of most middle-class mothers in America today than any ideology enunciated by Jefferson, Marx or Gloria Steinem...

...Fatherhood is, after all, a cultural invention...

...In America, Jewish fathers are still known for nurturance (actual feeding, TISHREI 5736 MOMENT 47 One father can support ten sons, but ten sons seem unable to support one father...

...Surely, a father who practices izdakah is a Hafachic model for his children, at least in one respect...

...As for that other stereotype — the nice Jewish boy — Neil Klug-man is as nice as tens of thousands of ex-altar boys (blond and Irish) hoping to marry a step or two above their backgrounds...

...Discipline, such as it is, has fallen to mothers required to play super-mother in their struggle to maintain family health without much help from extended family, older siblings, the community, or their husbands...

...A religious emphasis became a cultural mandate: nothing was more important than the life of a child, not just to the woman who bore it but to the man whose seed was carried by her...

...For that he needed a wife who would help create sholem bayis...

...Research on child neglect in middle class families is not as extensive as in lower class families, but it points to the significance of parental presence, energy and authority in raising children to healthy adulthood...

...Each father became his son's (and to a lesser extent, daughter's) rabbi...

...when will they try to be good Jews instead of leaving the task to their sons...

...but one must know what one believes...

...That is why the Psalmist could promise the religious man that "thy children (will be) like olive plants around thy table...

...One learned also from uncles, grandfathers and older wise men...

...Patimkin of Patimkin Sinks, the only ineffectual fathers in America...

...So were the Jews, who also emphasized filial piety and the responsibility of the older members of the family to teach the young didactically (not just by doing...

...All ancient family systems evolved as a response to the fact that human survival depends on learning...

...Better to hug and kiss, dress and feed, and chauffeur to Little League games and ballet lessons...

...The prophets spoke of Yahweh as a constant husband to his bride, Israel...

...The Jewish preoccupation with family — what is right with it and what is wrong — is second only to concern about Jewish survival itself...

...Such fathers are currently familiar through characterizations in popular culture...

...By teaching Torah diligently to their children, speaking of it when they sat in their homes, when they walked by the way, and when they rose up and lay down...

...He became dependent on her in a way that no other major religion compels...

...The reasons are not hard to discern...

...The Talmudic Rabbi Yosei used to say, "Never have I called my wife 'my wife,' but always 'my home.' " A man needed a wife to have a home...

...Jews have told each other throughout the centuries that it is not money but character which is the best dowry of a wife and that "a man's happiness is all his wife's creation...

...After the beginning of the Second Commonwealth, when Ezra made Torah study obligatory for adult males, the Jews invented a system of male bonding through Synagogues which, while designed to promote devotion to God, had the practical effect of enforcing devotion to children and wives...

...respecting Jewish women are linked to a tradition which includes Sarah, Rebecca...

...Something they understand much better, although they do not usually appreciate the Jewish source of that understanding, is that children who grow up in a close-knit, loving, stable family are much more likely to be healthy and live longer than those who do not...

...In addition to hundreds of novels and short stories, Jews also write biographies, autobiographies and essays in which family themes are dominant...

...Tens of thousands of Jewish fathers conclude, at least subliminally, that it is better not to teach (leave that to peers, T.V...

...she dies in him, he in her...

...Prestige and status went to those who knew, explained and lived most wisely and consistently the precepts of Torah...

...But boys learned from their fathers that by investing energy in fathering (not just providing) they were serving Torah and God himself...

...Are there no Greek-American Mar-jorie Morningstars...

...Marriage in the Jewish tradition is not a concession to sin...

...They might say with their more successful third generation children that they gave at the office, but there is not much to show for it...

...In America, it is even common for Jewish fathers to sabotage what little discipline mothers attempt to exercise over their children, although nothing could be more contrary to the child-rearing advice embodied in Scriptures and Talmud, both of which emphasize the unity of mother and father in relating to their children...

...Are Jewish fathers, such as Mr...

...Indeed, the prolonged dependency of infants and children on continuing adult care for their survival is the most singular characteristic of human families...

...Soon it became commonplace in the Jewish liturgy for adult males to promise during the recital of the holy Sh'ma that they would love the Lord their God with all their hearts...

...That young men are now postponing marriage and procreation until they are more sure of themselves and what they believe is all to the good...

...There are Patimkins named Smith, selling sinks, selling insurance, selling whatever, in almost every county in the country...

...What is really so special about Jewish families is not Jewish mothers, but Jewish fathers...

...Other gods and goddesses not only shifted allegiances in a repetitive maneuvering for power, but they were sexually promiscuous, providing a metaphor which Hebrews had followed in pre- and early-Yahwehist days when they had frolicked and fornicated on the mountaintops and — like others in the ancient Near East — practiced infanticide, child sacrifice and abortion...

...Classical Jewish literature and traditional Jewish practice incorporate a treasure of pertinent child-rearing advice for American fathers-to-be in the mid-1970's which, among other things, makes it clear that a father does not have to be authoritarian or tyrannical to provide the authoritative love necessary for the well-being and healthy development of his children...

...Jewish males were honored for being nurturant, teaching and disciplining fathers while adult females, honored not for their scrubbed good looks or docility (see Proverbs 31) but for their competence as managers and representatives of the family in the world of work outside the home, often demonstrated their individual capabilities far beyond the confines of kitchen and bedroom...

...America rewards its good providers...

...When his wife dies, a man's world is darkened, his step is slow, his mind is heavy...

...Probably no other people has made such a fuss over a man becoming a husband as the Jews...

...But he must be involved as a teacher and a disciplinarian...

...Marriage itself was viewed as a necessary precondition for devotion to God by all but those sects (presumably Jesus belonged to one) who expected the imminent coming of the Messiah and who viewed marriage and earthly pleasures and obligations as incompatible with preparation for the coming...

...Judaism evolved as a family-centered, home-based religion even, or especially, in its most God-intoxicated days in ways that Christianity never has...

...During the writing and codification of the Talmud (including four tractates on the family entitled Women) a distinctive Jewish father type emerged, based on the metaphor Yahweh as father to his children Israel...

...Other Talmudic sayings emphasize the dependence of the husband on the wife...

...How else could he renew the living covenant through his children...

...According to the Talmud, 394 Synagogues were functioning in Jerusalem even before the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 C.E...