To Turn to Judaism Is to Turn toward Life

Earlier this month, a left-wing Catholic journalist wrote an essay about the joys of young motherhood—provoking a storm of outrage, mostly on social media, from fellow educated leftists. Nellie Bowles sees in this hostility to the creation of new life evidence of a new breed of “nihilism” that is rapidly beginning to resemble a “death cult.”

Apocalypse is around the corner. Exhaustion is the mode. To create children is ecoterrorism. Parents are the oppressor class. . . . As the window sign on my block—right next to the Black Lives Matter sign—reminds me: existence is pain. This cult happens to be run by the luckiest people in the history of the world—a group who has healthier longer lives and more leisure and more power than their ancestors could have even imagined.

New data have shown just how sharply the fertility rate in wealthy countries is falling. That’s a very real thing. But according to [these nihilists], to care about the plunging birthrate . . . around the world is, for some reason, . . . racism, so we can’t even talk about it without risking the ire of the apocalypse-now brigade and, of course, our jobs.

Anyway, it’s sad. I think there will be a lot of heartbreak in a few years as millennial uterus-having people realize we are, by and large, middle-aged women. And that while children are by no means the whole purpose of life, they’re a potentially wonderful part of it.

I see my conversion [to Judaism] in part as a turn away from all this sort of thinking, and there’s lots of ways to phrase that turn. But I guess I could just say the obvious: Judaism is, in fact, not a death cult. And I like that about it.

Read more at Chosen by Choice

More about: Children, Fertility, Judaism, Progressivism

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society