A surprising number of biblical figures had fertility problems. Abraham and Sarah, Rebecca and Isaac, Rachel and Jacob, and Elkanah and Hannah (who ultimately bore the prophet Samuel) all had difficulties. No other culture’s sacred scripture focuses so extensively on infertility.
What can we learn from this?
First, that children are precious. Indeed, the Jewish tradition sees them as a great blessing. In part that is because of their inherent value as human life, but it is also because of the psychological growth and joy they bring to their parents. The very difficulty that so many couples have in conceiving and bearing children is itself a mark of how precious they are when they come.
Second, the biblical stories amply indicate that infertility causes immense tensions in marriage. Many infertile couples begin to question who they are individually and what their future together holds.
Worse, many couples seeking to become pregnant feel the equivalent of a final examination each month, and, if they are having difficulties conceiving, they will fail many of those examinations.
In our own time, Jews are especially troubled by this problem not because of Jewish genetic diseases but rather because we have been duped by the American ideology that makes work the fundamental source of one’s identity and pride. That leads Americans to sleep less and work more hours than any other nation on earth.
It also inevitably takes a major toll on family life. Part of that toll is in the very attempt to have children in the first place.
While there are many factors that can cause infertility, age is the primary one. Physicians maintain that the optimal age for both men and women to procreate is 22. We human beings are designed to have children in our late teens and our early 20s. This ability continues unabated until age 27, but from 27 to 35 a higher percentage of couples encounter problems with infertility than their younger contemporaries. Those problems become even more prevalent in the 35-to-40 age group.
It is good that Jews value education and seek to excel in their professional lives. For reproduction, though, the unfortunate result is that Jews postpone marriage and procreation.
Rabbis routinely report that most young couples that ask them to officiate at their wedding these days are in their late 20s or early 30s. That means, however, that if they can have children, they will probably have only one or two, and there is a 30 percent chance, up to age 35, that they will have trouble having children altogether.
Infertility, it should be noted, is not just a women’s problem: 40 percent of infertile couples are infertile due to a problem in the woman; 40 percent are infertile to a problem in the man; 10 percent are infertile due to a problem in both members of the couple; and in 10 percent doctors cannot determine what is wrong (“undiagnosed”).
Jews, who have had a virtual love affair with medicine for the last 2,000 years, trust that whenever they want to bear children, medicine will enable them to do so. While infertility specialists have made great strides in making it possible for many couples to bear children, they cannot do that for everyone, and the younger the couple is, the greater the chance that the new techniques will work.
Because infertility is a great source of pain for the couples involved and a demographic quandary for the Jewish people, we as a community must work to address this problem.
First, in a proactive mode, teenagers should be encouraged to choose colleges where there are many Jews — not just so that they might take a course in Jewish studies or attend a service or holiday celebration but to increase their chances of meeting a Jewish mate. We also must communicate that it is not too early to look for a spouse while in college, and if one finds one, it is not too early to marry and begin to have children in graduate school.
Second, those of us beyond childbearing years must “put our money where our mouths are.” That is, we must help to provide day-care arrangements and tuition aid for Jewish day schools, supplementary schools and camps.
Here the Talmud’s insistence that grandparents have the same duty to provide a Jewish education for their grandchildren as parents do for their children is especially apt in our time. It is not a great favor when grandparents help with these costs; it is simply what our tradition expects them to do.
Third, we need to recognize that the emphasis on children in the Jewish tradition only exacerbates the problems of infertile Jewish couples. Not only do they suffer personally each time they see their contemporaries become pregnant or deal with their children, wishing that they could be in that stage of life as well; their own Jewish tradition seems to condemn them for not having children.
Here it is critical to note two things. First, like all obligations in Jewish law, the duty to procreate ceases to apply to those who cannot fulfill it through no fault of their own. Furthermore, adoption is an honored choice in the Jewish tradition that should be encouraged and supported.
Finally, we must impress upon Jews that even if childbirth is not an option, there are other ways to contribute to the nourishment of the Jewish people.
For example, the Talmud analogizes those who teach other people’s children to those who give birth to them.
Second, we in the Jewish community must take steps to support and assist young adults who would love to get married and have children, but cannot.
Communal activities and Internet sites like JDate can help, but so can parents who host intellectual, religious and social gatherings at their homes for their children and their friends and their friends’ friends.
We also must recognize that many couples in our midst would love to have children but cannot. That requires minimally that we must not badger couples without children with questions about when they are going to have them. We must instead try to be there for them emotionally as they struggle with this issue and support them in their efforts to have their own biological children or to adopt.
Moreover, in our programming we must plan for couples who do not have children as well as for those who do. Our Jewish institutions should not be only for couples with children, for that group constitutes a diminishing percentage of our people.
Instead, we must recognize the infinite worth of each Jew, married or not and with children or not, a value imprinted in each of us when we were created in the image of God.
Rabbi Elliot N. Dorff is professor of philosophy at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles.
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