lives

To Be
a Man,
Jewish
and

Childless

by ELLIOT JAGER

Hi, how are ya? How are the wife and kids?”

It’s an innocuous greeting that I get every so often from passing acquaintances who notice my wedding ring and take for granted that I have children — maybe even grandchildren.

Telling them that I don’t have either requires emotional energy I can’t always muster.

“When I go to a new shul,” one of the childless men I interviewed for my book told me, “what’s the second question people ask? ‘Are you married?’ is the first. ‘Yes, we’re married.’ Then, it’s ‘Do you have children?’ When I reply, ‘No,’ there are those who politely change the subject. Other times, I get a stony silence. The worst is when you get sympathy that borders on the maudlin. I suspect most people when they find out are privately sanctimonious.”

Actually, I have yet to meet a man who was embittered because he was childless. In his own way, each came to terms with the reality that he wouldn’t become a father. Even so, communal recognition of the issue could prove palliative.

Some 24 percent of American men aged 40 to 44 have no children, according to a recent Pew survey. About 51 percent said they would feel bothered if they never had offspring. Among non-Orthodox Jewish men between 25 and 39, less than a third are married. Marriage at a later age tends to be correlated with fewer children. And yet Jewish communal life in and out of the synagogue is child-focused.

Before an observant family sits down to enjoy Shabbat dinner, the parents bless their children. A few weeks ago, my wife and I were invited along with another couple from the neighborhood that we really didn’t know to the home of mutual acquaintances. When our hosts went into the kitchen to get the first course, the other male guest lifted his hands as if to place them on the heads of his absent children, moved his lips silently and blessed them virtually.

As a frequent bystander to this heartening Friday night ritual, I wasn’t sure what to make of it in this instance. I suppose this fellow figured that a blessing by pantomime was no less efficacious as when done live.

When my wife and I decided to abandon fertility treatments because they simply weren’t working, we embarked on a journey that ultimately brought us to accept that we weren’t going to be parents.

We found a wonderful and empathetic therapist to help us deal with the finality of childlessness. I also found it cathartic to write about my relationship with my estranged Hassidic father. We did not see or speak to one another for 30 years. Then the process of our reconciliation was overshadowed by his insistence — principally on religious grounds — that I seek the intervention of miracle workers to help overcome our childlessness. I also found it helpful to lay out the stories of other childless men and to converse with rabbis, philosophers and public intellectuals about what I saw as Judaism’s harsh attitude toward childless men.

Along the road toward acceptance, we experienced frustration, anger, and bereavement for the children we’d never have. And I also become mindful of the scores of references to infertility in the Hebrew Bible, Talmud and Jewish folklore. None of these were laudatory.

The Hebrew word for infertile is akar, meaning barren. Every time I come across it in the text I visualize it as written in boldface. It hits me in the gut because the connotation of akar goes beyond childless to a man who is literally uprooted from life, community and (some sages claim) the World to Come. It’s a heartless phrase that isn’t any more palatable when used in the feminine, akara.

The discomfiture of women who want children but can’t have them is intuitively plain to grasp. Everyone has heard of the “maternal instinct.” One way or another, women have been out front about childlessness

— some about their efforts to conquer infertility, others about proudly embracing life without children. At the same time, the distress of similarly situated men is often overlooked. Some men feel drawing attention to their involuntary childlessness makes them somehow seem less masculine.

But you can’t insulate yourself or your partner from the pain of childlessness. On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, we’ll be in our seats for the haftarah reading. The storyline from the Book of Samuel (1:8) goes like this: Elkanah has two wives, the fruitful Peninnah and the beloved-but-barren Hannah, who is disconsolate over not being able to conceive. Elkanah asks, “Why weepest thou? Am I not better to thee than ten sons?”

Broken with grief, Hannah heads to the Tabernacle in Shiloh, which is the dwelling place of the Ark of the Covenant. The next scene has her mumbling in supplication. The High Priest Eli takes notice, though he misreads her demeanor for drunkenness. Hannah straightens him out and in an about-face, Eli prophesizes that she will have the son she longs for.

Sure enough, she gives birth to Samuel. Rather than taking joy in raising him, she apprentices the boy to the priests as soon as he’s weaned. He grows up to become the greatest — arguably among the angriest — of the biblical prophets.

That’s the way it goes in the Bible. From Genesis through Chronicles, the Hebrew Bible does not record a single instance where God turns a deaf ear to the prayers of a barren couple. Not once.

The tension between fecundity and barrenness is a fairly constant, I’d say almost obsessive, biblical theme. Will Abraham and Sarah conceive a child? Will Isaac and Rebecca? Jacob and Rachel? In Jewish civilization, making babies is the first imperative. Think about it. Jews are the children of Abraham; the sons and daughters of Israel. To give living expression to the Covenant, observant Jews are foremost obligated to “teach diligently to your children.”

Even if, like me, you are with Mordecai Kaplan in envisaging Judaism as an “evolving religious civilization” that wrestles with God, nationhood and ritual in a never-ending search for meaning — that search for Jewish meaning is made incomparably more complicated for the childless.

But let’s set aside the big philosophical and theological issues regarding the meaning of life without children to consider the social implications of being Jewishly-affiliated and childless.

Think about the Jewish holiday cycle from the perspective of a childless man. The Pesach seder is emphatically child-centered, its very structure to provide an answer to the Four Questions recited by the youngest at the table.

In synagogues where the priestly blessing is recited, father’s wrap their sons, even those married with children of their own, in tallit prayer shawls, symbolically shielding them from the aura of the Shekhinah or divine presence.

And what is Purim without costumed children parading in the synagogue. Or Chanukah without youngsters playing dreidel (even if nowadays it might be a spin-the-dreidel app). Or Sukkot, when the children decorate the Sukkah, and the festival concludes with Simchat Torah and children parading around the synagogue with paper flags and miniature Torahs.

Of course, there are far worse experiences in the Jewish community than being a man without children. To be an unmarried man, for instance, can be much harder.

Moreover, perceptions vary. A man who finds himself in a religiously observant community is likely to be more discomfited over being involuntarily childless than someone in a more progressive milieu. In strictly Orthodox circles, a couple that’s been married for two or three years and doesn’t have children is likely to receive unsolicited advice on how to overcome their wretched predicament. In traditional synagogues of various stripes, a prerequisite for being a ba’al tefillah, or communal prayer leader on the High Holy Days, is being a married man with children.

The last thing I am suggesting is that that there is something wrong with putting children at the forefront of Jewish communal life. What is needed, though, is for clergy and communal leaders to begin a conversation about how Jewish institutions might advance a more welcoming, sensitive and inclusive environment for men — as well as women — without children.


Elliot Jager is a Jerusalem-based journalist. His memoir, The Pater: My Father, My Judaism, My Childlessness was published in November by The Toby Press.