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God bless the child
By Yehudit Rotem
Tags: Haredi, children, family 

The streets of Bnei Brak, Saturday night. The door of the number 2 bus opens and the ultra-Orthodox driver greets me with a broad smile, thanking me for choosing to travel with him. His radio plays Hassidic music, accompanied by his excited voice. The ride is a reforming experience, after a degrading journey in a Mehadrin bus [for Haredim, where men are seated in the front and women in the back] from Haifa to Bnei Brak, and I ask myself what other surprises lie in wait for me this evening.

Just then - what surprising timing - I put down, with a sigh, Anne Enright's book "The Gathering," which won the Man Booker Prize in 2007. In it, the heroine says, "Because, just at this moment, I find that being part of a family is the most excruciating possible way to be alive," thereby exposing her dysfunctional family. For her parents, who had 12 children and a few additional offspring who were stillborn, she reserved especially insulting epithets.

Against the backdrop of the rhythmic sounds of a Yardena Arazi tune, which had undergone a spiritual conversion, I find myself thinking that "The Gathering" can expect spectacular ratings - which a high birth rate cannot. Whenever large families face hazards, accidents or severe disruptions linked to children, ultra-Orthodox society, as the flag-bearer of the mission to have as many children as possible, finds itself under an onslaught of heavy attacks. To me, however, this topic continues to be interesting and elicits deep sympathy, even many years after I myself left that community.
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I look at the surroundings through the bus windows, at what used to be my society, choppy all around me: families returning home after a Sabbath with grandpa and grandma, parents pushing baby carriages and beside them children of all ages.

I see myself in every one of those mothers, just as I had been, counting my children time and again before boarding a bus (and once, despite it all, my little girl almost remained on the sidewalk, her face buried in a toy store's display window). Because of this never-ending identification with those mothers, I became a "serial children finder," especially before Passover. In the outskirts of my city, Bnei Brak, my radar eyes once caught a little boy walking on the sidewalk, alone, as though he knew where he was going. Some time ago, I picked up a pair of twins who were crawling on the sidewalk toward the street, and once I brought home a 4-year-old boy who had been waiting for his parents on a bench after a bus had dropped him off. And this evening, on my way to the bus stop, I caught a baby carriage about to roll off the sidewalk as the young mother was running after a "big" toddler who had suddenly turned toward the street. "The Lord preserveth the simple."

So what could be new to me when it comes to the one and only subject that excites me in this world that I left behind? When I still belonged, a saying made the rounds that "On the Sabbath one does not go for a walk with four children on Rabbi Akiva Street" [a major Bnei Brak thoroughfare]. But nowadays, says Chaim Walder, who won the Magen Hayeled [Child Shield] Prize and works as the educational director of Bnei Brak's Child and Family Center, in addition to being a popular Haredi writer and authorized mediator, "Seven [children] is the new four." And with that one sentence he manages to diminish my sense of accomplishment in the births I have achieved.

Walder is no slouch himself (even though he has not exceeded the "average"), and these days is celebrating the bat mitzvah of his daughter Noah, the fourth of six children. "The unique birth rates in the Haredi sector indicate that the number of births in this population is high by all accounts," he reads out to me the results of a Central Bureau of Statistics study. "The number of children born to an ultra-Orthodox woman, especially an Ashkenazi, was 7.5 in 2000. Thus, even though the Haredi community accounts for only 6 percent of the Jewish population, their part in births is triple [the average]."

As a self-appointed sociologist of the Haredi community, I discern two contradictory but parallel trends: On the one hand, you have the "new balabatim" ["landlords"] (as I called them in my book "Ahot Rehoka" ["Distant Sister"] some 18 years ago). The term refers to a gradually growing social strata that, while belonging to the religious-Haredi society, is rooted in the general world, engages in a wide array of professions, uses the media, has a high standard of living, makes frequent trips abroad and seeks entertainment. Yet, on the other hand, there is a central strata of Haredim who cling to traditional ultra-Orthodox characteristics, sharpening and making them more extreme.

Walder calls the latter group the "jug of pure oil," which embodies the essence of ultra-Orthodoxy, a goal that he and many others yearn to achieve, as part of a longing devoid of the jealousy of the villager who wants to be a princess. He claims that Haredi society is no homogeneous bloc and that the hard-core Haredim are leading a bitter and uncompromising ideological struggle against modernism and its various facets. The children are the spearhead. Nowadays, it is not rare to find 13 or 14 children in Haredi families, Walder says. The Lithuanian group leads the pack (with the Shasniks trailing behind with 7.2 percent of the population according to the same CBS study).

The world's best parents

Hearing that, I can't help recalling the sleepless nights, the piles of laundry, the sinks clogged with kitchenware, and the frequent visits to the pediatrician. The siren announcing the onset of Shabbat always "caught me" in a tense state, sweating like a slave. As though guessing the question at the tip of my tongue, Walder says: "The Lithuanian women are the toughest in the Haredi community. They are imbued with motivation and ideology, even more than the men," and I nod in consent, thinking of a relative who had just given birth to her 10th child.

Despite the hardships, I loved the heroics and the excitement of giving birth. T., a childhood friend who married a stern yeshiva student, like my husband, confided in me that whenever she is pregnant, it is "like Tisha B'Av for me," referring to the fast day commemorating the destruction of the two temples. When we parted (she cut off the ties) she already had 10 children. As a child, she had been the only daughter (with two brothers), meticulously dressed and pampered, with starched slips under her skirts. In my family, we were four, and the little one came as a surprise when we thought my 36-year-old mother was already going through menopause.

As a rule, during my childhood days in Bnei Brak, which was becoming ever more Haredi, large families were not commonplace. Our parents were mostly Holocaust survivors and new immigrants who lived their daily lives as survivors. "The invention of the big families" in the ultra-Orthodox world dates back to the late 1950s, after the army excused from national service yeshiva students and those attending kollel (yeshiva for married men), as well as anyone who turned religious studies into a lifelong calling.

Ideological poverty is much more bearable, even easygoing, says Walder, and I recall that I have always been ideologically challenged, just as I was weak in mathematics. "Among the Litvaks [Lithuanians] materialism is no need and definitely not a value. They only care about children. When I see a big family of nicely dressed children, who behave themselves, I feel humble beside them. Children are your extension, your spirit, your heartbeat. You will die and continue to live in them."

"Wait a minute," I want to tell him, you also have your own needs, to write, to be publicly active in the community, but Walder is swept away by the eloquent language he formulated and polished well before he met me: "Maybe I am not objective but you did not come to me because of my objectivity. I hereby assert that Haredi parents are the best parents in the world. How much do 'regular' parents talk to their children? I mean really talk and not the kind of conversation jammed in between classes, television and computers. Haredi parents talk to their children - all the time. Nothing is more important to them than their children and their education. On this matter we Israelis are not two different cultures, we are two nations."

And he adds: "I do not understand parents who willingly settle for two children. It's the height of boredom in my eyes. Why two? Take four! I keep an eye on our children. They are verbal, know how to adjust very well. Our neighbor, an 11-year-old girl, takes care of a 1-year-old. I go nuts over that."

"And when she grows up, will she complain?" I ask. "And that doesn't happen in families of two?" he replies.

A story or a phenomenon?

We are not really sparring partners, Chaim Walder and I, because I announced my emotional take on the subject right from the start. My interlocutor, an experienced interviewee, watches his language because he has been burnt in the past. He opts to paint an ideal picture for me, filled with "how good" and "how nice," and I find it difficult to agree with him.

I try to bring him back to reality. Finally, he concedes that there are problems, but, being a good Jew, he answers my question with a question and an updated parable: "If there are two bugs in a computer, do you throw the computer out? I prefer to repair it. This entire place is an institute for bug repairs. We have a professional team with the skills needed to handle problems" - he points to his office, part of a luxurious complex put up by Bnei Brak City Hall. "When a child is born with a medical problem, cognitive or emotional, the big family collapses much faster and in a worse manner than a small family. But in small families, too, there are downfalls. It's not always the parents who bear the burden. On the other hand, in large and strong families, the abnormal child gets love and support from his parents as well as from his siblings, who help him integrate in the world."

"Perhaps it would be better to avoid problematic pregnancies rather than care for the women and children later on? I found many Haredi women in the psychiatric ward at Tel Hashomer," I say. "In contrast to what many think," Walder responds, "Haredi rabbis are not oblivious to distress. They do issue permits for birth control, when it is required. When a big family is not suited to meet the challenges it has taken upon itself, there are inspections and support. And regarding ultra-Orthodox women in psychiatric wards - bring me the data and I'll respond to it. What can we do if our women stand out? If there are five of 'our' women in a ward of 100, they will still say the ward is packed with Haredi women. And in general, one must distinguish between 'a story' and a 'phenomenon.' A story is a matter for writers. We identify phenomena in order to address them."

I wonder whether I myself am a story or a phenomenon. I reject Walder's attempt to explain myself to me. Instead I tell him about the crisis I faced when I realized my children were growing up and I had to provide for them. His eyes light up and he tells me that in recent years he has been leading a special project to ease the burden of marrying off children in the Haredi community. I am happy to hear that. After all, my Haredi grandchildren will soon reach the age where they must marry. But that is not what I meant. I wanted to share with him the difficulty of finding an appropriate place in the world for each of my children, to propose a direction that would suit them, as individuals.

And now, a moment before parting, the bone of contention that we have tried so hard to ignore rises between us. Without beating around the bush, Walder acknowledges that Lithuanian ultra-Orthodox society, which considers itself the elite because of its rabbis and scholars, is concerned about the "jug of pure oil," about the great majority that toes the line, grows, increases in numbers and becomes stronger. In its eyes the individual is a deviant idea. It is marginal, and the margins should take care of themselves.

Yehudit Rotem's most recent novel, "Al Mishkavkhem Baleilot" ("Whom My Soul Loveth"), was published by Keshet this year.
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