THE JEWISH HOME TO-DAY
So much for the traditions of the Jewish home! What of it in this day
and generation? The fact cannot be denied that the Jewish home is
seriously threatened in our time. I do not go so far as a commentator
on Jewish affairs, who declared as long as a decade ago: "The Jewish
home, as we have known and loved it for ages, has ceased to be. It is
no longer a Jewish home but the home of Jews. All the grace and beauty
of Jewish ceremonial and custom have died out of it. The young
generation goes out into the world, unaffected by the influences that
held past generations loyal, and so Judaism and the community go alike
to waste." And, yet, that the indictment is not wholly unjustifiable
came to me when I learned of a Jewish mother who insisted upon a young
married daughter averting the birth of a child, because its coming
would interfere with and abbreviate a long-planned summer vacation in
European lands. The home which trifles with life's dignities and
sanctities in this fashion is become a mockery of the one-time
majestic Jewish home.
It will be noted that the reference is not to the vast majority of
Jewish homes in West European lands and in our lands, for these are
the homes of the poor. And the homes of the poor present a problem,
which in the absence of economic-industrial adjustment no ethical
aspiration will solve. As for the largest number of Jewish homes in
America, in them dwell victims of the mass migration movement which
has within two generations transplanted huge numbers from continent to
continent. Who will decide which raises the more serious problem, the
involuntary migration of the hapless many or the voluntary imitation
of the world by an unhappy few? There has really been more than a
migration, for innumerable hosts have suddenly been compelled not only
to wander from one continent to another but to leave one world behind
them and to enter into a wholly new world.
The move is not merely from Russia or Roumania, Galicia or the Levant
to America; it is a plunge into a new world-life with all that such
sudden sea-change involves. This transplantation to strange climes and
an alien life results in many cases in the tragedy of utter
misunderstanding and alienation between parent and children, a tragedy
remaining for some Zangwill to portray. But it is not only the homes
of the poor and the oppressed Jews the texture of which has greatly
altered within a generation. For within the homes of the well-to-do in
Israel a graver and a sadder peril has come to threaten as a result of
the repudiation, though it be implicit, of parental responsibility at
its highest and of filial duty at its finest, which repudiation in
truth is sequent upon the abandonment of the ancient and long
unwearied idealism of the Jew.
If the homes of the poor are endangered from without, the home of the
rich is in peril from within. Prosperity and its abandonment of the
highest have undermined the home to a degree beyond the possibility of
the effect of adversity. If it behoove children not to be over-insistent
upon their parents accepting their ways and becoming exactly like them,
it is trebly necessary for children to understand that foreignism in
parents does not justify them in compelling parents to assimilate the
externals of the new world and its new life. Under these circumstances,
parents have a peculiar right to be themselves, to insist upon the
essentials of their own _modus vivendi_, to cherish and maintain the
things by which they lived in a past arbitrarily cut off.
It ought to be said that the Jewish home has been more menaced by the
life of the world into which Israel has in some part entered than by
any other circumstance. The truth is that the Jew's home is become a
part of the world and in its new orientation (or occidentalization)
has lost its other-wordly touch or nimbus. Thus Israel never really
found it necessary to stress filial obedience. The latter has always
been one of the things taken for granted. Save for its obviously
necessary inclusion in the Decalogue, the Jew has always dealt with
filial obedience as it dealt with the theory of divine existence or
the fact of Israel's persecution taking all alike for granted.
If the conflict in the home is a little sharper within than without
Jewish life, this is in some degree the defect of its quality. The
large part played by the home in the life of the Jew makes the
transition to the new order seem harsh and bitter. The Jewish parent
of yore lived his life within the walls of the home, and the Jewish
mother particularly passed her days within the limits of a home. It is
not easy for the Jewish mother to surrender that sense of possession
which grows out of undivided preoccupation with child or children,
that sense of possession fostered as much by a child's sense of
dutifulness as by parental concern. The Jewish mother, whom the
middle-aged have known and loved, found her deepest and most
engrossing interest in the days and deeds of her children. It may be
and it is necessary for the Jewish mother to relinquish her long-time
sense of ownership, but let it not be imagined to be easy. And it is
the harder because with, perhaps before, its relinquishment comes a
sense of deep loss and hurt to the child.
Nor would the necessity of yielding up the sense of possession in
itself be so serious, if there did not coincide with it an ofttimes
exaggerated sense of independence in the Jewish child. We may be
witnessing an almost conscious break with the centuried tradition of
filial self-subordination, or it may be that the revolt of the Jewish
child seems more serious than it is because of the filial habit of
obedience in the life of the Jewish home. Whatever be the explanation
of the new filial role in the Jewish home, it is a sorry thing that
Israel in its assimilative passion should be ready to surrender the
home and its historic content, should be so unsure of itself and so
sure of the world without as to be willing to give up its best and
most precious for the sake of uniformity with the world.
And there are Jews who forget that the world reverences and honors the
Jewish home even as it reveres the Bible of the Jew! A wise friend has
written: "Whenever and wherever I have been asked by non-Jews what I
consider the greatest and most permanent contribution of the Jew to
civilization, I have always answered: the Jewish home. Ancient Greece
knew of no real home as we understand it. Israel did." But it is not
enough to laud the Jewish home of old. If Jews are to rest satisfied
with praises of the Jewish home that was instead of seeking to beautify
and ennoble the Jewish home that is, then, remembering the word of
Juvenal, virtue is the sole and only nobility, may it truly be said of
the Jew in the language of the rabbis: "As the dust differs from the
gold, so our generation differs from the generations of the fathers."
And yet there is no Jewish question here, though there be a Jewish
aspect of the wider problem we are considering. Jewish parents have in
the past for reasons given or hinted at been almost Chinese in their
adoration of a child. And when the day of parenthood dawns, these may
be as unwisely adoring and hopelessly indulgent touching their
children as were their parents. It may be that in the past Jewish
parents have given more to their children than have non-Jewish. Let
less be given parentally and more be asked,--Jewish parent and Jewish
child need this counsel most.