Lessons from a high-fertility subculture

Modernity has meant fewer children in virtually every culture around the world. Do holdouts like Orthodox Jews have lessons for the rest of us?

Sonja Trauss explains how Hasidic Jews have so many children and asks what, if anything, the rest of the world has to learn from them.

This piece was featured in Issue 24 of Works in Progress. Subscribe today to get Issue 25, and an issue every two months after, delivered straight to your door.

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Artwork by Atalanta Arden-Miller. Photograph depicting an ultra-Orthodox family by David Grossman.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews may have something to teach us. They live squarely in the urban centers of the US and Europe, including 200,000 in New York City, but unlike most city dwellers, they have very high birth rates. Today, a Yiddish-speaking woman in the United States can expect to have 6.6 children, compared with 1.6 for the country as a whole.

Everything in ultra-Orthodox life is geared toward facilitating large families, from how children play to how couples have sex. In this piece, I’ll use the example of Chabad, the largest denomination of Hasidic Jews, although many practices mentioned here are shared by all the ultra-Orthodox.

It’s not clear that many modern people, Westerners or not, would want to adopt the family-friendly elements of Chabad life. What’s more, little of the Chabad lifestyle can easily be practiced in isolation. But understanding how this community encourages fertility can help to explain why it is falling in many other parts of the world today.

Before marriage

1. Chabadniks start having children young: there’s almost no way to have six or more children if you’re starting after 30. Yiddish-speaking men in America have a mean marriage age of 22 and women 21, and couples will almost always have children shortly after, partly because contraception is broadly discouraged.

2. Since lifetime mates are chosen at a young age, Chabadniks believe the selection can’t be left to the couple alone. I don’t mean to be rude, but 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds don’t have a reputation for great judgment in any area. Even so, Chabadniks would object to characterizing the way they date as ‘arranged’, but from a secular point of view, the level of parental and community involvement and the short duration of courtship make Chabad dating practice resemble arranged marriage.

3. Chabadniks segregate children and teens by gender, believing that it helps to make their short courtship with a small number of potential partners feel satisfying and selective. Teenagers can’t have boyfriends and girlfriends in middle school and high school, and children are forbidden from playing at the marriage experience. Even in my secular Jewish childhood, our Hebrew school teachers scared us with tales of rabbis who made children get real divorces after pretend weddings.

4. Sex before marriage is prohibited. Such restrictions have long been foisted inappropriately on American teens, but they are much less unreasonable when community members marry around 20.

After marriage

Starting early isn’t enough to guarantee many children. Parents need to have kids young and then continue to have them throughout their twenties and thirties. But how do couples continue to like each other enough to keep wanting to have more children (including having the frequent sex this requires)?

1. Gender segregation continues in many, if not most, areas of adult life. This helps maintain a sense of romance in daily life. As the Chabad-Lubavitch website says: ‘If we preserve the space and boundary between men and women we can cherish our times of closeness all the more’.

2. Men and women are prohibited from mixing because rabbis believe a love affair is around every corner. But the omnipresence of assumed temptation both makes extramarital affairs difficult and, according to Chabadniks, creates the sensual atmosphere it’s meant to dispel, while channeling it toward the only acceptable outlet: one’s spouse.

3. Sex becomes a pious act, permitted within a limited timeframe. While a woman is menstruating, and for the seven days after the end of her period, a couple doesn’t have sex at all. Some couples take this very seriously and won’t even touch lest contact lead to physical intimacy. This even includes handing each other an object in case their hands touch accidentally. At the end of this period, the woman goes to a ritual bath called mikvah. The mikvah visit happens at night, when the sun is down, and the bath is a communal facility, some of which are quite fancy. Upon returning home, the woman is supposed to have sex with her husband. Having sex on day 12 or 13 of her menstrual cycle is a great way to maximize the chance of conceiving!

4. Sex is especially encouraged on Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest. From Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, pretty much all that’s permitted is eating, praying, reading, socializing in your neighborhood, and napping. The faithful are commanded to enjoy Shabbat, and one of the recommended ways is to have sex with one’s partner. As one prominent halachic code (a compilation of rabbinic law) says: ‘Marital intimacy is one of the expressions of Shabbos pleasure’.

The life of a child and its parents

The gender segregation described above may seem alien, but we seculars also inhabit segregated worlds; they’re just not tied to our biological sex. We call them ‘professional’ and ‘leisure’, ‘public’ and ‘private’, or ‘adult’ and ‘child’.

In fact, people without children may not realize how totally we separate children into their own sphere and complicate their existence outside of that sphere. Not only does this discourage adults from having children, it also marginalizes those who do have them, especially women.

When children are permitted in public spaces, the expectation is that they be continuously and closely supervised by an adult, in a bubble of attention and control. A recent poll of five hundred children between the ages of eight and twelve found that 62 percent had never walked or biked somewhere without an adult. Even in the absence of actual danger and even when they’re not causing a nuisance, children are not allowed to roam, with parents sometimes facing prosecution when they leave their children unsupervised.

While Chabad life has gender segregation, the separation between adult and child spaces does not exist in the same way. Children are considered a blessing, and making it easy to raise them is a major purpose of life.

Walking into a Chabad congregation, one of the most surprising features for secular Americans might be that young children roam anywhere in the building apparently without limitation, playing games, squealing, and laughing, including at the front of the room where the service is being led. A leading Chabadnik rabbi, Zushe Greenberg, explains: ‘We not only recruit kids to come to shul [synagogue], but even encourage this phenomenon. As I always tell people, we allow the adults at Chabad because they’re the ones who bring the kids’. Some of these children belong to the rabbi. He might pick one up, or shush them in passing. If they’re very loud in the hallway, other congregants might shush them too, but children making noise or playing unattended in this space isn’t problematic. Rabbi Elisha Greenbaum says: ‘A shul without children is boring. What kind of organization would deliberately reject their own future and opt for a sterile, boring, child-free environment?’

Lastly, Chabad women do not carry the burden of childcare alone. Men and older male children are active contributors to childcare and to children’s education. Religious men, in general, do more housework and more childcare than non-religious men. And communal childcare is the default. In New York, for example, many more Orthodox Jews, including Chabadniks, send their children to daycare than non-denominational Jews do: 54 percent versus 15 percent aged 0–2 and 93 percent versus 18 percent aged 3–5. Nursery schools are run and staffed by women, but primary schools for boys have male teachers and leadership to a great extent.

Learning from Chabad life

Copying Chabad life wouldn’t be easy in secular society. Religious belief adds weight to practices like the mikvah or sexual abstinence. But there is one pronatalist practice that we can adopt from ultra-Orthodox life and that all high-fertility subcultures share: assuming that everyone you interact with between the ages of 20 and 45 will have at least one child under five in their care. This assumption impacts every social and business function. Children are welcome in far more spaces, and where they aren’t, event organizers provide schedules and resources to facilitate the participants’ childcare needs.

This might seem like a tall order, but in the developed world we already expend tremendous consideration and public resources for a type of dependent: people’s cars. The host of an event, the owner of a store, the developer of offices or housing, an employer, or a local government will all assume their guests, customers, tenants, employees, and residents have cars, and take responsibility for providing a place to store and a convenient way to transport them.

We take on tremendous expenses to build huge parking garages and wide and smooth roads for people’s cars. This social support incentivizes driving. If we extended as much concern for people’s children as we do for their cars, we would, like Chabad, encourage more children than we have today.

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Sonja Trauss is the Executive Director of YIMBY Law.