Lessons from a high-fertility subculture - Works in Progress Magazine

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

What would it take for the world to turn around the widespread decline in births? 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.<br>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.

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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<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>After marriage<br>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)?<br>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’.<br>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.<br>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!<br>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...