Does the Family Have a Future?
Constantly present yet rarely viewed as an institution beyond the scope of everyday worries, the family is essential for societies and individual human beings. The Pesach Festival gives us an opportunity to examine the state of families between myth and reality in more detail. At the beginning of this issue, Yves Kugelmann characterizes Pesach as “a festival of family, friends, and the community” for Judaism in which “the individual thinks from the perspective of the community and not the other way around. The attachment to the community releases the individual into a freedom that has its basis in common sense instead of radicalness.”
Mordechai Piron, former Chief Rabbi of the Israeli Defense Forces, goes deeper with these thoughts. He sees a fundamental conflict between Jewish philosophy and the Greek philosophy of antiquity, as well as the types of Gnosticism that still have an influence to this day. The latter consider the universe to have no meaning and purpose and the history of humanity as an incurable, hopeless chaos. On the other hand, the philosophers of Judaism presented people with the enormous challenge of taking action for the continuance of the world and for the preservation and well-being of the human species in the sense of a partnership with God. According to Rabbi Piron, the logical conclusion of this philosophy is to place marriage and the family at the center of human existence. As described by the Zurich journalist Nicole Dreyfus, these philosophical postulates meet with clichés in everyday life such as that of the untiring “Jewish mother” who sometimes becomes unbearable for the sons and husband. Dreyfus embeds this cliché in the history of the modern age between the shtetl and North America, where Jewish mothers and daughters played a leading role in the emancipation of women. How much Jewish families have been strained to this day by fleeing and immigrating is shown by Monica Strauss in her article on the work of writer David Bezmozgis. His latest novel, The Free World, has autobiographical traits and tells the story of a Latvian-Jewish family in Rome that is waiting to continue their journey to America but cannot escape its past in the Soviet Union.
Other articles examine the outer influences that threaten the institution of the family. Using studies conducted by the prominent sociologist Andrew Cherlin, Andreas Mink gets to the bottom of the causes for the “American paradox”: Nowhere else in the Western world is the family held in such high esteem as in the USA. At the same time, the land of unlimited opportunities has also assumed a sad top position for divorce rates and the number of children born out of wedlock. However, Rachel Stern has received some practical advice from Ruth Westheimer – at least with regard to the divorce problem. Known throughout the world as “Dr. Ruth” and an institution in her own right, the psychologist advises married couples to spend intimate hours outside of their own four walls in order to keep their relationship fresh and exciting in the long run. In the meantime, our Hamburg colleague Katja Behling presents the research work of the Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz, who has looked into the negative influence of capitalism and mass media on love: The ideal of the optimum choice and digital matchmaking results in more fragile and consumption-oriented relationships. ●
