The Diaspora Challenge that I Called TMore than Twenty Years Ago - My Article in Jewish Action 2004

 

This Pesach, I arrived at shul to find a new edition of YU Torah-To-Go - always a fun read. Except this issue focuses on the critical communal challenge of Aliyah, and states rather dramatically that Diaspora Judaism is at a new croosroads. In light of growing anti-Semitism at home, and the pull of Israel, many in the issue argue that (Modern Orthodox) Diaspora Jewry needs to make some important choices about its future. 

This issue has already garnered much discussion (and I'm here in Israel!) and an early response from Professor Adam Ferziger in which he notes the issue, promotes his most recent book, and makes the important point that Aliyah is not always running away, and that Diaspora Jews make tremendous contributions here in Israel - and should think about aliyah in this manner as well. (On a personal note, there's a small but growing trend of Jewish educators coming to Israel and staying in Chinuch, rather than retraining in another field).

I raised the issue of the "brain drain" on Modern Orthodox communities more than twenty years ago, in an article that I called, "In Search of Leaders" in Jewish Action magazine of the OU. At the time, it also generate much discussion, including this article in the Orthodox forum by Yoel Finkelman, and others. 

Also, after we made aliyah in 2008, many many people commented that I wasn't following my own advice from my article. Sadly, neither they nor many of the letter writers, read my article carefully.

For reasons that are not clear to me, the archive for the particular issue was corrupted, so I'm sharing the original article here should you care to read it.

You can read the responses online (still up) here.

The Tradeoffs of Being a Working Mother

Rabbanit Rosenberg of Migdal Oz

A while back, I criticized a Jewish Action cover story that seemed to extol the virtues of the working mother without addressing any of the costs to the mother herself, to her family, and to her children. I even sent the piece in to Jewish Action hoping that they'd publish it as a response, but they cut it down to a short letter. Oh well.
I thought of my comments when reading two related news items over the past week.
The first, in Hebrew, comes from the Tzohar conference on parenting that took place in Jerusalem this week. At the conference (which I did not attend), Rabbanit Esti Rosenberg, the head of the women's Beit Midrash in Migdal Oz, admitted that the hours she put into her work did in fact take a toll on her family and impacted on her as a mother. She said,

”הרבה פעמים אני אמא פחות טובה בגלל שיש לי מחויבות לעבודה שלי, לתפקיד שלי כראש מדרשה. אפשר לתת לזה הסברים וצידוקים אידיאולוגיים, אבל זו המציאות“

Often I am a less good mother because I have obligations to my work and my job as the head of the Midrashah. I can offer explanations and ideological justifications, but this is the reality.

I come not to criticize Rabbanit Rosenberg. Far from it. Rather, I think she deserves a great deal of praise simply for her willingness to tell the truth. Of course serious work obligations take away from a parent's ability to invest time in her (or his) children. Yet, in the frum world we somehow feel that we can't admit the truth. Rather, women are supposed to be able to do it all: family, kids, work, laundry, volunteering, hosting others for Shabbat - all without skipping a beat. Sorry, that's not how it works. Time invested in work means less time for doing homework with the kids. We might not like to admit it, but that's the truth. Rabbanit Rosenberg's seminary is known in Israel for its liberal bent, and its focus on teaching Torah Shebe'al Peh to women at an advanced level.  I hope that readers of this article don't attribute her confession to her liberal attitudes towards women's Torah study. It's really not relevant to this discussion. It matters not whether you're the head of a women's study program or an office manager or a checkout clerk: if you're working, then you're not at home, no matter how much you'd like to be.
Her comments resonated with me as I read another article - this one in the "paper of record".
The article, "Coveting Not a Corner Office, but Time at Home", describes the work-life of Sara Uttech, who has managed to find work that allows her to work from home each Friday, and also allows her to attend every one of her sons' baseball games. While society is pushing women to set aside family considerations and focus primarily on work, women seem to have a different idea. According to the Times,

Unaccounted for in the latest books offering leadership strategies by and for elite women is the fact that only 37 percent of working women (and 44 percent of working men) say they actually want a job with more responsibilities, according to a survey from the Families and Work Institute. And among all mothers with children under 18, just a quarter say they would choose full-time work if money were no object and they were free to do whatever they wanted, according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll.
By comparison, about half of mothers in the United States are actually working full time, indicating that there are a lot out there logging many more hours than they want to be. 

On average, mother's don't want to be working more, but working less. They're looking for careers that will help them make ends meet, but also allow them a family life as well.
And while the OU might not admit it, I'm pretty sure that Orthodox mothers feel the same way.

An Imbalanced Look at the Orthodox Working Mother

Jewish Action published a recent multi-page spread on working mothers, during which a number of working women were interviewed about how their careers affect their ability to care for their families and their children. Does a full-time job have any negative impact on a Jewish, Orthodox mother? According to Jewish Action, the answer is a clear, emphatic, "NO". The introduction to the issue says it all.
Overwhelmed. Exhausted. Stressed. Somewhat surprisingly, few of the women we interviewed for our cover story on balancing career and family used the words above to describe their very full lives.
Their lives aren't "stressed". They're full. Balanced. Just ask the women themselves. Here are a few choice quotes.

"Even though the fellowship was very demanding with a sixty-hour-a-week commitment, it gave me the independence I needed to balance work demands with family."
"Currently, I have a very large and busy solo practice; I deliver around 600 babies a year...It used to be extremely frustrating for me when there was some school event that may have been important to my kids but wasn’t important enough that I could arrange for coverage at work. I would feel terrible missing it, but I knew if I started taking off for the little things, it would all come apart. Did I want to go help my daughter pick out her wedding dress when she was a kallah? Of course I did! But she managed on her own, and sent pictures to my phone as she shopped...
"Hashem blessed me with deep reservoirs of energy. In my day, there was no such thing as telecommuting, so I would sometimes come home from work at 5:00 pm, put the kids to bed, then go back to work until five in the morning. Then I would come home, get the kids off to school and go back to work. But not everybody can handle such a physically taxing schedule. You shouldn’t feel guilty or like a failure if you’re not able to function at full capacity on almost zero sleep.
I did certain things to stay close to my kids. When they were little, I would record stories for them to listen to..."

The irony in these pieces is that they weren't written with a sense of irony. Delivering 600 babies a year while raising a family? You can never do anything outside of work - and she alludes to the fact that they was barely at her own chidren's weddings. Recording stories to play for your kids while you're at work? Really. Here we read about women describing ridiculous schedules, which made serious demands on their time, and they really think that those choices didn't affect their families and their children? Of course they did. To think differently is naive. Some also make allusions to difficult life events: divorces in the family, problems with children's development - but the article makes no attempt to connect between the choices these women make and the results of those choices.
And what about the husbands and children? It would have been interesting - and to my mind far more informative - to ask the family members of these superwomen how they viewed the fact that mom was working so hard. Were they really as fine with it as their mother seems to think? Or, is she sweeping a great deal of dust under a very large rug?

The entire piece left me feeling confused an a bit angry. Countless families make tremendous sacrifices so that they can raise their children on their own, without relying on full-time nannies. How does an article like this one make them feel? Well, obviously they just can't get their act together. After all, look at the success of these career women who didn't have to make any sacrifices! (at least according to the article). A great line in the article: "We also pay full tuition, and sometimes I wonder if I’m killing myself trying to pay the bills while other people are getting breaks because they’re not working. It’s hard enough to pay our own tuition, so I don’t really want to subsidize someone else who’s not sweating as hard as I am to meet the payments." Now it's not just a choice. No, it's wrong for a parent to work less. That costs everyone else more!

I don't know how I feel about the issue of working mothers. My wife works, and we depend on her income to survive financially. (she doesn't work full-time, but when you add the hours of grading that she does at home, it comes close!) Moreover, she needs the intellectual and personal stimulation from her work, her teaching colleagues, and her professional life.
But I still struggle with the issue (and I've got a good amount of Judaic knowledge and learning in my background). So I began to wonder: doesn't Judaism have something to say about this? Wouldn't it have made sense for the OU to ask...a rabbi about Judaism and the role of women? Or a female scholar? Someone with some Jewish knowledge?
Does the Torah have anything to say about an issue that the vast majority of Orthodox families struggle with? I daresay it does.
Moreover, the OU should have at least have interviewed the other side of the coin, families where parents do stay home and work less. What sacrifices does that entail? How hard is it really? What are the ramifications of making that type of choice?
Then the article about "Striking A Balance" would have been somewhat balanced. As published, the Jewish Action piece on working mothers had very little to say about a very important issue.