"BE FRUITFUL AND MULTIPLY"

If young families see that there is appropriate support for a larger number of children in the community, then they may be encouraged to have more children.

FAMILY LIFE

If we are going to encourage children by taking the commandment, "Be fruitful and multiply," seriously, we need to concern ourselves with the stability of the Jewish family. In the American Jewish community the rate of divorce is fifty percent of all marriages. Perhaps twenty percent of our divorces take place late in life and will not affect the birth rate.

Judaism has always made divorces easy so that it was readily available* Despite this, divorce was not a major problem in J ewish societies of the past and the numbers remained limited. This was true among the poor Jewish societies of medieval Eastern and Central Europe and of the more affluent communities of Spain and Italy . We cannot discuss this whole area in this paper, but we should recognize that if we take steps to increase the Jewish population we must take parallel steps to aid the stability of the Jewish family so that parents will feel at ease about having a large number of children and not face an uncertain and unpredictable future.

PERSONAL AUTONOMY AND COMMUNAL RESPONSIBILITY

We must address the issue of personal autonomy. We see it mainly as beneficial; it has provided us with the freedom to explore our world and to make enormous advances in virtually every field. Individuals have been creative without fetters or restrictions, ideas have flown freely. On the other hand, many of the ills of modern society such as the breakdown of the family, the drug culture, and the problems with law and order, are also in part a result of personal autonomy. A great deal has been written about personal autonomy; it remains especially problematic within the Jewish realm with our emphasis on mitzvah and a covenant with the God who is the ultimate source of the mitzvah.