The Jewish community is often focused on having children. There are good reasons. The first mitzvah in the Torah is to be fruitful and multiply. We have suffered tremendous losses of Jewish lives. And having children is indeed one way to ensure another generation of Jews will carry on the tradition. 

It is also complicated.  Focusing on having children can ostracize people. People who are single, queer and heterosexual people who are struggling to grow their family, people who have tried for years to have children and accepted that it was not meant to be, people who have endured miscarriages, people who have lost a child, or people who have simply decided not to have children. 

And as Shalom Hartman Institute scholar-in-residence Mijal Bitton has pointed out, it also places a disproportionate burden on the bodies that bear children–often but not always women–and their careers. Even if a child is adopted, the responsibilities of childcare tend to fall on women. 

Having children was so central to my own understanding of my Jewish identity that during my many years of infertility it was tremendously painful for me to be asked why I did not yet have children. 

I was not the first Jew to experience that pain. In fact, it was a struggle for the first Jew.

The responsibility to foster the next generation was particularly incumbent on Avraham Avinu, Abraham our father. In God’s first words to Avram, God clarifies that Avram has been chosen to be blessed, but through producing offspring. In parashat Lech L’cha God says, “Go forth from your land, your birthplace, your father’s house, to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you.” Avram’s divinely ordained instruction is to be Avinu. When Avram reaches Canaan, God doesn’t say, “Welcome Home.” God says, “I am giving this land to your descendants.” 

This of course must have been a little confusing to a guy with no children and a wife struggling with infertility. But when Avram tries pointing this out, God says “Turn your gaze toward the heavens and count the stars, if you can count them!” And God promises: “So shall your seed be.” 

In the moment that God changes Avram’s name to Avraham, Abraham, God makes it clear that Abraham’s particular mission in life is to ensure that there is a generation after him, and therefore many generations after that. God says, “You shall no longer be called Avram, but your name shall be Avraham, for I make you the father of a multitude of nations.”

So it is particularly bizarre that both today and tomorrow we will read stories about Abraham nearly killing first Ishmael and then Isaac. Each time I read these stories, there is a fresh sense of horror. But until this summer, most of that horror and confusion came from a focus on love. Parents are supposed to love their children, God is supposed to love God’s children, why would God ask Abraham to expel or sacrifice a child he loves?

Then this summer at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, faculty member Micah Goodman shifted the focus in an important way. In the Akeidah, the binding of Isaac, God’s test of Abraham is not just asking him to sacrifice the child he loves. God’s test is asking Abraham to sacrifice his central purpose. God asks Abraham to sacrifice the future.

And both Abraham, and Hagar, come very close to sacrificing the future of not just their children but the generations that will come after them. So just before Ishmael was about to die of thirst and just before Isaac was about to die under Abraham’s knife, an angel of God had to intervene. Each time, in order to ensure the future, God had to step in to save the next generation. The angel of God says to Hagar, “Come, lift up the boy and hold him by the hand, for I will make a great nation of him” and God says to Abraham “I will bless you greatly, and make your descendants as numerous as the starts of heaven and the sands of the seashore.”

That angel's voice reverberates today. It is, I hope, a wake-up call to us. As Americans, we seem to be trying to sacrifice the future on a massive scale. Perhaps we need to shift the Jewish conversation from pro-natalism–from being focused on having babies–to being anti-mortality–to trying to stop our kids from dying.

Who are our kids? As you may know, I frequently cite American sociologist Robert Putnam, who, when he published his book called Our Kids, gave an interview in which he stated that today when parents talk about our kids, they mean the kids in their home. But when he was growing up when people talked about our kids, they meant the kids in the neighborhood. 

So when I talk about our kids, I too mean the kids in the expansive neighborhood of our congregation. Even if the kids in our individual homes have grown, or not having children is currently a source of pain, we are nonetheless collectively responsible for our kids in all of their beautiful diversity. And 5783 was not a great year for our kids.

First, the good news. The child mortality rate in the United States has dropped significantly not just in the past 100 years, but in the last thirty years. Unlike 100 years ago, we don't expect that only a fraction of our kids will survive into adulthood. Rather, we expect them to live.

Now here’s the bad news. After decades of dropping, for the past few years the child mortality rate in our country has gone up. After decades of improvement, we are now seeing the sharpest increase in child mortality in over 50 years. As the American Medical Association put it, “A nation that begins losing its most cherished population—its children—faces a crisis like no other.”

I would actually challenge the idea that children are our most cherished population. Lives matter across the age spectrum. But the particular tragedies of child mortality rates going up in our country are that our kids are indeed our future, and that many of their deaths are preventable. It is tragic that every year our kids die of unintentional accidents or disease or chronic conditions. But it is reprehensible that a shocking number of our kids are dying due to public policy, our own collective choices.

For the past three years, the leading cause of child mortality in America has been…firearms. This as you know is a uniquely American problem and we can do something about it. The other driver of increased child mortality is drug overdoses. In a country with a staggering mental health crisis, especially among children, our kids having access to guns and drugs has been deadly.

Many of our kids are scared, not excited, about the future. As we discussed last year, if we don’t dramatically intervene, climate change will make our kids’ future unrecognizable to us. Our reluctance to make these interventions is understandable. Inaction is easier. But in the words of Alon Tal, a Member of the Israeli Knesset, and Chair of the Department of Public Policy at Tel Aviv University, “The problem is everytime we make these decisions we’re saying we prefer our lives to those of our grandchildren.” While the Inflation Reduction Act is helping to transition us away from fossil fuels we are not moving fast enough and our kids are not blind to what this means for them.

5783 also saw the child poverty rate skyrocket. After an all-time low of only 5.2% in 2021, it is now 12.4%. The cause is simple. Less than a year after the expanded child tax credit was enacted, Congress let it expire. And that has been devastating for our kids. Pediatricians are seeing kids who were healthy a year ago now failing to grow because their families cannot afford sufficient food. In the words of one pediatrician, this also means they are failing to grow the brain that they need for the rest of their lives. 

And preference for some kids over others begins at birth. The United States has a higher infant mortality rate than 50 other countries.  In fact, an infant born in the United States is three times more likely to die than babies in say Singapore or Estonia. The United States is a wealthy country and it is a dangerous place to be born. But it is not equally dangerous. This year a groundbreaking study in California and two by the CDC showed that the biggest determining factor of whether a baby will survive their first year of life is the color of their skin.  For example, in California, a state with a relatively low infant mortality rate, for every 100,000 births, 173 of the babies born to the richest white mothers die before their first birthday. But 437 babies born to wealthy black parents die. This is not just about wealth and access. Our country’s devaluing of black lives starts at birth. 

And we are also in a country that is trying to eradicate our kids who are transgender. They are being told that they are not normal and should not exist. 2023 marks the fourth consecutive record-breaking year for anti-trans legislation in the United States. My Hartman cohort classmate Marharat Rori Picker-Neiss is a parent to an 11 year-old son that is being denied gender-affirming care in Missouri. The situation in Missouri is bleak. But as a mother and as an ordained Orthodox leader she is fighting for our kids, speaking publicly whenever and however she can to stop anti-trans legislation.

I hope we listen. Gender-affirming care is recommended by both the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics. It includes talk therapy and, for kids reaching puberty, hormone therapy. Kids undergoing surgery to alter their bodies is extremely rare. We are not talking about harming our kids’ bodies. We are talking about medical care that allows them to live. 

So what is happening in our country to our transgender kids is shocking. In 2023, the United States saw more bills targeting gender-affirming healthcare than the last 5 years combined.  And in 2023, a study showed that about half of transgender youth have considered suicide and 1 in 5 have attempted suicide. Prohibiting healthcare for these kids is destroying them simply for who they are. There are now over 20 states in which our kids who are transgender can’t get the medical care they need to live. As GLAAD’s CEO and President, Sarah Kate Ellis, said “We urge lawmakers and politicians to stop playing reckless games with transgender lives.” 

We speak excitedly about the exponentially growing number of kids in our congregation. We speak excitedly whenever a child is adopted or born. And we should. We also need to talk about how our kids are now more likely to die than they need to be. And it is happening on our watch. So before we judge Abraham we need to ask ourselves–Why are we sacrificing our kids?

Why aren’t we listening to the voice yelling from heaven, the voice of our tradition that deeply values life? Fortunately, there are things we can do. These are not problems for scientists or specialists. These are largely legislative problems, that is to say, our problems. The people we elect could pass legislation to make it less likely that kids have access to guns. They could re-enact the expanded child tax credit that lifted millions of our kids out of poverty. They could ensure support structures exist for families with black children and they can work to fight systemic racism. They can stop passing laws that hurt transgender children and they can overturn the bills that already do. In Michigan, there are 8 anti-trans bills that have been introduced. They won’t pass if our representatives don’t vote for them.

And just as Ishmael cried in the desert we need to listen to the voices of our kids, and particularly the kids who are at the greatest risk. Young climate activists are organizing protests around the world this weekend. Young activists in Montana won a landmark case by advocating that a law stopping agencies from considering climate impacts while issuing permits violates their right to a clean and healthy environment. But our kids should not bear the burden of our mistakes. We need to support them in their work. And we need to reach out to them and hear from them what they need us to do.

Because what they need us to do may include things that most of us can do–making calls to our representatives, testifying or driving people to testify, getting out the vote, checking in on our vulnerable kids.

We have more personal and political power than we think. And we can use it. God made it clear when Ishmael and Isaac were in danger that God wanted them to live. God wants us to choose life for our kids. God opened Hagar’s eyes and she was able to see the well and act to save her son. We can open our eyes and act to save our kids.