No Fun Without Family 12/03

By Rabbi David Eidensohn

America is a culture of fun. Fun is a huge industry. Movie stars, sports figures, and entertainers make fortunes. Shaq O’Neil makes $200,000 a game, or $6,000 a minute of playing time.

The successful doctor up the block from me just took a second mortgage on his house. Without it, he can’t keep up with the HMOs, pay his insurance, and feed his family.

Kobe Bryant declined to plead in a rape case. Michael Jackson, who entertains our children, was arrested for child molestation. A sports columnist wrote recently how atypical a week it was because nobody in professional basketball got arrested.

A friend of mine worked thirty years for IBM. When he neared retirement age, IBM fired him. He now lives on a tiny pension, and is not getting any younger. Another friend told me a year before he was fired, “The computer industry drains you until you reach fifty, and then they let you go. They don’t want to support you in your old age.”

 What he predicted came true. Everybody knows it is true. The Global companies and billionaires get rich while most people struggle. Today, a family cannot survive unless the wife leaves her children and works. This is because the pursuit of fun has doubled consumption since the fifties. Double consumption means double people working.

If we could devote the time we spend on “fun” to developing financial stability and security, we would have much more real fun.

Instead, we are becoming a society of very rich global business people and fun stars, and an increasingly oppressed everyone else.

Pulitzer Prize winning columnist David Broder of the Washington Post recently studied the finances of all of the states in the country. They are all going on the dole. One state built a new prison but has no money to hire guards. A county just sold the farm of an 89-year-old woman because she didn’t pay a few hundred dollars in taxes.

Does this sound important? If so, why do people sit for a few hours every night watching television or videos? Why are they not worried about an impending financial collapse of state government

You may think that the states will turn to the Federal government. However, the Federal annual income is about a trillion or two dollars. The Federal deficit is about 6 or 7 trillion. In a few years, that will rise to 25 trillion dollars. How can a country, spending printed paper with nothing to back it, survive? This is how they do it in the banana republics. But, as Paul Krugman of the New York Times observed, the financial debacle facing the Federal government is far worse than faced by any banana republic. (On our website gendercentral.com are various articles about the financial situation of the country.)

Does anyone care? No. They are too busy watching Michael Jackson and anyone else that provides “fun.”

You may think that I am saying that entertainers should get less money. This is not my message. I am not in favor of lessening anyone’s earnings. I want to do away with the “fanaticism of fun.” Fun as we have it in America is a consuming and deleterious thing. When we teach children to worship anyone who has certain physical characteristics and to deride others who are less blessed, we destroy our children.

My children, and nearly all of my neighbors, never heard of Shaq or Kobe, and certainly not Michael Jackson. We have no televisions. We never go to movies. We spend our money on our grandchildren, not sports.

A Presidential Commission on Fatherhood, during the Clinton administration, found that fewer Americans want marriage. People are now having babies without marriage, because marriage doesn’t work or is too demanding for “fun” people. The study found that American men consider children an expense that interferes with their fun. In my Orthodox Jewish community, we have no “professional fun.” That is why we have flourishing families, may they increase. Ultimately, family is the finest fun, the real thing.

My energy goes for my children and grandchildren. My walls are lined with pictures, not of movie stars, not of sports stars, but of grandchildren. Somebody said to me, “David, you are a billionaire.” What billionaire has what I have? You can’t buy a happy grandchild.

I have fun. I get down on the rug and bark like a dog. My little grandchildren go wild. Meanwhile, secular sir is out there drinking. What fun. Or he has other fun. “Fun” ultimately leads to searching for what is not available. Searching for fun leads to addictive and compulsory behavior, even perversion. When you live for fun, you never find it. Elvis Presley killed himself seeking a bigger dose of drugs. He no longer had “fun” from the old dose.

When you live for family, every day is heaven, even when a grandchild finds out where you keep your financial records and throws them all over the floor.

A child senses if a parent is dedicated. When a child realizes that parents live only for them, the child responds and makes the parent happier than any fun. When a child realizes that parents would rather be at the movies than listening to his prattle, the child can make the parents so miserable that there are no words for it.

Thus, “fun” and family are mutually exclusive. Throughout the Western world, people are into fun. They are not having children. Then they wonder why their world is disappearing.

In Europe they just raised the retirement age. There are not enough young people to put earnings into pension funds. People who are ready to retire have to get back to work. The future is bleak. People live longer, and retirement ages will be longer and longer. When will it end? There is no world without children.

France just had a heat wave that killed thousands of people. Who were they? They were old people who sat and suffocated because no children were there to help them. The government can’t do it. When my wife and I are 120 years old, our children will fight for the right to have us as guests.

Europeans have no young workers from their basic population. They have to import young people from around the world. This leads to racial and religious problems, even hate. It all begins from running after fun. Where it ends, nobody knows. The power is from babies. Nothing else matters. Fun means no demographic power. Family means demographic and ultimately political power.

As Western whites realize they can’t have fun and children, they go without children. They then import others or allow immigration from areas that are totally different or even opposing to what they want for their country. Seeing their world disappearing, many of them become Nazis.

 I once met a financially successful woman in her forties who never married. She told me how much fun she has in her life. She just went to Hawaii. She swam, heard a good band, sampled the food, and probably met a man. Hopefully, she practiced safe sex. I felt so bad for her. I thought of what my daughters were doing. I raised them differently.

Once my daughters sat in front of the house and played with a little nephew. A woman walked by and asked them what they were doing. They replied, “We are babysitting our nephew.” The woman huffed and said, “My children don’t baby sit. They are not slaves!” My daughters had the proper upbringing, so they held in their feelings until they got into the house. Then we all had a good laugh.

In those days, there was very little money in the house. However, that Passover I bought little silver cups for my daughters. I said, “These cups are only for slaves.” Every year at the Passover meal, those cups adorned the table, and all of us thanked G-d that we were “slaves.”

I am a slave to my children. My children are slaves to the family. Slaves? By our standards, this is living, not slaving. But to the “fun” person, doing anything for anyone but yourself is “slavery.” When “fun” man meets “fun” woman, the first thing they do is have a fight over who is the “slave.” Half of marriages end in divorce, and many people just give up on marriage. They then have babies without marriage, which damages the child. The main thing is to have fun. Fun? Let me assure you. A broken child is no fun. A happy child is fun. And to have a happy child, you have to be a “slave.”

Professional “fun” is perverse. Family fun is real. Pleasure begins and ends with complete dedication to family.

In the sixties, rebellious college students took drugs and did sex. Some of them got sick of it and became religious. One such man came to a Yeshiva and said, “I was in San Francisco with a beautiful naked girl doing drugs. I thought this was pleasure. Believe me, it is a lot better now.”

Once, in a Rabbinical Court, we noticed a strangely clad woman coming to us. I couldn’t believe that in this day and age a woman could dress the way she was dressed. She looked like a poor imitation of a Medieval Nun. She had so much “fun” in her life, that now she wanted to find something else.

I once wrote a column that said, “Put your TV in the trash, or your child in the trash.” One of them has to go.

If you didn’t listen then, I tell you now, “Take your child out of the trash, and stay out of it yourself.”

The clock is ticking. I don’t mean the clock that ends the half in basketball. I mean the clock that ticks the seconds until our world disappears in fun.