When UTJ MK Rabbi Shmuel Halpert put forward his proposal a
year ago to increase the National Insurance Child Benefit
allowance from the fifth child onwards, the previous Finance
Minister, Avraham Shochat staunchly opposed this proposal,
terming it "corrupt." However, despite the backing Shochat
received from members of his own party and other anti-
religious parties, Rabbi Halpert's bill was approved and
became law, accompanied by the ranting of the Finance
Minister.
In this matter Shochat followed the advice of senior figures
within his Ministry, who consistently display a begrudging
attitude towards large families, even if "chareidi families"
are not the only ones involved. Every Israeli family is
entitled to benefit from rights granted to large families,
including Arabs, and for this reason their representatives
in the Knesset supported the proposal. In practice, however,
only families with more than four children stand to benefit
from the increase, the allowance increasing together with
the number of children in a family. The Bill's purpose was
to ease the large family's financial burden.
The large family (one "blessed with [many] children" in
Hebrew), which has always been considered a paradigm in
Jewish tradition, has become a hot subject of debate in
secular Israeli society. Anti-religious MK's have even
challenged the validity of the term "mishpachot bruchot
yeladim."
"It is no blessing," shouted Yossi Beilin during one of the
discussions in the Knesset. His statement provoked heated
responses from all sectors, including secular ones, who
pointed out that Israel's first Prime Minister, Ben-Gurion
was an enthusiastic supporter of large families, and enacted
a financial reward for any family with ten children or more.
Beilin, in response, said that this was an "unforgivable
crime" on his part.
Fear of "Demographic Imbalances"
It is obvious that the real reason for the Finance
Ministry's antagonism is not financial: the sum involved is
relatively paltry. In truth, their antagonism is
ideological, being based on the real fear of "demographic
imbalances" felt by secular Israelis. Even senior figures in
the Finance Ministry cannot maintain a neutral stance, since
they are too affected by hostility towards the chareidim.
Secular Israeli society, caught up as it is in
individualism, careerism and concern for a high standard of
living, generally considers the child-rearing aspect of the
human condition as a nuisance, and the size of the family is
not a topic it pays too much attention to. A family
consisting of two, or at the most three children, with one
or two dogs, is considered the ideal.
They pour scorn upon the model of the chareidi family, which
considers children to be a heavenly gift and is willing to
confront all the challenges and difficulties of a large
family. Its existence also contradicts totally the notions
of secular society about children's welfare being easier to
look after within the framework of a smaller family.
The opposite is true. There are no children happier than
those growing up with lots of siblings, and no children
sadder than those growing up in a lonely environment, where
parents are career-oriented and have other things on their
mind, leaving their children to grow up on their own, or at
best in the company of one or two siblings.
However, the main reason for the secular opposition to large
families in the chareidi sector (as well as in part of the
national-religious camp), stems from the fear of "political
demographic imbalances," the fear that within two or three
decades the observant sectors in Eretz Yisroel will be
a majority of the Jewish population, based on the assumption
that the secular public will continue its "model" of the
small family, and will carry on investing most of its
resources in careers and egotistic hedonism.
This is the real motive behind the violent opposition to any
proposal for increased assistance to large families, even
though they try, unsuccessfully, to disguise this in "socio-
economic" terms of "concern for the child," who will grow up
in poverty, and be denied the opportunity for a personal
career, a broad education, an academic profession and so on.
Human history contains hundreds of thousands of examples of
large families, where the tenth or twelfth child has
developed the most on the personal level in every sense, in
accordance with Chazal's principle, "Beware of the children
from poor homes, for Torah shall stem from them."
Jewish children in particular, throughout the generations,
succeeded, even in conditions of abject poverty, in
investing all their energy in spiritual matters; they
compensated for their lack of material possessions by
immersing themselves in Torah, becoming eminent talmidei
chachomim. There is no shortage of such examples in our
history.
The Intifadah as an Excuse
However, a society run in accordance with proper Jewish
values is duty bound to ensure that such families receive
appropriate material assistance as much as possible, making
sure that each child has "bread to eat and clothes to wear."
This was the principle underlying the original law, which
provided for Child Benefit allowances paid out by the
National Insurance Institute.
It should be pointed out that Rabbi Shlomo Lorenz was the
person who initiated this law during his early years as an
Agudas Yisroel MK. He recently related that he was
encouraged to put forward this law by R. Yosef Cohen
z'l, from the chareidi community of Copenhagen, who
told him that Israel should follow the example of Denmark
which pays out such allowances.
Over the years, certain changes have taken place in the
framework and extent of assistance offered by the State,
culminating in Rabbi Halpert's proposal to strengthen the
law by increasing the level of assistance with each
additional child.
However, nine months ago the Intifadah broke out and the
defense establishment asked for an additional three billion
NIS during this current financial year. In order to finance
this additional expenditure, the government decided to make
cutbacks in other areas of the budget. One of the victims
was the increase in Child Benefit allowance, even though
this piece of legislation went through all the necessary
procedures a long time ago, and was already being
implemented.
Even someone without a professional insight into budgetary
politics could not help being struck by the maliciousness of
those senior Finance Ministry officials. After Sylvan Shalom
became Finance Minister his officials lost no time in
advising him that the approved increase in Child Benefit
allowance was one of the most "appropriate" candidates for
cutbacks. Amazingly enough, Shalom failed to realize the
falsehood of this piece of advice. First of all, if the
defense budget were in need of reinforcement, would it not
be more logical to make cutbacks in its own budget first?
Just recently it was reported that in order to make service
in the permanent armed forces more attractive, a decision
was taken to provide every officer with the rank of
Lieutenant Colonel (and there are hundreds of these) with a
private car costing 220,000 NIS, as compared to the previous
allowance of 80,000 NIS! Why can the army not make do
without this additional luxury?
The annual Defense Ministry budget amounts to tens of
billions of Shekels. Nobody disputes that due to the new
security situation costs will necessarily increase, but is
it really so difficult to find nonessential sections within
the Defense Ministry budget which can be cut back in order
to finance security activities? Finance Ministry officials
know better than anybody else where cutbacks can be made:
either in the huge sums allocated to bonuses and inflated
pensions, or by reducing the amount of people employed in
totally superfluous tasks in the framework of compulsory
mobilization and reserve duty, or from other sections of the
budget. Instead they find it fit to rashly attack the poor
man's lamb by depriving large families of much-needed
assistance.
A Huge Budget for Subsidizing Theaters
If they wanted to, Finance Ministry officials could, on the
spot, find superfluous and wasteful sections relating to
public expenditure, such as the State's generous subsidy to
the theaters to the tune of 86 million NIS. Theaters are in
the red: there are not enough people visiting them and
buying tickets to finance their existence. In other words,
if visitors would have to pay for unsubsidized tickets,
which reflected the real cost of a performance, nobody would
bother coming. Therefore in order to ensure the continued
existence of the theaters and to encourage people to visit
them, the government subsidizes them so that they can sell
very cheap tickets. Workers' committees and children of High
School age are forced to come to the theater almost for
free, just to make sure that there will be a large enough
audience for the actors to perform to, even though a lot of
the pupils are disdainful of the actors and often shout out
insulting remarks at them.
A State which considers it of essential importance to offer
86 million NIS worth of subsidies to theaters, cannot bring
itself to allocate a few extra hundred NIS a month to
children from large families. However, we have not yet
touched upon the ultimate absurdity. The State invests huge
amounts in every new immigrant and, as we know, even
immigrants with tenuous connections to Judaism, through some
Jewish grandparent, are entitled to these payments. When it
comes to native-born Jewish citizens, on the other hand,
Finance Ministry officials begrudge them even a small
additional amount of extra assistance. There is no need to
pay for flying these Jews to Eretz Yisroel, or for an
"immigration basket" to finance their first few months in
the country, nor do they need an ulpan, or to learn a
profession, to find housing and so on!
The State Comptroller, in his last report, wrote that
hundreds of millions of Shekels of public funds were being
wasted, mainly by government-owned companies, including
Bezeq, and yet nobody considers cutting back funds allocated
to these companies. Better to deprive the poor man of his
lamb. All this is due to the secular fear that the chareidi
and national-religious sectors will continue top grow,
despite the fact that these groups constitute the last hope
for maintaining a Jewish majority in this country, faced
with the real demographic threat of the Palestinians. But
this fact does not bother them, for some reason.
A Secular Journalist: "They're Missing The Point!"
It is interesting to note that the absurdity inherent in the
opposition to the increase in allowances to large families,
has not escaped even an avowed anti-religious journalist
such as Arye Kaspi. In the Ha'aretz supplement (4th
Sivan) he demonstrates intellectual honesty, and
writes as follows:
"The Finance Ministry hopes to save about half a billion
Shekel by delaying the implementation of the Large Families
Law. Delaying the implementation of social laws is a time-
honored custom of the Finance Ministry--the chareidim
managed to pass the Large Families Law about a year ago with
the help of Arab MKs. According to the law, the Child
Benefit allowance of families with five children or more
will be increased. There is a consensus in the media that
this is a bad law. The claim made against it is that the
costs of maintaining a child become less with each
additional child. Therefore the allowance should decrease
starting from the fifth child, whereas this law does the
opposite, raising it from the fifth child onward.
"This argument sounds very convincing, but it misses the
point. Large families receive governmental assistance not
only because of the costs of raising a lot of children, but
also because that way we locate poor families. All over the
world there is a direct correlation between poverty and a
high number of children!
"One of the most difficult issues in any social program is
to decide who are the weak sections of society. Any
definition is bound to be inaccurate. Not all disabled
people are weak, not all one-parent families need financial
assistance, and not all old people are dependent on a
National Insurance allowance. The modern Welfare State has
reconciled itself to the fact that there will be a certain
amount of people who will benefit from a social security
measure, which was not designated for their specific
situation. A correct social policy will use several
definitions of poverty, in the hope that that way most poor
people will be protected. The assistance granted to large
families is one such technique.
"Another argument made against assistance to the chareidim
is that they suffer from `voluntary poverty.' This is a
standard claim made by the middle-classes all over the world
to explain why the weak should not be given assistance.
According to this theory, the poor have only themselves to
blame for their situation. In Israel the unemployed are
blamed for their unemployment and those receiving minimum
wages are blamed for an unwillingness to get on in life.
"There can be no doubt that the values of chareidi society
contribute towards the poverty of its members, but the
children born to a poor family are not to be blamed for
their situation. The problems in such a family start not
with the eighth child, but with the first. The allowance,
even though it is officially meant for the seventh or eighth
child, is divided in practice between all the members of the
family. It has to be remembered that the new law makes a
large family just 500-1000 NIS better off. About another 100
NIS per child. Less than the cost of one private lesson in
English or a pair of pants. According to the new law, the
Child Benefit allowance of a family with eight children
would be 3997 NIS. You could not while away your time in a
five-star hotel with such a sum. The opposition of the
Finance Ministry and of the media to the Large Families Law
does not stem only from economic or social considerations,
it also seems to have been influenced by a touch of hatred
towards chareidim!"
