Courting Catastrophe
by Esther D. Kustanowitz
New York Jewish Week, First Person Singular
June 16, 2006

Even if you haven’t seen “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s documentary about global warming, you’re probably aware that the planet is headed for environmental catastrophe. We’ve had some inklings of this. We know that our aerosol hairsprays are destroying the ozone layer, and more recently, we’ve watched helplessly as tsunamis and hurricanes have wrought devastation at home and abroad, sweeping away people and property in giant waves.

Enter the new crisis. In a series of newspaper ads for Shavuot retreats, one getaway promised analyses of some of the more salient issues within the religious community. The first workshop was titled “the singles catastrophe.” Last year, organizations held workshops on the singles “crisis,” but this year, that word was used to describe a session on the situation in the Middle East, and the singles situation got an upgrade. So, to recap: Arab-Israeli conflict? Crisis. Singles situation? Catastrophe. (Hyperbole? Priceless.)

Perhaps we started off as a “situation,” a “weather system” or a “tropical storm.” But the amateur anthropological meteorologists have reassessed the threat. (“Batten down the hatches! Reinforce your windows! The Jewish singles catastrophe is coming!”) A part of me soon expects an ad proclaiming the “catastrophe” a worldwide “pandemic,” surpassing avian flu and the Ebola virus. Find Patient Zero. Put him in quarantine, as if he’s not there already. Start everyone on Cipro as a precautionary measure. Get the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention involved. They’ll start working on a vaccine immediately.

While certainly not on the same literal level of devastation as Ebola or Katrina, the language that is regularly used in describing the state of singlehood in the Jewish community conveys an undue sense of panic. At events, singles are lectured on the importance of marrying and building a Jewish home, a goal that brought most of us to there to begin with. Sometimes it’s a “soft sell,” an emphasis of Jewish commemorations or text study that reminds us that it’s “not good for a person to be alone,” or that urges us to trust that Hashem, who provides for all, will bring us a soul mate. Other times, it’s a “hard sell,” the rebuke of a prophet urging us to repent, reprimanding us for not having married and procreated years ago, as if we spent the last decade frivolously turning down marriage proposals, and as if we could actually travel back in time and correct said “mistake,” if a mistake is really what it was.

And while we’re making analogies, let’s talk dinosaurs. Geologists theorize that eons ago, the earth experienced “mass extinctions,” that a natural disaster, an ice age, meteor or other seismic event obliterated the dominant class of animal life and enabled the rise of a new class of animals. As singles watch their community of friends marry, have kids and move away literally and figuratively, they experience the social equivalent of mass extinction. They find other friends, and either find their bashert and leave the group, or watch as the process happens all over again, resulting in another tectonic shift, another extinction. Social refugees, they fend for themselves, because Jewish life is geared to the coupled and impregnated.

Even if it originates from a place of love and concern, merely making the analogy between natural disasters or diseases and the contemporary state of Jewish singles is designed to create chaos, panic and further isolation. Convening conferences and establishing a plan for battling the dreaded and apparently imminent “catastrophe” in the name of Jewish continuity serves only to separate single and married people and slot them into a clear hierarchy. Perhaps it’s time for the Jewish community at-large to stop declaring singles an affliction to be cured, and bring singles issues out of quarantine. Beyond the fear, people will discover that single Jews can provide vital contributions to Jewish communal life, whether or not we’ve done our procreative part for Jewish continuity.

You can’t love a hurricane’s winds into not blowing. And perhaps certain houses are stronger and more likely to survive devastation. But a storm will do what it will do. And the community’s role is to create an environment that nurtures and rebuilds and provides shelter and support for those whose lives have been afflicted by forces within and beyond their control.


Esther D. Kustanowitz, who’s generally fond of metaphors that prove a point, can be reached at jdatersanonymous@gmail.com.