Jack Wertheimer replies to Joey Kurtzman on Jewcy.com:
You live at a time when well-educated Americans marry late, if at all, and have few children, if any. The fact that the responsibilities of parenting are far down the road for most of your generation further disconnects you from what used to be conventional Jewish life.
By contrast, your Orthodox peers for the most part live in a different world. Since they tend to marry when they are 10-to-15 years younger than most non-Orthodox Jews and have children at younger ages, they assume a set of responsibilities that bring them into contact with organized Jewish life and have a greater and more immediate stake in the collective Jewish present and future.
I can understand why you would regard all these circumstances as a wonderful gift. You feel free and unbounded—no family, no children, no people, no limits, just the great wide world. Little wonder that you latch on to the great causes of our time: “Darfur and mass child death-by-malnutrition” give your life meaning. But do they? I don’t question your concern with these horrors. Which thinking person would not be shaken? But forgive my skepticism, Joey: If you cared deeply about these causes, you would pick yourself up and join the Peace Corps or volunteer for any of the myriad of service organizations sending Americans to do good in the world. Instead, you are content to invoke the mantra of Darfur and malnutrition, as if the brutalities of war and poverty are some new invention.
