Among Israeli parents, there is a popular lullaby drawn from the words of Jacob's blessing to his sons, Ephraim and Menasseh, in the Book of Genesis. In translation, its words are:
The Angel who has redeemed me from all evil, bless the youth.
Through them, may my name be remembered,
And the names of my fathers, Abraham and Isaac,
And may they be a teeming multitude within the Land.
Since our first child, Chana, was born eight months ago in Jerusalem, I've had the pleasure of hearing my wife sing these words almost every night as we put our daughter to bed. (Because my wife grew up in Israel and I only immigrated from the U.S. three years ago, I generally leave the Hebrew singing to her). The melody of the lullaby is gentle but powerful, and as I listen, I am often reminded of the quietly miraculous character of our new, often exhausting lives as parents: we are participating in the realization of Jacob's ancient blessing.
And we are hardly alone. As countless political scientists, economists, and sociologists have pointed out, Israel is unusually fecund. Even as birthrates in every other developed country have plummeted to well below replacement levels in recent decades, Israel's population growth has remained remarkably robust. Currently, Israel is the only OECD country with a naturally growing population. Its birthrate - which, since 1980, has consistently hovered around three births per woman - is roughly double the still-declining OECD average and exceeds that of nearly every country outside of sub-Saharan Africa. Though demographers might not use the phrase, the Jews certainly have become "a teeming multitude within the Land."
Beyond the data, the abundance of children is one of the most striking features of modern Israeli society. For better and for worse, there are unattended children everywhere here: running through the streets, singing together on buses, and rioting through any store that dares to sell toys or candy. This presence undoubtedly contributes to the prevailing sense of total chaos that reigns over every Israeli park and mall, but it is also, I suspect, the reason for the undeniable feeling of vibrancy that characterizes Israeli society in general.
With birthrates continuing to fall around the world, this vitality only stands out more and more. Faced with unprecedented population declines, rapidly aging societies, and looming public-pension crises, panicked policymakers are increasingly looking to Israel for solutions. "What," they wonder, "makes Israel different?"
As someone who has watched friends and family members become parents in both the U.S. and Israel, and has himself recently become a parent, I think I might be able to point to three features of Israeli life that foster our booming birth rate.
The easiest place to look for explanations of Israel's unusually healthy birth rates is public policy. Certainly, for an American like me, this is where the differences between Israel and the U.S. are most immediately clear.
The first major benefit expecting Israeli parents can rely on comes in the form of taxpayer-funded healthcare. By law, all Israelis are required to join one of four heavily subsidized national insurance groups, which are prohibited from denying coverage to anyone because of preexisting conditions. As a result, almost no expectant mothers in Israel begin their pregnancies without full coverage of all the associated medical costs.
In fact, when it came to the delivery itself, my wife and I actually made money. This is because of an Israeli policy that provides every family the equivalent of about $600 upon the arrival of their first child. The only time finances were discussed during our forty-eight hours in the hospital was when an orderly asked us for the details of the bank account into which we would like to have that money deposited. In contrast, according to a 2020 report from the Health Care Cost Institute, the average delivery in America costs families just under $2,000 in out-of-pocket expenses.
Israel's generous maternity leave laws offer even more substantial support. After giving birth, Israeli mothers are universally entitled to fifteen weeks of paid leave. Taxpayers, rather than employers, are responsible for providing this payment, which is helpfully delivered to parents as one lump sum in the days after their child is born. Israeli mothers are further entitled to an additional period of unpaid leave equal to one-fourth of the total length of their employment (up to a maximum of one year of total time off). American federal law, in contrast, guarantees only twelve weeks of unpaid leave for mothers. Though state laws vary, and employer-sponsored leave has become more common in recent years, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that only 27 percent of American workers are currently eligible for any amount of paid family leave.
Finally, and most significantly, the Israeli government supports families through direct financial aid. This aid comes, first, in the form of tax breaks of between the equivalent of $1,650 (for children over age five) and $3,700 (for toddlers) per child per year. In addition, the government provides a universal monthly "child allowance" to families based on their number of children. Under this policy, the equivalent of roughly $50 is automatically deposited into each family's bank account per month for the first eighteen years of their first child's life. About $60 per month is added for second, third, and fourth children, while the figure falls back to $50 for fifth and subsequent births. Through this program, and in addition to the money saved through tax relief, an Israeli couple with four kids can expect to collect about $49,500 from the state over the course of their children's infancy and adolescence.
In my conversations on the topic with young American couples, what stands out to me most is the amount of planning that, by necessity, goes into their decisions about whether and when to have children. Everything, it seems, must be in perfect order - in terms of employment, benefits, housing, savings, etc. - before they feel confident "taking the jump." I've even heard of would-be American parents actively avoiding summer or fall pregnancies so as to save themselves the cost of two years' worth of health insurance deductibles.
All of this, to my Israeli friends and family, sounds like madness. Though, of course, Israeli family policy does not and could not eliminate all the financial risks of starting or growing a family, it does meaningfully mitigate them. Compared to the U.S., parenthood in Israel is simply less financially onerous, less financially risky, and is ultimately, for those reasons, more enticing.
But before pro-natalist readers get too excited, it is worth noting that the existing evidence suggests that public policy alone is insufficient to ensure natural population growth. Over the last several decades, many nations have tried to promote childbearing by replicating Israeli levels of financial support for families, and none has succeeded. In fact, spending on family benefits in most OECD countries exceeds that of Israel (as a percentage of GDP) without having prevented those nations' downward fertility spirals. There are, it should be noted, a few important exceptions to that trend: Hungary, Sweden, and France, for example, have all meaningfully increased their national birthrates through aggressive and expensive pro-family policies. Nevertheless, to date, no amount of government spending anywhere in the world has successfully restored sub-replacement birthrates to replacement levels.
Thus, while Israel's pro-family policies probably positively influence Israel's exceptional birthrate, there is good reason to think that public policy is merely one among a constellation of even more significant factors that encourage Israeli couples to have children.
That brings us to our second factor: when comparing fertility rates between different cultures, one of the most important variables to consider is religiosity. Throughout the Western world, higher levels of religiosity are strongly correlated with pro-family attitudes and larger family sizes, and in this regard, Israel is no exception. Jewish Israelis who describe themselves as either "religious" or "Ultra-Orthodox," and who together make up just under 25 percent of Israel's Jewish population, have birthrates significantly higher than the rest of the population. According to the Jerusalem-based Taub Center for Social Policy Studies, the total fertility rate (TFR) for these two groups currently stands at 3.77 and 6.38 births per woman respectively compared to an overall Jewish-Israeli TFR of 3.03.
Anyone who knows anything about the Jewish religious tradition will not be surprised by this difference. The first of God's commandments in the Hebrew Bible is to "be fruitful and multiply," which rabbinic sages have long maintained obligates every Jew to have at least one son and one daughter. Even beyond that legal minimum, the traditional Jewish attitude toward children is that they are fundamentally good. "He did not create the world in vain," the prophet Isaiah tells us, "but created it in order that it would be inhabited." In contrast to Christianity, there is no Jewish tradition of celibacy or monasticism; home and family life are the universally mandated avenues for the expression of piety and devotional sacrifice.
What makes Israeli fertility truly remarkable among developed nations, however, is the fact that elevated fertility rates are not limited to its devout religious minority. According to the Taub Center's data, the overall TFR among the more than 75 percent of Jewish Israelis who do not identify as either "religious" or "Ultra-Orthodox" currently rests above the minimum level required for population stability. In other words, even if you excluded its Orthodox Jewish population, the Jewish-Israeli birthrate would still be substantially higher than the overall birthrates of the U.S., Canada, or any country in Europe.
Given this remarkable fertility across Israel's religious spectrum, it is tempting to conclude that religion is playing only a marginal role in fueling the country's fertility. But that, I believe, would be a mistake. This is because, as Israeli scholar and historian Ofir Haivry recently explained in Mosaic, religion plays a much larger role in Israeli society and culture than Israelis' self-reported levels of religiosity would suggest:
[I]n Israel the vast majority of the population, including most "secular" Jews, observe numerous religious practices, which in turn shape their values and family lives. Upwards of 90 percent of Israeli Jews attend Passover seders . . . and circumcise their sons. . . . About 30 percent of "secular" Jews in Israel keep kosher homes, about 50 percent regularly light Hanukkah candles, and the same proportion testify to lighting Sabbath candles occasionally or even regularly. (Compared to about two-thirds of Jewish Israelis overall.) Thus, ironically, many more "secular" Israelis engage more regularly in religious practices than their "religious" European or American counterparts.
In my own experience as an immigrant to Israel, the ubiquity of such religious traditionalism is one of the most puzzling features of life in the supposedly hyper-modern "start-up nation." Even among my Israeli friends and acquaintances who do not aspire to anything close to full religious observance, it is not remotely uncommon to hear them express genuine affection, respect, and even reverence for religious Jewish values and rituals - both of which powerfully and regularly orient them toward the participation in and celebration of family life.
The most striking example of this phenomenon is Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath, which lasts from sunset every Friday until nightfall the following day. Traditionally, Shabbat is a day of rest and prayer, a commemoration of God's rest on the seventh day of creation and his eternal sovereignty over all he created. But even among religious Jews the locus of Shabbat observance is as much the home as the synagogue: it is a day without work, without TV and internet, when families gather, bless their children, and spend undistracted time singing, eating, and talking together.
Astoundingly, more than 70 percent of Israeli Jews report celebrating Shabbat with a Friday evening meal each week. Most include at least one element of traditional religious observance as part of the meal: the parents' blessing of the children, the mothers' lighting of the "Shabbat candles," or the fathers' blessing over the wine. Just as importantly, the general expectation is that unmarried adult children return home for Shabbat to be with their parents and siblings. As my American-born in-laws like to say, "Every week is Thanksgiving in Israel."
In this respect, and despite the secularism they so often proudly profess, Jewish Israelis' religious behavior is more similar to that of the Mormons than that of any other religious group in the Western world. Like Jewish Israelis, religious Mormons dedicate one evening a week to undistracted family time. They refer to this ritual, which is usually observed on Monday nights, as "Family Home Evening." Notably, as with Israeli Jews, this regularly observed celebration of the family life is associated with larger family sizes: In 2021, the TFR among American Mormons was 2.8 births per woman, almost as high the Jewish-Israeli TFR and far exceeding the overall American TFR of 1.63.
Because so much of the Jewish population remains rooted in an intensely pro-family religious tradition, family figures prominently in Israeli society. Family life is not just a priority here, but something closer to an assumption - one that, like romance, is baked into the culture as an expected, essential, and, at least potentially wonderful part of life. To a degree that simply did not exist in the America I grew up in, family is the celebrated and, literally, regularly sanctified institution around which the rest of Israeli culture revolves.
On one hand, then, the solution to falling birthrates appears straightforward: embrace religious traditionalism! If other nations want to restore their birth rates, they should follow Israel's lead in recommitting to rituals and ways of life that prioritize, preserve, and strengthen the family as the central institution in society - ideally through religious observance. And yet, in many ways, the example of Israeli pro-family traditionalism raises more questions than it answers. Why, for example, does Israeli-Jewish religious behavior resemble that of American Mormons despite Israeli Jews reporting levels of secularism higher than what one finds in America? What does such religious traditionalism even mean in the absence of orthodox belief and how is it sustained? What, in other words, has allowed Israel to retain its traditional, religiously inflected, pro-family culture while also embracing the modernism that has eroded similar cultures in most of the developed world?
To make sense of Israel's puzzling blend of secularism and religious traditionalism, we should turn our attention to another widely observed Jewish ritual: the Passover Seder. Passover is the annual week-long celebration of the Exodus from Egypt, when God took the Jewish people into the wilderness and formed a covenant with them at Mount Sinai. It is also one of the most widely observed Jewish holidays in Israel. Each year, surveys tell us, between 93 and 97 percent of Jewish Israelis gather with their families on the first night of Passover and celebrate the Seder, a festive meal during which we recount the story of our redemption from slavery.
Traditionally, the Seder is regarded as a fulfillment of the commandment described in the Book of Exodus: "And you shall tell [the story of the Exodus] to your son on that day." Yet, the Seder is as much a reliving of the events of that story as it is a retelling, featuring a wide array of rituals, foods, and songs designed to capture and recreate the experiences of the Jewish people's deliverance from bondage. "In every generation," we read during the Seder, "a person must regard himself as though he personally had gone out of Egypt, as it said [in the Bible]: 'And you shall tell your son on that day, saying: This is because of what God did for me when I came out of Egypt."
The example of the Seder matters, first of all, because it points to the intense blurring of the lines between religious and national identity in the Jewish tradition. As the story we tell during the Seder makes clear, the Jews are both a people - the actual descendants of real, shared ancestors - and a nation defined by our covenant with God. One consequence of this uncommon self-conception is that orthodox belief is not a prerequisite to living a committed, traditional Jewish life. Unlike in, for instance, Mormonism, it is possible to be deeply devoted to Jewish tradition and ritual on purely secular grounds. Though, in practice, I suspect very few Jewish Israelis are really committed to the Jewish tradition on purely secular grounds, the availability of nationalism as an alternative source for traditionalist commitment goes a long way to explaining the exceptional robustness of "secular" Israel's deeply traditional, religiously rooted, family-oriented culture.
In addition to nourishing Israel's pro-family traditionalism, such nationalism strengthens pro-natalist impulses in a more abstract but even more important way: it creates a shared sense of identity across time. In this regard as well, the Seder is arguably the most powerful example of what this looks and feels like in practice.
The first time a young child hears his father explain the Seder as a celebration of "what God did for me when I came out of Egypt," he probably accepts the statement at face value. When he gets older, he will probably object. He now knows it cannot be literally true. But there is a powerful moment in the life of every Jewish child when, upon hearing it, he stops trying to imagine his father leaving Egypt and starts imagining him as a child, listening to his own father make the same puzzling claim. Each generation that came before him, he realizes, was taught what his father is teaching him now. Each one made the conscious decision to preserve that teaching, to identify with his forefathers, and to repeat the story to his own children. In this way, the Seder teaches him not only to recall and identify with his most ancient ancestors, but with the countless intervening generations of fathers and sons in whose footsteps he is now walking.
Among many other similarly oriented Jewish rituals, the Seder both powerfully reflects and reinforces an awareness that to be Jewish is to be the inheritor of an intergenerational project - a national story that precedes each one of us by centuries and will outlive us by many more. And the pervasiveness of this self-understanding among Jewish Israelis is, I believe, among the least discussed and most important drivers of Israel's exceptional fertility. Because their individual identities are deeply rooted in a transtemporal sense of national belonging, Jewish Israelis feel remarkably connected to their collective past and invested in their shared future. Though, I'm sure, very few have read any Edmund Burke, they broadly and instinctively share his understanding of the nation as "a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born."
While it's admittedly difficult if not impossible to measure its influence, my own experience suggests that this aspect of Jewish Israeli identity has an enormous impact on attitudes toward childbearing here. In my conversations with Israelis on the subject, they do not speak of having children as merely a lifestyle choice or a question of personal preference. Though such considerations obviously play a major role in their thinking, there is also an unmistakable sense that having children is about something bigger than each of them individually. The choice to have children is an affirmation of the national story they have collectively inherited and spent much of their lives celebrating. In this way, shared memory leads to shared identity across time and produces, in turn, genuine excitement about and investment in the future - an excitement and investment expressed, concretely, in the decision to have children.
In some sense, then, the secret to Israel's remarkable fertility may ultimately lie in the Biblical blessing with which this essay began. For in his blessing to his sons and their future descendants, Jacob begins with their ancestors and heritage. "Through them," he says of Ephraim and Manasseh, "may my name and the names of my fathers be remembered." Only then does he proceed to offer his blessing that they might become "a teeming multitude within the Land." Though, at first glance, the two sections of the blessing seem unrelated, my own experience of modern Israel suggests that Jacob's preface is indispensable: the enduring source of the Children of Israel's exceptional, future-oriented natalism is their intense, equally exceptional rootedness in their shared past.