Families in the Bible defy stale ‘traditional’ stereotypes

Real biblical kin are connected in ways other than genetics and blood.

In this election season, our newsfeeds will be flooded with stories about the culture wars. In the 1980s, when I was growing up, these issues were shaped by what was then a new force in politics, leaders of the religious right. As a kid in this era, I was strangely fascinated with the radio show “Focus on the Family,” a precursor to the booming right-wing media landscape that exists today.

“Focus on the Family” molded language, perception and culture with intentional word choices. The Bible was cited as the source and foundation of a very conservative worldview. I found this infuriating, because among the values I heard promoted were hateful, prejudice-filled judgments about my family. They called us dangerous and wrong because my mother loved a woman. These ideas were shared and repeated widely, and now the terms “family values” and “traditional families” are linked with this skewed perspective.

As I grew up and began studying the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, more deeply, the modern concept of the traditional nuclear family was not what I found. Most traditional biblical families do not have two parents, one a man and one a woman. Real biblical families are defined by complex, layered relationships, with multiple sets of parents and kids, often connected in ways other than genetics and blood.

Moses, Sarah and Jacob were all in what contemporary pundits would call nontraditional families, yet one can’t get much more traditional than the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Hebrew Bible. Families that don’t look like the nuclear family model are not new — they are what the biblical tradition offers as paradigms for a life of family, community and meaning.

The Torah teaches that families are created for many reasons, including necessity, longing and love. This remains true today. Moses was the child of what we would now call an open adoption, which protected him from a murderous decree. He grew up knowing his birth and adopted families, making him the ideal leader when it was time for the great Exodus from the tyranny of Pharaoh. The patriarch Jacob had children with sisters Rachel and Leah and with their maidservants Zilpah and Bilhah. These four women gave birth to and raised 13 children together.

Today, foster and adoptive families are shaped by the migrant and refugee crisis, issues of mental health, addiction or the death of parents. And just as the Book of Genesis is filled with parents longing for children and coming up with active, creative solutions to have a child, today we see families formed through surrogacy, donors known and unknown, and adoption.

I empathize with those who, like me, have been told that their families were too different, strange and nontraditional, and felt the judgment, shame and ostracism that comes with those words. As a rabbi, I offer a tikkun, a healing, to anyone with that pain. We need to celebrate all the families in our communities and to correctly call them traditional.

The traditional family that I am in now was created from love and in response to a dear one’s longing to have a child. My husband was her sperm donor. The three adults and four kids in our Torah family are connected in many intertwined ways.

People describe families now in many ways: queer families, families of choice, blended families. Some families find unique names to describe the relationships that build their home. Simple questions from inquisitive people can be hard to answer because we don’t always have the words to describe our reality. But words create worlds. The term “traditional family” should be reclaimed for all these families. They are not modern or nontraditional but, rather, a new leaf on an ancient family tree.