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what is in the volume. For general understanding, for practical work with people, and for preparation for the emerging world dialogue on sex, marriage, and family, we recommend this volume as a resource.
    n o t e s
    1. William Goode, Changes in Divorce Patterns (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
    2. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scrib-ner’s, 1958), 181; Ju¨rgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action I (Boston: Beacon, 1981), 340–341.
    3. Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper: Social Science and Moral Obligation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 52–60, 133–140.
    4. For summaries of studies and statistics supporting these claims on a comparative international basis, see Wolfe, Whose Keeper, 56–58; David Popenoe, Disturbing the Nest: Family Change and Decline in Modern Societies (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988); David Popenoe, Life Without Father (New York: Free, 1996); Linda Waite, ed., The Ties That Bind: Perspectives on Marriage and Cohabitation (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2000).
    5. For the specific effect of these trends on children, see Paul Amato and Alan Booth, A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); see also the recent report distributed by the YMCA of the USA, Dartmouth Medical School, and the Institute for American Values, Hard-wired to Connect: The New Scientific Case for Authoritative Communities (New York: Institute for American Values, 2003).
    6. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love, and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity, 1992).
    7. Popenoe, Life Without Father, 196–201; James Q. Wilson, The Problem of Marriage (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 207–221.
    8. See, e.g., Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im et al., Islamic Family in a Changing World: A Global Resource Book (London: Zed, 2003); Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, eds., Interreligious Marriage: Threat or Promise? (forthcoming); Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, The Future of Shari’a (forthcoming); Don S. Browning, Marriage and Modernization: How Globalization Threatens Marriage and What to Do About it (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); Don S. Browning and David Clairmont, eds., American Religions and the Family (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming); Michael J. Broyde and Michael S. Berger, eds., Marriage and Family in the Jewish Tradition (Lanham, NY: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005); Paul B. Courtright, Dower and Divorce in Diaspora Hinduism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, in press); Robert M. Frank-lin, Crisis in the Village: Restoring Hope for Families in African-American Communities i n t r o d u c t i o n xxix
    (forthcoming); M. Christian Green, Feminism, Fatherhood, and Family Law (forthcoming); Steven M. Tipton and John Witte Jr., eds., The Family Transformed: Religion, Values, and Science in American Life (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005); John Witte Jr. and Eliza Ellison, eds., Covenant Marriage in Comparative Perspective (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005); John Witte Jr., Ishamel’s Bane: Illegitimacy Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
    Sex, Marriage, and Family
    in World Religions

Chapter 1
    j u d a i s m
    Michael S. Berger

INTRODUCTION
    Judaism, like other millennia-old world religions, has within it many voices and opinions on such core human subjects as sexuality, marriage, and family. Unlike other world religions, however, Judaism has been, for most of its history, the tradition of a minority—a powerless, stateless, and oftentimes persecuted, minority. To be sure, an early period of independence, roughly coeval with the Bible, produced the literature (or its antecedents) that would become the foundational text of Judaism. But beginning with the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 586 bce and the consequent exile of Judeans to Babylonia and Egypt, minority status became the norm for Jews, with few