DEUT259 The importance of marriage, within the Jewish tradition, is not only for reasons of propagation and companionship, as important as they are, but also to educate children in the Jewish tradition so we can continue across the generations. Abraham, the Patriarch of the Jewish people, is already charged with teaching his children (Genesis 18:19); and the commandment for each one of us to do likewise, which appears several times in the Torah, is enshrined in the sections chosen for the first two paragraphs of the Shema, (Deuteronomy 6:4-9, 11:13-21), a prayer that we recite twice daily. Even after schools were established, the primary context for Jewish education remained the home, and to this day parents continue to be responsible for ensuring that their children learn to be educated and practicing Jews. In our own time, we are re-discovering that no schooling, however good, can be adequate; that family education is the key to the continuation of the Jewish heritage; and that parents must continue to educate themselves as they seek to teach their children. This, in fact, is just a subset of the general Jewish duty to study the tradition on a lifelong basis, for Judaism is very much a religion for adults. Parents have the mission to prepare their children for such lifelong learning, whether the parents are married or single, custodial or not; but one of the objectives of marriage within the tradition is to provide the context in which children can best learn how to be Jews.
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