With dull regularity, almost every two weeks, we are informed by newspapers, magazines, and journals that the family is finished. New social structures are emerging from our contemporary chaos which will replace the family and make it obsolete. Many avant-garde sociologists, echoing variations on the theme of Portnoy’s complaint, not only predict the dissolution of the family, but welcome it warmly and even urge it. The idea of the end of the family issues from a variety of sources. Most important among them are the radical counter-culture, with its rejection of all restraints in the name of an absolute individual autonomy and freedom; the exaggerated individualism endemic to Western Protestantism, albeit in a distorted form; and the militant homosexuals. This past winter or spring, the New York Times Book Review carried the pronouncement of such one priestess of pederasty that the family is an oppressive institution, and that this form of tyranny must be overthrown.It is my thesis that this not true, that this assessment of the end of the family is a propagandist exaggeration which Issues from ideological reasons, and that we must not permit it to become true -- for ideological along with other reasons.Almost a thousand years ago, one of the greatest Jews of all ages, Sa’adia Gaon, taught that the rational basis of the entire biblical moral code was the protection of the family. Family and morality are intertwined in the life of the Jewish people.Of course there are problems of the family in modem times. I need not repeat all the sorry statistics about the divorce rate and the frequency of unhappiness in marriage, and the obvious fact that many more young people nowadays are delaying or rejecting marriage. But fashion is not the final word, and style is too ephemeral to be accepted as the permanent state of things. Furthermore to destroy the institution of the family because it raises problems is like throwing out the baby with the bath water, or killing the patie…