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| The miracle of birth:A new
book explores the spirituality women find in pregnancy |
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| By Sarah Bronson |
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While pregnant with her first child,
American immigrant Chana Weisberg searched for books about Jewish
women's experiences with pregnancy. Assuming that Orthodoxy's
emphasis on childbearing and rearing would have led to literature on
religious women's emotional and spiritual relationships with their
babies and with God during pregnancy, Weisberg was surprised when
she emerged empty-handed. |
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| So, when she
became pregnant with her second child, now four, Weisberg set out to
write the book she had sought but had not been able to
find.
The result is "Expecting Miracles: Finding Meaning and
Spirituality in Pregnancy Through Judaism," which was released this
week in Israel by Urim Publications. The book is a collection of
interviews with 23 Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox mothers in Jerusalem
about their physical challenges and spiritual growth during their
pregnancies. Of the interviewees, 15 are immigrants from the United
States, England, or South Africa. Almost half only became
religiously observant as adults. Weisberg also includes interviews
with female Jewish educators and two Jerusalem-area midwives. The
book will be available outside of Israel at the end of August, the
publisher says.
According to Weisberg, like many women, "I
used to see birth as something just to get through with as little
pain as possible."
But her book, she says, expresses "the
school of thought that it's not something just to get through, but
something to learn from and grow from, that it can be the highest
spiritual experience of your life."
Most previous books
about Judaism and pregnancy focused on Jewish legal aspects of
childbearing or on health and fitness, sometimes weaving in Jewish
folklore or special prayers for pregnant women. One, "A Time to Be
Born," written by Anglo-Israeli Michele Klein, describes
pregnancy-related traditions and folklore from different Jewish
communities and time periods. Sarah Goldstein's "Special Delivery"
is a collection of Jewish women's birth stories. "Expecting
Miracles," however, is the first publication to use interviews with
contemporary Orthodox women to examine how they use their
pregnancies as vehicles to feel closer to the
Divine.
Weisberg, who says she was "blown away" when she
discovered the lack of rabbinic literature about pregnant women's
relationships with God, said that the absence of such discussion in
traditional Jewish texts allows women to "have their own ways of
seeing their connections between Judaism and pregnancy. We make up
our own perushim [interpretations of religious texts or ideas] -
perushim on our lives."
"Men wrote Jewish law," Weisberg
notes, "but [finding spiritual meaning in life events] is something
[women] are excellent at. It's so clear to us that childbearing is a
way for us to serve God, that we don't need someone to tell us how
to connect it to Hashem."
Rebetzen Chana Henkin, founder and
dean of Jerusalem's Nishmat Center for Advanced Jewish Study for
Women, who is featured in "Expecting Miracles," told Anglo File that
"there cannot be a body of rabbinic literature speaking about the
spirituality of pregnancy, because it's an experience that is
totally feminine. The issues of feminine spirituality have to be
developed by women." Weisberg's book, Henkin said, exposes the
secret thoughts that praying women had always "inserted between the
lines to make the prayer relevant to their own self." Indeed,
Weisberg says that since the interviewees knew their identities
would not be revealed in the book, many shared thoughts or
experiences that no one had ever known except their husbands.
According to Weisberg, almost none of the featured women are
prominent members of their communities, simply friends of friends
who were willing to open a window into their emotional lives. "I
think people who are not religious just see these women at the
Western Wall with their kids and don't really know who they are,"
Weisberg said. "As much as I hope the book will reach the hands of
mothers and those who want to be inspired, I [also] hope it will
reach the hands of those who have seen religious women and wondered
what it is like for them."
The book does not, however,
whitewash the experience of pregnancy. The stories include
infertility, miscarriages, pain, exhaustion, high-risk births,
C-sections, unsupportive grandparents, nausea and the ambivalence of
first-time mothers about having a baby to begin with. The
interviewees are frank about their physical and spiritual
challenges, how they overcome them, and how they feel when they are
unable to overcome them.
In anticipation of the book's
publication, Weisberg created JewishPregnancy.org a couple of years
ago, an online resource center and interactive community for Jewish
women seeking spiritual meaning in pregnancy despite the morning
sickness and aching backs. The site receives 300,000 visitors a
year; Weisberg has received 1,000 grateful letters, particularly
from residents of diaspora communities where a pregnant Jewish woman
might feel isolated. | |
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| Chana Weisberg. The book exposes the secret thoughts
that praying women had always "inserted between the lines to make
the prayer relevant to their own self." |
| (Orna Itamar) |
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