Rabbi Julian Sinclair on a book which explores the spiritual side of pregnancy

Expecting Miracles: Finding Meaning and Spirituality in Pregnancy Through Judaism,

Chana Weisberg, Urim Publications, $25

As a thrice-“pregnant” father, I’ve waded through a fair amount of the voluminous pregnancy literature. There are books that describe the physiological development of the foetus, books that debate the pros and cons of pain medication in labour, books that advise you how to deal with intrusive in-laws, books on nutrition, sex and exercise, and books that detail everything that can go wrong so luridly that it’s incredible anyone reading them would ever choose to have a child.

There are almost no books, however, on the spiritual aspect of bringing a new life into the world. Chana Weisberg’s path-breaking “Exp-ecting Miracles” goes a long way to remedying the gap.

Weisberg, an American immigrant with three children who lives in Jerusalem, has already founded a website, JewishPregnancy.org, which receives 300,000 hits per year.

For her book, she interviewed a range of 23 Orthodox Jewish women about their experiences of pregnancy — Sephardi and Ashkenazi, American, British, Swiss and Israeli, newly observant and frum from birth, modern Orthodox and Charedi, PhD students and full-time mothers.

They share a conviction that childbirth is not just “something to get through with as little pain as possible” in Weisberg’s phrase, but that it can be “the highest spiritual experience of your life.” Although some are in part-time work or studying, all of the women at a certain point decided (sometimes in the face of family or societal disapproval) that bearing and raising children is their principal way of serving God.

Weisberg has coaxed from her interviewees a fascinating revelation of the inner world of religious Jewish women. They speak with a lot of humour, poignancy and honesty about dreams, premonitions, prayers and miracles, about blessings from rebbes and angelic midwives.

There’s the story of Tamar, a 47-year-old South African who became pregnant for the first time after praying at the Wailing Wall for 40 consecutive days. For a year before she conceived, her husband would periodically feel a weight in his abdomen. When he meditated, the weight would tell him: “We are your unborn children.” After a year, his wife became pregnant with twins.

There’s the rabbanit — female rabbi — with “more than a minyan” of children who speaks of her feeling that, after the Shoah, her task is to bring down as many new Jewish souls as she can. And there’s an Israeli woman who screams out the names of friends who are sick or infertile during her intense labours. “I thought that, if it’s anyway going to hurt during the labour and I’m going to yell, then at least I should yell for things we really need,” she says.

The interviewees also talk about morning-sickness, infertility, miscarriages, Caesarean sections, pain, exhaustion and ambivalence about motherhood. They don’t idealise pregnancy or childbirth; rather they share their struggle to find meaning and a stronger connection to God through both their joys and travails.

In addition, the book includes discussions with distinguished Jewish educators such as Rabbanit Chana Henkin of the educational organisation Nishmat, and with Bambi Chalkowski, a midwife for 40 years who has delivered the grandchildren of babies who were born in her care. Weisberg has also included little-known Chasidic writings on birth from Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav, who taught: “Like life, childbirth is a lesson in accepting our limitations, and shatters the illusion that we are in control of situations in which we find ourselves.” There is also a birth meditation, based on classes of the contemporary mystic Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh, who describes how kabbalistic breathing exercises, combined with meditations on biblical verses, can enable a woman to focus on the joy inherent in the birth process, rather than on the difficulties. 

Well-written and entertaining, the book is also often surprising and moving. Weisberg originally intended it to fit within the genre of ethnological study, but, as she found herself drawn to the wisdom and spirituality of her subjects, it became more of an inspirational work. She has managed to write a book about the religious and emotional world of Orthodox women that combines the strengths of looking both from the outside in, and the inside out.

“Expecting Miracles” also has the power to challenge conventional assumptions about women’s fulfilment. Weisberg acknowledges in her introduction that it is not about women who are struggling to balance motherhood and career, the norm in the Western world. (She plans another book about such women.) All of her interviewees have opted to make motherhood their priority. Many of them clearly could have made other choices.

Ella, for example, is a doctoral student in physics with five children. Science barely gets a look in during her interview: being a mother is the centre of her world. There’s no trace of self-pity or regret in her interview, and no indication that she’s the victim of sexist brain-washing. She simply sounds as if she has chosen her life and is delighted by it.