One Baby Step at a Time: Seven Secrets of Jewish Motherhood

by Chana (Jenny) Weisberg (Urim Publications, 2007)

Step Five
Learning to Value our Role in the Home

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Step Five Introduction

Having children means that we spend more time at home than ever before. I, for example, used to be a person who spent 90 percent of her waking hours outside of the house working and studying, and now I spend 90 percent of my waking hours at home- taking care of my kids, writing, and doing housework.

The Jewish home is known as a "Mikdash Me'at," a miniature Temple, and people often compare the Jewish wife to the Priests going about their various sanctified tasks. After I became a mother, though, this comparison made me cringe with resentment. What is the similarity between scrubbing sheep's blood off the altar, and clearing bowls of soggy left-over cornflakes? Between preparing a sheep for a burnt offering and making meatloaf? Between preparing the priestly garments and putting in yet another load of dirty laundry?

And to this day, I still struggle with the tidying and dishwashing and chicken-soup serving that maintaining a Jewish home requires. But as the years pass, I have come to accept, at least in principle, that my home is not just a concrete structure filled with dusty furniture and strewn with toys and dirty socks. Today I know (once again, at least in principle) that as a homemaker I am working to create a truly holy place. This home I am cleaning is a place where I teach my daughters to thank God before they eat their apple slices spread with peanut butter, and that words can hurt every bit as much as sticks and stones. It is a place that absolutely glows once a week from the light of my Shabbat candles, and from the angelic entourage that follows my husband and guests home from shul on Friday night.

When it is hard for me to clean up the kitchen one more time, I find it helpful to remind myself of the tens of millions of Jewish homes that will never exist on account of Hitler's evil genocide as well as the silent tragedy of intermarriage. I remind myself of what a privilege it is to be the creator of one of the remaining sanctuaries for the Torah's light to fill up the world, my own home serving as an unbroken link in the nearly severed chain between Mt. Sinai and the end of history.

But that doesn't mean that when faced with a playroom that looks like it's been hit by a hurricane that it's always easy.

This section addresses the often difficult transition from the focus on the outside world to the home, and coming to terms with our domestic role.

Blaah-Buster Tidbit: Homebound Holiness by Chana (Jenny) Weisberg

Rabbi Shimshon Dovid Pinkus traveled around the world speaking about the power of sincere prayer. One of the most important topics to him was women's special gift to connect with God naturally, through spontaneous prayer in their own words. He implored women to speak with God for support like a second husband/mother/friend as we go about our days in our homes- comforting a child who is teething, peeling potatoes for kugel, or crying with frustration at a neighbor's thoughtless comment.

Rabbi Pinkus spoke often about his great-grandmother, a saintly woman who never learned how to read Hebrew because, he explained, she did not have any need to pray from a prayer book. He recalls how she prayed in Polish, crying out to God from the bottom of her heart as she went about her day. In her own words, he insists, she was able to express her needs, her love, and her dependence on God better than if she read every word of the morning, afternoon, and evening prayers.

Rabbi Pinkus led the prayers for his community every year on Yom Kippur. He described how he would spend the whole day on his feet praying with great emotion and sincerity, and how his prayers would rise to Heaven, where they would stand behind a locked gate. At that point, one of the women in his community who was home taking care of her small children, "with a prayer book in one hand and a bottle in another," would start crying as she prayed for God to have mercy on her husband and children and the Jewish people. And it was, he explained, in the merit of that one young mother crying on her living room sofa that the prayers of the whole congregation would pass through the unlocked gate, and make their way up to the Hashem, just as the Talmud assures us that the gates of prayer are locked, except to tears.

Rabbi Pinkus also liked to tell the following story:

A husband says to his wife, "My dear wife, I feel so sorry for you that you don't wear tsitsit [ritual fringes]."

She answers, "Don't feel sorry for me. I feel sorry for you. Why do men wear tsitsit? Because you must wear them in order to remember Hashem's Throne of Glory. But I always remember the Creator of the world because I spend my days in the house speaking with Hashem, and not distracted by everything I see in the streets like you."

"But, my dear wife, don't you feel badly that according to the Torah you are not commanded to hear the shofar?"

"Why would I need to hear the shofar? If any man would ever give birth, he would know why I don't need a shofar in order to awaken my heart to call out to God."

"But, my poor, dear wife, you are not even commanded to dwell with the Divine Presence in the Succah."

"What do I need to dwell in the succah for? My house is a succah filled with the Divine Presence the whole year round. I sit in my home and my baby is crying, and I am together with the Creator of the World no less than you when you study Torah in your Succah."

The Jewish woman in her home can always be with the Creator of the World, as she speaks with God in her own words, in the language of her heart.

Mother Monarchs and the Messiah by Chana (Jenny) Weisberg

Tonight is Tisha B'av, the anniversary of the destruction of the First and Second Temples. Last year around this time, I heard a famous rebbetzin speak about the destruction of the Temple, and right there, in front of an auditorium full of people, this woman started crying. This rebbetzin is someone I know fairly well, and she is not a person to start crying over nothing. In fact, I have never seen this rebbetzin lose her composure, outside of that time, and for weeks I was pretty bewildered by it. Her tears got me thinking about the destruction of the Temple, and in particular about why the thought of the events of Tisha b'Av did not make me as upset as they made her.

And then I realized something that had not occurred to me, that it was the destruction of the Temple that set us off on the past two-thousand-year journey to Hell and back again (at least almost) that the exile has been. Two thousand years that, despite pockets and centuries of relative quiet and peaceful coexistence with our non-Jewish rulers and neighbors, has been all too full of crusades, inquisitions, pogroms, one nearly successful attempt at genocide, as well as the Israeli wars and terror attacks of recent years. Tisha B'av, I realized, is the paradigm for all these tragedies that we have suffered as a people, as well as their starting point.

Which leads me (at least sort of) to tell you about this past Shabbat spent at Moshav Keshet in the Golan Heights, and the two classes I taught there about my new book Expecting Miracles- one to a visiting group of American college students, and one to a group of Israeli mothers from the moshav where we were staying.

On Friday night after dinner, I spoke to the students, almost all of them single, new to observant Judaism, and trying to figure out what to do with their lives. Since Expecting Miracles came out two months ago, I have been giving classes to married women around the Jerusalem area pretty much nonstop, and the classes have been, I think and hope, very successful. In the classes, I have used stories from the book to show how Judaism provides women with the tools to overcome the challenges in pregnancy, birth, and motherhood. And when we were preparing for the trip to the Golan, I didn't have a chance to make up a new source sheet for a special class for these students, so I decided to give the same class to these students that I had been giving to the married mothers.

So there I was, late on Friday night, telling these young women about Jewish motherhood and pregnancy. I told them a story about a powerhouse mother of fifteen kids, and another woman who screams out the names of childless women while she gives birth, and another mother who adopted a child after twenty years of infertility. I talked about the ways in which the Torah gives the women in the book the power to cope and triumph over challenges. Usually, when I say these things to mothers, I look around and see that everybody is with me. I see smiles and nods, and even a few tears if I'm really on.

But that night, I looked around me, and saw that I had totally lost them. I saw thirty pairs of blank, exhausted, and confused eyes. I tried to tell them that I was giving them a peek into what their lives would look like, with God's help, in a decade or two. I told them how nobody had ever spoken with me about the lives of religious mothers when I was their age, about their strength, and heroism, and spirituality, and wisdom, and that I wanted them to know that they were headed, God willing, for something very challenging, and also incredibly rewarding.

But, when I went home that night my heart was very low, since I felt that, with a few exceptions, I had not gotten through to them at all. I lay in bed for a while unable to sleep, and then, in an effort to cheer myself up, I got out of bed so I could watch my children as they slept, smiling at Dafna's propped up knee sticking out of her blanket, and Nisa's quiet snoring out of her open mouth. But even this did not help. I realized, as I sat at the foot of Dafna's bed, that while it is inspiring to tell a thirty-year-old mother of three about a woman who screams out names during her births or a mother who raised fifteen children in two rooms, for most American twenty-year-olds, that is more scary and problematic than inspiring.

One nervous student came up to me the following day and said that she was going to law school, and how could she possibly balance being a lawyer with having so many kids? Another told me that she was worried that she would not be able to raise children and also find time to invest in her own spirituality. Instead of inspiring them, I had managed to scare them with all my talk of large families and fulfillment through motherhood. I even overheard one student saying, "As though Jewish women are nothing but baby factories!" Ouch.

 

I felt very down, until I went the following afternoon to speak to the women from Moshav Keshet. A lot of young mothers live in Keshet, but to my surprise, the women who came to my talk were all over forty. Not that they were out of the swing of motherhood though. One mother nursed a newborn, and another one rocked her one-year-old in a baby carriage.

The night before, I had found myself in the role of the expert, the experienced mother who would tell these single women a thing or two about motherhood, and I had failed to a large extent. And I came to these women and I felt like the chairs had been switched; all of a sudden I was the newborn mother who needed to be encouraged, inspired, told that everything would be OK.

I felt right away that there was something very special about these women. And I realized, after a few minutes, that what struck me about them was the royalty of these women who, in most cases, had spent the last twenty years raising families of eight and more children, washing dishes, making roasted chicken for Shabbat, ironing their husbands shirts, and working a bit on the side to make ends meet. But, instead of being worn out embittered dishrags, as I would have assumed before I became a mother, an intense regimen of motherhood had transformed them over the decades into women whose faces absolutely shine with kindness, holiness, and dignity.

As I sat with them, I felt so moved by these mothers that I had to hold myself back from crying. But, I did hold myself back, and I gave the class, and the women rewarded me with big smiles and nods of recognition and appreciation. Even though I felt ridiculous that I was the one teaching when I am certain that of all the women in the room, I had by far the least to teach.

 

So I went back to the guest house feeling on top of the world and telling myself, you win some, you lose some. And I thought, if only I had kept my mouth shut the night before, and had simply taken these visiting students to meet these mothers, then they would have understood what I was trying to tell them. They would have seen how a person can progress from being a confused single woman, to an overwhelmed young mother, to a mother monarch- absolutely confident of her place in the world and in God's eyes.

 

This week, Rebbetzin Yemima Mizrachi told us a great story. In Sephardic communities, it is a common tradition for women to start scrubbing and cleaning their houses during the afternoon of the Tisha B'av fast. Because, just in case the Messiah arrives that Tisha B'av, they wouldn't want him to show up and see what a mess their kids had made while they were passed out on the sofa the whole day dying from thirst.

One year, many years ago, a rabbi in Morocco decided that this was a ridiculous tradition, and he announced in synagogue that the women should not clean their houses that Tisha B'av. And then, later that week, that same rabbi was walking in the market, and he overheard the following discussion between two mothers:

"Did you hear what the rabbi said this past Shabbat?"

"No, I didn't hear."

"He told us that the Messiah is not coming this year!"

"What do you mean!?"

"He told us that we don't even have to clean our houses this year, since the Messiah's not coming anyway!"

In light of this story, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the leading rabbi of the Sephardic world, declared that women do not have to clean their houses on Tisha B'Av. However if you know a woman who does this, it is forbidden to tell her that she should not do so, since it is only in the merit of the absolute "blind" faith of Jewish mothers that the Jewish people continues to exist at all. Over the past three millennia of Jewish nationhood, our men have, on many occasions, found all sorts of rational explanations and justifications to chase after the bright lights of the dominant non-Jewish culture. Whereas Jewish women have tended to trust the feeling in their gut that tells them that the most important thing they can do in life is cling to the Torah and Hashem like a life preserver as they have tossed about within the vast ocean of the alternative Persian or Greek or Roman or Christian or Muslim or secular cultures.

 

So, I would like to draw our attention this Tisha B'av eve to the accomplishments of ordinary, everyday mothers, in whose merit, our holy Rabbis teach us, the Messiah will finally come. The ones, like the women I met in Keshet, who believe that by raising their children to be mensches who keep the Torah, that they are doing something of tremendous, everlasting importance. And the accomplishments of the mothers who still weep over the destruction of our holy Temple two millenia ago, and who continue to pray that this Tisha B'av the Messiah will show up on their doorstep right before the afternoon prayer- just in time for them to welcome him into their kitchen with the newly washed floor, and offer him a cup of coffee and a piece of the chocolate cake that they had set aside in the fridge covered with Saran Wrap just for him.

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Also in Section Five: Personal essay "The Flylady and Me," and inspirational readings from Sarah Shapiro and Rabbi Shimshon Pinkus