FEATURED JOBS
Comments (0)I teach a class for expectant parents called “Hava NaBaby.” Working with a childbirth educator, we empower our students with practical and spiritual tools to help them through this exciting time in their lives. One of my favorite sessions is the one on comfort measures for labor and delivery. My co-teacher helps them learn about massage, aromatherapy, positioning, breathing, medications and more. I connect them to the wisdom of our tradition, discovering verses, rituals and images that might both inspire them during the journey to parenthood.
The predominant Jewish image for labor and delivery comes from this week’s Torah reading: the exodus from Egypt. In Hebrew, the word for Egypt is mitzrayim, meaning “narrow place.” The waters part and we walk through the Sea of Reeds, the birth canal of the Jewish people, arriving, as the Psalms describe it, in the merchav Yah, the “sacred wide expanse.” Similarly the baby lives inside the “narrow place” of its mother’s womb, travels through the birth canal and arrives in the “sacred wide expanse” of the world.
I had a professor in graduate school who taught that the great thing about metaphors is that no metaphor is perfect, so there is always room for another. That is certainly true in this case. While both Egypt and the womb are narrow places, it would be preposterous to claim that a baby’s experience inside the womb is anything at all like the experience of slavery. True, they are both confining, but by their very nature one is oppressive and the other is nurturing.
We all have narrow places in our lives, no matter their nature, where we cannot stay. Gabriel Garcia Marquez speaks of this in his book “Love in the Time of Cholera.” He writes, “… human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but ... life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”
Science has not yet unlocked the mysteries that might explain why, in a particular moment, a women’s uterus begins to push her baby through the birth canal. Torah does not say too much about the moment the sea parted to birth the Jewish people. But there is one famous story from the rabbinic imagination that may offer some guidance and insight to help us birth ourselves.
In the midrash, our people stand with the sea in front of them and the Egyptian army behind them. One man, Nachshon ben Aminadav, begins to walk into the water. He walks until the water comes up to his knees, his stomach, his mouth, his nose. And then the waters part. We walk to freedom. Nachson’s steps took both courage and faith. We too need both the chutzpah to walk into the unknown — the courage to be active in our own redemption — and a certain kind of trust in the Unknowable — the faith that God will accompany us on the journey.
J101
Rosh Hashanah L’Ilanot — the New Year for Trees — was declared by Hillel and his disciples because by the time of the 15th day of the Hebrew month of Shevat, the annual rains have ended in Israel and a new cycle of tree growth has commenced. The holiday — today better known as Tu B’Shevat — is observed next Wednesday, Feb. 8.
Rabbi Miriam Cotzin Burg is the director of educational engagement at the Center for Jewish Education.