The introduction retells my own personal story- my journey from a life with little connection to Judaism, until my Junior year of college when I had my first encounter with religious women during a semester abroad in Indonesia. This was the first step of my journey- that found me moving to Israel, studying Judaism, becoming traditionally observant, and marrying- all the while meeting women who showed me the spirituality and profound insights that Judaism brings to pregnancy, birth, and motherhood.
Introduction - My Story
The first religious women I met were not Jewish. They were Muslim women I befriended on a study-abroad program in Indonesia during my Junior year of college. While I come from a family with a strong Jewish identity, and had grown up in Baltimore in a Jewish neighborhood, up until that point in my life, I had never before met a religious Jew.
At the end of the study program each student conducted an independent study project, so I set off on my own for a city in central Java in order to research the Indonesian student movement. I interviewed many people, any student activists who would speak with me, but I enjoyed the time I spent with the religious Muslim women students most of all. The time I spent talking with them about their lives, and not about politics, ended up being the highlight of my time in Indonesia.
Pippin, my closest friend among the students, would question me about why I was not more religious. She would ask, "Don't Jews pray? Don't you miss G-d if you don't pray?" I was a bit embarrassed, and responded with complete lack of knowledge, telling her that Jews prayed only on Saturday mornings, and then only in a synagogue and never on their own. Pippin did not realize that her prodding would be a major factor in my subsequent quest to seek out religious Jews, and to turn to my own tradition. I do not know to this day whether she would be more happy or infuriated to hear how I am living now, living a life in which G-d-centeredness is the goal, but living in the "Zionist entity"- Israel. By the time I left Indonesia, Pippin and her friends had taught me how religion can provide a person with a sense of purpose, strength, and community- and had made me understand how much I longed for those things in my life as well.
I had planned to spend the following semester of my junior year studying in Moscow, but when that became impossible as a result of the political instability of 1991, I decided that the next best thing to going to Russia was to volunteer with Russian immigrants in Israel. When I was looking for a new place to live after several months in the country, someone suggested that I could stay at a yeshiva [a school for intensive Jewish study] for baalot teshuva [newly religious Jewish women]. I was suspicious of going to a yeshiva, but the secretary there told me I could stay there for free, and that there was no obligation to attend classes.
Once I moved in, the students amazed me with their ability to read ancient Hebrew with ease, and bewildered me with their belief that G-d listened to them and directed their lives. Within a week, I left my volunteer position with Russian immigrants, and became a full-time student. I was literally moved to tears when I saw a baby happy in his mother's arms at a Shabbat meal at a local family, and on Shavuot, the walk in the pre-dawn darkness as part of a river of thousands of people converging on the Western Wall was beyond magical.
I was thrilled to find that I could learn so much from my own tradition, and I would literally get goosebumps from something as simple as reading a particularly powerful verse from the weekly Torah portion. Despite all this, towards the end of my studies, I realized that I still harbored a great deal of ambivalence towards Judaism. I enjoyed living a traditional life, but the theoretical religion I read about often left me frustrated. I had no way of knowing that, just as meeting Pippin and her friends had enabled me to move past my incorrect assumptions about women in a traditional society four years before, I was about to join a community of religious women who would finally show me the beauty of a traditional Jewish life.
When I met my husband, who had come from a similar Jewish background as me, he was studying at a traditional men's yeshiva . It was when we married that I began meeting some special religious women, who pushed me to rethink my understanding of the role of women in Judaism. One of these women was the landlady of our first apartment. She had lost her eyesight years before, and chanted psalms and blessings from memory in a mysterious Turkish melody. We lived in the apartment below her, and were often woken up at four in the morning by her loud praying. When we visited her, she would tell us of visions and dreams of angels she had on what seemed to be a regular basis.
I remember in particular a dream she told us about from many years before, in which an angel told her shortly before Passover that there was still chametz [leaven] in her apartment. She was extremely upset, and prayed to G-d that He would show her where the leaven was, since she was already an old lady and did not have the strength to clean the whole apartment again. Sure enough, at that moment she noticed one of her cabinets open a crack, revealing where her young grandson had hidden a half-eaten cookie behind a stack of books.
Another Nachlaot woman was a neighborhood mikve [ritual bath] attendant, an elderly Chassidic, fifth-generation Jerusalemite who told me that women come from all over Israel to immerse in her mikve and receive her powerful blessing. After several months of exposure to the women of Nachlaot, it seemed natural to me that this woman should be here, at one of Jerusalem's more run-down but apparently holy mikvaot. When recently this same woman confided that a childless woman had come all the way from Switzerland in order to immerse here and to be blessed by her to have children, I didn't flinch. I had already come to expect the extraordinary in my newly adopted neighborhood in central Jerusalem, the belly button of the spiritual universe.
What struck me the most about these women and so many others that I met was their assumption that G-d cared about them, and had granted them the power to bless others not based on age, or even Jewish learning, as would often be the case among men. It was based simply on their unwavering belief that as Jewish women they are members of a very small nobility- microscopic and irrelevant in the eyes of the world, and yet extremely important in the eyes of G-d. As soon as I married I was surrounded by women like this- women who seemed to have angels hovering above them at all times in order to convey their prayers to Heaven.
The longer I lived in Nachlaot, the more my thought processes started changing as a result of these women. What I had studied in books moved into the background as my accumulated experiences of the irrational and the inexplicable began taking on a power for me that I had never imagined possible. At the same time, these women began occupying a primary place in my religious worldview, as residents of the upper echelons of the spiritual hierarchy of the world.
During my first pregnancy, my appreciation for Orthodox Jewish women deepened further. I should first explain that as a single baalat teshuva and a newly married woman, I did not enjoy being around children, and I felt sorry for mothers who seemed so hopelessly focused on motherhood. I saw becoming a mother as almost totally undesirable, as the beginning of a kind of enslavement that restricted women from intellectual and personal development. It was only after my oldest daughter was born that I started understanding how wonderful it can be to spend an afternoon exchanging smiles with a six-week old, and also how the intense, nearly non-stop job of taking care of a baby can be the source of a great deal of happiness and satisfaction.
And, of course, my experience of pregnancy and birth also opened up a whole new window into what it means to be a religious Jewish woman. But this new understanding didn't come right away either. When I was pregnant with our first daughter, Hadas, I was focused almost entirely on the physical and emotional aspects of pregnancy. G-d's role in what I was going through had simply never crossed my mind.
When I entered my ninth month, I became more and more anxious about how I would get through the birth. I felt so alone and frightened, as though no one could protect me or make sure that everything was going to be OK. My husband and I had gone through a birth preparation course, but I wondered how he would be able to help me if I was in a lot of pain. The night we went to the hospital for the birth, I was terrified of what lay ahead. By the time the cab arrived my contractions were three minutes apart, and were already extremely painful. In addition to worrying about what this meant for the rest of the labor, I realized that having one of those contractions in a moving car on bumpy Jerusalem roads was going to be pretty excruciating.
So, I braced myself for the next contraction, but to my great relief, for the first time since early that morning, the contraction did not come. Three minutes passed, six minutes passed, nothing! When we came to the first traffic light, I got a contraction, and it ended promptly when the cab started moving. I experienced two more contractions, at irregular intervals for the first time all day, and each coincided exactly with the uneven placement and timing of the traffic lights on the way to the hospital. Once I got out of the cab, the contractions returned to normal.
Up until that point, it had never occurred to me to think that what was going on in my womb had something to do with G-d. But it really seemed as though, at that moment, Someone was letting me know that I was being taken care at this time when I felt more vulnerable than I ever had before. I went into the birth a bit calmer, and with a new faith that G-d was watching out for my well-being, and that the baby and I would be fine.
In the years that have passed since this fateful car ride, I have slowly come to believe that pregnancy and birth take place in an altered spiritual reality, in which the dividing curtain between this world and the next is left slightly open. While I still have a long way to go in terms of absorbing this last aspect of Jewish motherhood, I pray that this journey will ultimately lead me to the opening of the curtain, with a newly heightened understanding of what it means to be bringing a child into the world- in order to make it more G-d centered, and to make it holy.
My guides on this journey have been the women of Jerusalem who, in my everyday life, have guided me by way of their personal example to see the strength and wisdom of the much-maligned Jewish mother. This book is about these women- the anonymous mothers we see every day pushing baby carriages, rushing to work, crying as they pray at the Western Wall- and what we can learn from what they have learned.
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Also in the Introduction: About the Women in this Book, Traditional Jewish Women and Childbearing- an Overview, Miracles
