Childlessness in the Jewish Community – www.yerusha.com

Imagine if anyone who could achieve 100 on an IQ exam was given a special hat to wear, and you couldn’t top 90.

Imagine if people who possessed at least three friends were admitted to a communal lounge, and you only possessed two friends.

Imagine if everyone could ride the bus regardless of their ability to pay, but those who couldn’t pay were forced to wear a special badge, and you couldn’t pay.

Certainly, it would be cruel to publicly penalize human beings who were disadvantaged in any of the above ways – but we do it, unintentionally, to a specific group in the Jewish community. People who are unable to bear children are often placed on the fringe, made to feel different as well as inferior.

I don’t mean to make childless people sound pathetic, as though they were moping about in a cloud. They are people with lives and families and careers and hobbies. But like everyone dealing with a problem, they still need the community’s awareness and sensitivity.

The communal snub is not intended. No thinking person would ever stigmatize someone for having blocked ducts or a low sperm count, for having been unable to find the right mate until after the biological clock ran out, or for any of the other reasons people are unable to produce children. Nonetheless, I know from personal conversation and observation that the feeling of being on the outside persists and is fed by numerous communal practices, and particularly in the shul environment.

• We loudly admire people’s children, and we highlight their success in our bulletins.

• We talk incessantly about wanting to attract young families, with children, to inject vitality into our shuls.

• We center our communities around schools and youth programs.

• We parade our children around shul, on the bimah, when the Torah is removed and returned, at Adon Olam, and so on.

• We create support systems for singles, for divorcees, for the handicapped and abused and bereaved, but rarely for the childless.

And the unintended offense is in the Torah we teach, as well:

• The rabbi will pontificate on Rosh haShanah about Gd answering Sarah and Chanah and Rachel, and he will praise the prayers of Chanah as though promising that if you, too, would pray as Chanah did, you would be blessed with a child.

• One of our Shabbat songs, צמאה נפשי, includes the exultant line לא כי בנך המת ובני החי, "No; your child is the deceased one, and mine is the live one." In context, of course, the line is not meant to come off this way - but I have been unable to sing that line for a dozen years, since a friend's pregnancy was cut off mid-way.

• We teach classes on raising children, we use child-centered anecdotes and metaphors in our speeches, we deliver derashah after derashah with lessons for educating our youth, repeating incessantly, “our sons and daughters,” “our children,” and so on.

• The rabbi notes that the first mitzvah in the Torah is to procreate, and that one of the six questions we are asked posthumously is, “Did you involve yourself in procreation?”

Each speech and shiur can be a hammer-blow. None of this is ill-intended, and none of it is inherently wrong. We must teach authentic Torah. But we could do better, with sensitivity.

I’m definitely not suggesting that rabbis deliver speeches about childlessness. Every year, when I was in the pulpit, I would think about doing that on Parshat Vayyetze, regarding the rivalry between Rachel and Leah, and every year I scrapped the idea; the topic would be painful and embarrassing for every childless couple in the shul. No, that’s not the right way.

There are right ways, though. I was careful to say “our children, our nieces and nephews, the children of our friends,” when talking about issues relating to kids. I added caveats and disclaimers when discussing the prayers and salvations of Sarah, Chanah and Rachel. I downplayed my kids when talking to people who were not blessed with their own. I reminded myself that had I lived in a less blessed time, I might well have been childless, too, and their pain would have been mine. I encouraged adoption, when I felt it was appropriate. I avoided “Im yirtzeh HaShem by you” as well as kvater opportunities when I thought they would not have been appreciated. And I davened, of course, for those who were trying to have children.

But I know it was not enough; how could it be enough, when people who had done nothing to warrant their childless state came to shul and were inevitably immersed in a child-centered culture?

We need to develop greater sensitivity, and to create institutions that will reflect this; this is why I was glad to receive an email advertising Anna Olswanger's www.yerusha.com, a site advertised as serving “Older Childless Jews” with resources and support. The site’s structure is currently a skeleton, but much more flesh could be added. הגיע זמן, it’s about time.

Of course, www.yerusha.com is a drop in the bucket, and it’s only getting started – but with enough such drops, developed sufficiently, we might yet get somewhere.

Wow

Now, this is a powerful piece of artwork, by Jacqueline Nicholls:




The artist's comment from her website:
This piece is possibly one of the most personal things I have done. It comes from my years experiencing the monthly niddah rituals, checking and preparing to go to the mikveh, while also experiencing fertility problems. The monthly cycle being one of disappointment (sometimes despair), a private grief, and then as it approaches the time of immersion, a week of quietly building hope. Maybe this month it will work, maybe this month I will get pregnant, maybe this month, maybe.... The different ways of writing the text 'maybe this month' relate to different emotional states that the monthly hope 'maybe...' is whispered. It is embroidered in white on 15 white niddah examination cloths, but sewn together in red.

For other women, the monthly preparations for the mikveh perhaps contain other hopes and dreams, other things that maybe this month things will be.... this has been my process during the niddah cycle. A cycle that has taught me about my body, and made me aware of the passing of time and the emotional roller-coaster of family life.

I don't even begin to know what to say.

I feel quite ineligible to comment, as a male. A man can certainly know what it is to hope, and to hope for children, and to be disappointed, and to experience physical barriers to fertility, but the biological element involved for women is in a league of its own.

So I post it sans comment.

h/t A Mother in Israel.

Daf: Nedarim 88-91

As we wrap the last of Nedarim, I look back and realize how much stronger my understanding was this time, over the previous time.


I must admit that when I went through Nedarim last, I felt it was rather dull, its discussions parochially Neder-focused rather than global in their reach. I also felt that there were so many mishnayos focused on lexical minutia that I had trouble sensing forward motion or flow in the gemara.


This time round was an entirely different experience. Part of that is because I was teaching it this time rather than learning it on my own, and part is because I went through it with an eye for structure. I could see much more of a progression from Point A to Point B, and I also found many items which did have ramifications for greater, non-Nedarim issues.


Here are some last thoughts on the final dapim. Nothing huge, just a few things to see.

88a
Regarding the issue of giving something to a wife without that also being considered a gift to the husband, one might challenge this based on our discussion earlier on supporting the wife without benefiting the husband. The Rosh on the mishnah addresses this.

89a-b
Note the Ran vs. the Rosh on each of the 9 cases.

89b
The Rosh has an interesting edition of לא יפר in the mishnah.

90b
On Rav Sheshes’s point, see the Tosafos in Sotah 6a that is referenced on the side of the amud.

Note that יורה כחץ is an allegation of infertility, not impotence; the gemara was familiar with the medical concept of male infertility, although the case here ascribes it to mechanical malfunction rather than something more subtle.

91b
R’ Akiva Eiger refers you to an interesting Tosafos in Shabbos 110a on the dietary habits of snakes.

I should also note, though, that our gemara might be read to indicate that snakes automatically poison that which they eat, through a toxin on their fangs. This is actually subject to a machlokes in Sanhedrin 78a.

The last Ran is important in understanding whether these final stories are examples of extraordinary leniency, or simply a reduction of בעל נפש chumra concerns.

Next installment: Nazir