If All the Seas Were Ink

by Ilana Kurshan

  PART V

  The Order of Purity

  NIDDAH

  A Folded Notebook

  As a child I dreamed of having twelve children. I filled pocket-sized spiral notebooks with lists of names and ages of the kids in my imaginary family, as if their ages would be fixed and unchanging. At night I lay in bed thinking about alliterative names for my ten-year-old twins and eight-year-old triplets, privileging sound over sense and often drawing inspiration from my school vocabulary lists: Chevrolet and Chevron, or Parsimonious, Avarice, and Evanescent. I had little idea what having children might actually entail—that it would be necessary to have a partner, that there was a certain window of time in which a woman was fertile, that conception was not automatic but involved chance, luck, divine intervention, or all of the above. Two decades later, when I’d long ago abandoned the dream of Cheaper by the Dozen and finally became pregnant with my first at age thirty-two, it was with full awareness of just how many stars had aligned to allow for this miracle to transpire.

  My appreciation for the miracles of conception and pregnancy were deepened by my study of tractate Niddah, which deals with menstrual purity and childbirth. I thought about this tractate while sitting in the waiting room of the health clinic in Ramot, a suburb of Jerusalem. I’d traveled all the way there—over an hour by bus—because there were no ultrasound appointments available anywhere closer that week, and I was too excited to wait. Just a few days earlier I took a home pregnancy test which seemed to indicate that I was in fact pregnant. I could not quite fathom my good fortune, and I was afraid of being disappointed until I knew anything for certain. I even repeated the pregnancy test just to be sure that my eyes weren’t deceiving me—I had one kit that I’d bought at Super-Pharm in Jerusalem, which had instructions in Hebrew, Russian, and Arabic; I had another kit from CVS with English and Spanish guidelines. But both times two pink lines appeared in the window of the plastic stick, suggesting that in at least five languages, you would have to say it was so.

  And so I sat in the waiting room anxiously anticipating my turn for an ultrasound that would confirm what I dared not yet allow myself to believe was true. All around me were women with far more visible baby bumps, and I wondered if that would be me in a few months. The Talmud in Niddah speaks of Layla, the angel responsible for pregnancy, who brings a tiny seed to God and says, “Master of the Universe, what will become of this droplet? Will it be brave or weak, wise or foolish, wealthy or poor?” (16b). I wondered about these questions too, but my reverie was interrupted when a woman in a white coat called out my name and ushered me into a cubicle-sized room. There I was instructed to lie on the chair and lower my pants. I shivered as the technician spread cold jelly on my lower belly and turned on the machine. I heard a sound that resembled the trotting of horses, but turned out to be the beating heart of the new life growing inside me. “Please God, may everything be normal,” I prayed as the technician examined the screen and printed out what looked like a photo of intergalactic space. Even after she assured me several times over that the baby looked fine, I could not stop my lips from mouthing their silent prayer.

  In general I tend not to invoke God in my daily speech. I do not say “please God” or “with God’s help” or any of the other phrases I associate with those more devout than I. Yet all this changed when I learned I was pregnant. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by the sense of how much was beyond my purview even though it was taking place just millimeters beneath the surface of my skin. The Talmud in Niddah (16b) teaches that “all is in the hands of heaven except the fear of heaven.” It is a famous and oft-quoted line, though few people know that it appears in the context of fetal development. To me this makes perfect sense. There is nothing like pregnancy to remind us how little is in our control. In a related teaching, the rabbis assert that there are three keys that are in the hands of God, which God does not entrust to any messenger (Taanit 2a). These are the key to rain, the key to childbirth, and the key to the revival of the dead. We pray for two of these keys during the second blessing of the Amidah, the central Jewish prayer, where we ask God to cause the rain to fall and to revive the dead. Why not pray for childbirth as well? I resolved that I would pray for the health and welfare of the unborn child inside me each time I came to this blessing.

  When I didn’t have time for formal prayer, I simply placed my hand on my stomach and recited a version of the prayer that Rabbi Yehoshua’s mother used to recite. The Mishnah teaches that Rabbi Yehoshua’s teacher praised him by saying, “Blessed is the one who gave birth to him” (Avot 2:8). Rashi explains that Rabbi Yehoshua’s mother used to pass by the study houses of her town and ask the sages, “Please pray for this unborn child in me that he should become a Torah scholar.” I modified her prayer only slightly: “Please pray for the unborn child in me that he or she should be healthy, with a good head and a good heart, and a love for Torah.”

  It was always “he or she” because Daniel and I decided not to find out whether we were having a boy or a girl, though the information was readily available to us. We asked the doctor to jot down the sex in the back of a notebook whose last page we never turned. I suppose that on some level, I wanted to retain my sense that “everything is in the hands of heaven.” Amidst the harsh fluorescent lighting of medical examination rooms and the lurid glow of X-rays, that dark realm of the unknown seemed ever more elusive. Even if the unknown was not unknowable, I wanted to hold on to as much mystery and wonder as possible. And so I left the key to the sex of the child in God’s hands, feeling no need to unlock that door just yet.

  We waited, too, before sharing the news of the pregnancy with others. The Talmud states in tractate Niddah that there are three partners in the creation of every human being: the Holy One Blessed Be He, the father, and the mother (Niddah 31a). For a little while at least, we wanted to keep it among ourselves. In any case this tractate also teaches that a pregnancy is not visible for three months, based on the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis in which Judah finds out that Tamar is pregnant after three months have elapsed (Genesis 38:24; Niddah 8b). It was only when the bump became too big to hide that we shared what most of our family and friends were already suspecting. And so the circle widened like ripples on the surface of a pond created when a pebble is cast into the water.

  That pebble grew until it was the size of a pea, then a blueberry, then a lime. I tracked the baby’s development on an American pregnancy website that featured a different fruit for each week of gestation: “You are nine weeks pregnant. Your baby is now the size of a grape.” Sometimes these weekly produce updates were confusing: How could the baby already be the size of a banana when last week it was an heirloom tomato? And what size is an heirloom tomato anyway? Instead I decided to use the Talmud’s measurements, which were more familiar. At first the baby was a k’zayit, the size of an olive, which is the minimal volume of food for which one must make a blessing after eating. A month later it was k’kotevet hagasa, the size of a large date, the amount of food that the rabbis thought would satisfy one’s appetite and therefore render an individual liable for violating the commandment to afflict oneself by fasting on Yom Kippur. Just a few weeks later it was k’beitzah, the size of an egg, which is the amount of leftover sacrificial meat that would render the individual who came into contact with it impure. I hoped that it would take me less time to give birth than k’dei achilat pras, the time it takes to eat half a loaf of bread, which the sages ruled was the amount of time within which a person must consume the requisite amount of matzah at the Passover seder.

  Pregnancy has a timeline of its own, but mine seemed to follow a sacred rhythm. The very same week that I first felt the baby kick in the womb, we began reading the book of Exodus in the weekly Torah portions. Exodus describes the enslavement and liberation of the Jewish people from their Egyptian taskmasters. But the Bible also tells us that while the Israelite men were laboring to build the pyramids of Pithom and Raamses, their wives were laboring to bring forth children in astounding
multiplicity: “The Israelites were fertile and prolific; they multiplied and increased and reproduced and grew mightier very very much, and the land became filled with them” (Exodus 1:7). The language of the text, with its rapid succession of synonyms and its doubled “very very,” reproduces itself, replicating the embodied experience on the semantic plane. And so Exodus starts off as a book about pregnancy.

  Early in the book of Exodus, during their encounter at the burning bush, God tells Moses that he has “taken note” of the people’s suffering. The Bible’s word for “taken note” is pakad, which is the same word used to describe how Sarah became pregnant: “And the Lord took note of Sarah as He had promised, and Sarah conceived and bore a son” (Genesis 21:1). God takes note of the Israelites, causing them to reproduce en masse. But amidst all their laboring in Egypt, God reassures the Israelites that they are not alone. “I will deliver you,” God promises through Moses. In the Bible Egypt is known as Mitzrayim, which comes from the Hebrew word for “narrow.” God pledges to deliver the Israelites from the narrow birth canal of Egypt, parting the sea to allow for the deliverance of His firstborn Israel.

  As Passover approached and my pregnancy progressed, I wondered whether the convulsions of childbirth would be as cataclysmic as the splitting of the sea and whether I would feel the divine hand that guides each firstborn through the narrow womb never before stretched by a child. I imagined my moans and groans and cries and shrieks reaching to the throne of the One who is responsible for the creation of all new life, the One who takes note and delivers. A couple of months before my due date, Daniel and I enrolled in a natural childbirth class, where we filled an entire notebook with strategies and tips for a smooth and successful childbirth. But when I thought about tractate Niddah’s discussion of women who have extraordinary difficulty giving birth and go into labor for three days (36b), I put my notebook aside and, like the Israelites, addressed my pleas directly to Heaven.

  In the end I carried all the way to term and went into labor a few weeks after Passover, on the morning of Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s national memorial day. Daniel and I adopted a friend’s annual tradition of visiting the military cemetery at Mt. Herzl to speak with bereaved families at the gravesides. It is a way for us, new immigrants who do not have anyone to mourn, to take part in the national mood and to try to offer comfort. We took a bus to the cemetery, but instead we walked the whole way home in the hope of speeding up my labor. The walk was over an hour downhill, and I was sure I felt the baby moving down the birth canal with each step I took. The Talmud teaches in tractate Niddah that “in the first three months of pregnancy, the baby is in the lower region. In the next three months, it is in the middle region. In the last three months, it is in the upper region. And when it is time for it to emerge, it flips over and comes out. And this is the pain of childbirth” (Niddah 31a). My baby seemed to be flipping countless times over, and there was no mistaking the pain.

  Yom HaZikaron leads directly into Yom Haatzmaut, Israel’s independence day, with the mood flipping 180 degrees from sorrow to joy. By Yom Haatzmaut morning, my contractions were still a half hour apart, and I realized that the situation called for more drastic measures. So I decided to attend Hidon HaTanach, the national Bible quiz show which takes place every year on Independence Day. I thought that perhaps my baby was waiting for the chance to review all the Torah learned in the womb, as the rabbis teach: “What does the fetus resemble in its mother’s womb? A folded notebook.… And a candle burns for him above his head … and they teach him the entire Torah.… And when he comes out to the air of the world, an angel comes and slaps him on the mouth and causes him to forget the entire Torah” (Niddah 30b). I was confident that my baby, who had learned nearly three hundred pages of daf yomi—spanning several tractates—during the nine months of my pregnancy, knew all the answers to the questions being asked on the stage of the Jerusalem Theater where I sat between my husband and mother, who was visiting in anticipation of the birth. Conscious that they were both watching me, I tried not to grimace too visibly each time another contraction came on.

  Thankfully the Hidon did the trick, because by the time we got home that afternoon, I was already counting the minutes between contractions and recording them in the notebook I’d used throughout our childbirth class, that very same notebook in which the sex of the baby had been jotted down—so I trusted—on the final page.

  I stayed up all night that night, with my mother and husband taking turns rubbing my back and guiding me through each of the contractions. It was a leyl shimurim, “a night of vigil,” as the Bible describes the night before the Israelites left Egypt. The pain wracked my body like the plagues that devastated Egypt, and I fought through the pain with my howls. “Thus said the Lord: At midnight I will go forth among the Egyptians.… And there shall be a loud cry in all the land of Egypt, such as has never been nor will ever be again” (Exodus 11:4–6). They say it is always darkest before dawn, and indeed it was just before the sun began to rise that I felt myself trembling and shivering, as if enveloped in darkness and cold. How crazy was I to have thought I once wanted twelve children! I was never going through this again, I swore, like the woman in tractate Niddah who “at the hour she bends down to give birth, jumps up and swears that she will never sleep with her husband again” (31b). As I hobbled to the car supported by Daniel on one side and my mother on the other, I knew just how she felt.

  We drove to the hospital as quickly as possible. The rising sun was painting the sky in streaks of pink and red as we headed toward the hills of Ein Karem, but I was oblivious to the world around me because I felt something as heavy as a bowling ball trying to push its way out of my bottom. Convinced that the baby was going to fall out of me then and there, I crouched on all fours in the backseat, trying to hold it in for dear life. When we arrived I refused to be placed in a wheelchair, unable to sit down because of the immense pressure on my posterior. The nurses laid me on a gurney and determined that the time had come. There was no time to take my vitals, no time to administer any drugs, no time to let the bread rise. Within twenty minutes of our arrival at the hospital, our son had made his way out from my very narrow womb into the air of the world, where he was slapped by the angel and delivered into my waiting arms. The candle was no longer burning on his head but his eyes were bright as he looked up at me, blinking and bewildered. Who would this child become? I wondered. Would he be brave or weak, wise or foolish, wealthy or poor? In the notebook folds of his ruddy skin, the story of his life began to be written.

  PART VI

  The Order of Seeds

  BERACHOT

  Writing About Prayer Is Easier Than Praying

  I discovered that I was pregnant with my firstborn while leading the congregation in Yom Kippur services. All of a sudden, in the middle of my recitation of the Avodah—the part of the liturgy that describes the high priest’s terrifying entrance into the Holy of Holies on the most awe-inspiring day of the Jewish calendar—I grew weak, saw stars, and collapsed. That evening, after breaking my fast, I took a home pregnancy test and understood why I had been unable to make it through the Avodah. But even before I became pregnant, my relationship with prayer was complicated and contentious. Having children only enlivened that struggle, and gave it new shape.

  As I sit down to write these words today, I find myself experiencing this struggle yet again, in real time. I thought that before I wrote about Berachot—which deals with prayers and blessings—I would first open my siddur (prayer book) and recite shacharit, the morning service. But that was at 6:00 a.m., when I woke up to the cries of my hungry twin daughters. Three hours later, with the kids all fed, clothed, and deposited in their respective preschool programs, I am anxious to start writing. Once again, my compulsiveness has gotten the better of me, and I sit before the computer with the blinking cursor beckoning me more urgently than the siddur lying unopened on my desk.

  * * *

  And so the history of my prayer life is less a history of praying tha
n of trying—and generally failing—to carve out the time and mental space to pray. When I first came to Israel and studied at a yeshiva, an institution for the religious study of Jewish texts, we prayed in the beit midrash, the study house. The walls were lined with Jewish religious texts, and I stood in a corner surrounded by bookshelves and learned Talmud during davening, the Yiddish term for praying and the term commonly used in religious circles. Apparently I was in good company. The Talmud (Berachot 30b) relates that Rabbi Ami and Rabbi Assi lived in a town with thirteen synagogues, but they would pray only in the study house where they learned Torah. But I suspect this practice is not ideal. One day my teacher came up to me after services and spoke harsh words, though he had a twinkle in his eye: “Wow, you must be quite a Torah scholar given all the Talmud you learn during davening. But tell me—if you’re such a Torah scholar, shouldn’t you know better than to learn Talmud during davening?”

  The question continues to haunt me. Any time I have to choose between praying and learning, inevitably I choose the latter. Studying Torah is about novelty. It is about conquering new territory, synthesizing more and more information, and coming up with insights that cast everything that came before in a whole new light. Prayer, on the other hand, is about repetition and return. The rabbis caution that one should not make one’s prayer into a “fixed task” (Berachot 28b), but this injunction only reflects how difficult it is to do anything but. Each day and each week and each year, we recite exactly the same liturgy as the days and weeks and years that came before. The Shema—a prayer consisting of biblical verses that constitutes the credo of Jewish faith—is the same when we recite it this evening as yesterday evening; the Shabbat afternoon service this week is identical to the Shabbat afternoon service last week; and we will say the prayer for dew this Pesach as we said it last Pesach. Whereas Torah study is about taking the unfamiliar—the next page of Talmud, a new midrash, a new interpretation—and internalizing it until it becomes familiar, prayer is about taking the familiar—the same words we say day after day—and saying them with such concentration and fervor that it is as if we are renewing each day the miracle of their creation.