And so Hannah prays both out of need and out of gratitude. From a literary perspective, her petitionary prayer is far outmatched by her prayer of thanksgiving, which takes the form of ten jubilant poetic verses: “My heart exults in the Lord / I have triumphed through the Lord.…” (I Samuel 2:1). Perhaps Hannah can wax more poetic once her heart is no longer hardened. Once she is no longer overflowing with tears, she can compose herself and compose her thoughts in more measured form. She can hold herself back, which is what the line breaks of poetry demand. In prose, one line spills into the next, like a woman crying out in uncontrollable tears; in poetry, each line ends in a finely modulated caesura, like a graceful dancer holding herself momentarily still before the music starts up again. By the time Hannah offers her poetic prayer of thanksgiving, she has learned the eloquent rhythm of expressiveness and restraint. No wonder the rabbis turn to her as a model of how to pray.
* * *
I am inspired by the rabbis’ invocation of Hannah’s prayer not just because it is so lyrical, but also because Hannah is a mother, and praying as a mother poses its own host of challenges. Not long ago, I was walking along the park that lines the old railway tracks linking our home with my daughters’ gan, a term used for the various daycares and preschools that Israeli children attend from infancy until the start of first grade. I ran into a man who looked vaguely familiar, and he smiled at me as if he knew me well. “I know you! You’re the tehillim lady,” he told me. When I looked back at him quizzically, he continued, “I hear you singing tehillim every morning. You’re so devout!” I tried to make sense of his words. Tehillim are psalms, which as far as I know, I never chant. But then suddenly I understood.
Every weekday morning, as I push the girls’ double stroller on our way to gan, I “daven” aloud with them. I put the word “daven” in quotes because it’s a far cry from serious prayer. I do not have a siddur open before me, and I do not recite the full liturgy, nor do I stand and sit at the appropriate points since I am pushing a stroller all the while. Rather, I sing my favorite melodies from the morning service as we walk: I recite the Modeh Ani and Mah Tovu prayers as we head down the hill to Hebron Road, the four-lane highway that marks the border of our neighborhood; I chant Ashrei and other psalms as we cross at the light; and then I belt out a few “hallelujahs” as we make our way through the parking lot toward the park. Many of these prayers are indeed psalms, which explains the misperception. By the time we get to the gan, I am usually up to the blessings before the Shema. But at that point I stop to take the girls out of their stroller, deposit them on the floor surrounded by toys, and bend over to kiss them goodbye on the tops of their heads.
I did not realize until now that anyone overheard my morning davening, and I’m a little embarrassed by it all. After all, the proper way to daven is in synagogue with a minyan, while holding a siddur and bending and bowing at the appropriate moments. And yet my approach to prayer is not without precedent. In the third mishnah of Berachot (10b) we are told of a famous debate between the schools of Hillel and Shammai about how to recite the Shema. Shammai says that at night one should recite the Shema while lying down, and in the morning one should recite it while standing, to fulfill the verse, “When you lie down and when you rise up” (Deuteronomy 6:7). Hillel, who is generally more lenient, says that any position is acceptable, in fulfillment of the previous part of the verse, “When you go along your way.” That is, Shammai would never approve of the way I daven on the walk to gan, but Hillel would have no problem with my ambulatory shacharit.
Praying “along the way” has become habitual at this stage of life, and I do it even at home. When I wake up in the morning it is usually to the sound of someone calling out from the next room, and I rarely have time in bed to recite Modeh Ani. But I sing it aloud as I rush into the twins’ room to find them jumping up and down while clutching the crib railing, excited to see me. Then I walk to the window and open the shades to let the light pour in as I say, “Blessed are You … Who gives the heart understanding to distinguish day from night.”
The Talmud in the ninth chapter of Berachot (60b) lists the various blessings that Jews are supposed to recite in the morning: “When he gets dressed he should say, ‘Who clothes the naked.’ When he stands up he should say, ‘Who uprights the bent.’ When he puts his feet on the ground, he should say, ‘Who spreads the earth above the waters.’” Though today these blessings are generally recited in the synagogue rather than the home, we learn from the Talmud that they were originally recited to accompany the various stages of waking. And so this is what I do as well. I wipe the green crusts from my girls’ eyelashes and recite, “Blessed are You, Lord our God … Who removes sleep from my eyes, and slumber from my eyelids.” And I rub my own sleepy eyes and recite, “Who gives strength to the weary.”
Daniel, too, has a hard time finding time for prayer during our rushed and busy mornings, so he has come up with his own creative solution. He places our kids in their booster seats and high chairs with breakfast in front of them and then brings his siddur and tefillin to the table, where he davens. Matan enjoys singing along, though he knows that he is not allowed to touch the “feeleen” boxes until he finishes eating and washes his hands, after he and Daniel have sung Adon Olam, the closing hymn. And Daniel is grateful for the opportunity to daven, though he looks forward to the day when he can return to minyan and not have to worry about picking Cheerios off the floor in between the Shema and the Amidah.
When I consider where we are in our prayer lives, I think of the Mishnah’s injunction to pray in a reverent frame of mind. The phrase used in the Mishnah is koved rosh, which literally means “heavy-headedness.” If Daniel and I feel any heavy-headedness, it is not from our tremendous powers of concentration but rather from the chronic sleep deprivation that is the inevitable lot of parents of young children. The Mishnah goes on to state that the early pious ones used to wait an hour before praying in order to get into the proper frame of mind for speaking with God. And so I like to think of our prayer these days as analogous to that preparatory hour of the early pious ones. It is not really prayer, but a preparation for the rest of our prayer lives. If we were to stop praying altogether, it would be much harder to return to the discipline of daily worship. And so instead we pray “along the way” or at the breakfast table. It is just enough to stay in shape so that when we do indeed have time to recite the full service properly, our souls will not have forgotten how.
For my own part, I am grateful that I’ve found a solution to my difficulty with stopping to make time for prayer. Instead of stopping, I pray along the way, like Hillel. And I do not feel idle and impatient while davening because, like Hannah, I am praying as a mother—sometimes while worrying about the toddler who is out of my sight, and sometimes while observing my new crawlers as they clamber underfoot. I rarely have to fight the impulse to pick up a volume of Talmud in synagogue anymore because I don’t usually have a free hand. This is not an ideal situation. But as I set off in the mornings with the wind blowing through my hair and my gorgeous children sitting in the stroller before me, it feels like enough. My heart exults in the Lord, and I feel so full of gratitude that I cannot help but pray.
PART VII
The Order of Festivals (Again)
SHABBAT / ERUVIN
A Pregnant Pause
Shabbat is meant to be a day of rest, and tractate Shabbat enumerates the thirty-nine categories of work that are prohibited on this day—including cooking, weaving, building, and hunting. But for Daniel and me, Shabbat ceased to be restful when our twins were born on the cusp of tractates Shabbat and Eruvin, in February 2013. Our family grew quite dramatically from three to five, and our notion of Shabbat—and of what it means to rest—was never quite the same.
Early in my study of tractate Shabbat, when I was just starting my second trimester, I was placed on bedrest. The doctor was concerned that my amniotic fluid was leaking and ordered that I remain as horizontal as possible for at least two weeks. I
lay there on the couch, legs propped up on three pillows, holding up my heavy volume of Talmud over my head (Shabbat is one of the longest tractates) as I learned the opening pages about transferring objects in and out of houses on Shabbat. This prohibition, which is the basis of several chapters in tractate Shabbat and all of tractate Eruvin, derives from the biblical commandment to “let everyone remain where he is: let no one leave his place on the seventh day” (Exodus 16:29). By lying low and resting, we affirm that God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh. But for me, stuck there with no possibility of leaving the couch, let alone the private domain of our apartment building, every day felt like Shabbat.
Ever bent on productivity, I tried to set goals for myself that I could accomplish without getting up, including reading all nine hundred pages of Hilary Mantel’s first novel about Oliver Cromwell, Wolf Hall, and writing every day in my journal. But my frustration with bedrest was the same as my ongoing frustration with Shabbat—there is always so much I want to accomplish, and nothing gives me more pleasure than checking things off my list, so enforced stasis is torturous. Breakfast in bed is my worst nightmare—second only to a beach vacation. “How dull it is to pause,” Tennyson’s Ulysses declares in a line I often quote to myself.1 This time, though, I had no choice. And so the laundry piled up, the e-mail went unanswered, and for two weeks I did little but pause.
During my fortnight on bedrest I tried to reconceive my notions of pregnancy and productivity. I told myself that pregnancy was in fact a period of maximal productivity: even when my mind was idle, my body was hard at work creating new life. Two new lives! I vowed that I would use bedrest as an opportunity to cultivate patience, and to appreciate the value of sitting still. It is a skill I’ve long wanted to acquire. I’m not a good researcher because I am so eager to start writing immediately that I rarely give ideas the time they need to gestate. I also can’t write fiction because I am afraid to let my characters take me along for the ride; I want to have it all planned out in my head before I even sit down at the computer. While this compulsiveness has made me very productive, it has also made me less creative. So long as I am single-mindedly focused on getting things done, I do not allow myself to be receptive to the manifold possibilities of distraction. But I was determined to comply with bedrest and give things—the babies, and also my thoughts—the time they needed to take shape.
In spite of this noble resolve, in actuality I spent most of my bedrest gritting my teeth and trying to bear it as Daniel managed all the household chores, cared for Matan, and kept me supplied with steaming cups of tea and long novels. The experience left me with a deeper appreciation for what Shabbat is supposed to be—not a time to stay up all Friday night reading by the bathroom lights (the only lights still on once the Shabbat timers have turned the others off), and not a time to embark on hour-long afternoon walks (though I often do). Presumably what the rabbis had in mind was more in line with bedrest—a period of calm and contemplation, of sitting and studying.
In my case bedrest was complicated by an increasingly rambunctious Matan, now toddling around the apartment and getting himself into all sorts of trouble. Matan, too, did not know how to sit still. He was fascinated with wires and switches and ran all around our apartment turning our various lamps on and off. At eighteen months his vocabulary included the words “light” and “on,” and he screamed “On, light! On, light!” each time he successfully flicked the switch. He grew frustrated when we walked in the house in the evening and the lights were off. “Off? Off?” He’d look at me imploringly, and I’d try to explain that yes, the lights were off now, but they could be turned on later; even when they were switched off, they bore within them the latent potential to be on. “It’s like God,” I tried to explain. “We can’t always see and feel God, but even when God seems to be turned off, He is still there, waiting for us to be able to see Him again.” No one provides better fodder for theological musings than a relentlessly inquisitive toddler.
In his fascination with electricity, Matan made no distinction between Shabbat and weekdays. So we tried to teach him about muktzeh, which is the subject of the seventeenth chapter of tractate Shabbat. Muktzeh means “set aside,” and refers to the rabbis’ injunction that anything that is not prepared in advance for use on Shabbat is considered out of bounds for use on the day. One category of muktzeh includes items that are prohibited because their primary purpose is forbidden on Shabbat, such as electrical appliances. Unfortunately, most of Matan’s favorite toys were muktzeh: the blue desk lamp he’d ask us to put on the floor so he could crouch down and talk to it, the electric mixer known as the “jigger” which he clutched to his chest and toted around the house, and the light switches on the stairwell that he turned on at will as I carried him past. “Muktzeh, muktzeh,” I told him on our way out to synagogue, hurrying down the stairs and trying to distract him. But to my consternation, the next morning he started pointing to the light switch and saying “muktzeh,” as if this were a new word for light. And so with the day of rest behind us, creation had to begin all over again on Sunday, as Matan and I spoke light into being.
* * *
The second chapter of tractate Shabbat deals with the commandment to light Shabbat candles as the sun sets on Friday evening. The candles must remain lit until they burn down, unless there are extenuating circumstances, such as a sick person who cannot sleep because of the light. For most of my adult life, I found this a difficult religious obligation to fulfill. I wanted to go to synagogue every Friday night, but it did not seem safe to leave the candles burning unattended at home. If a woman lives alone, or if she wants to go to synagogue with her husband, then who is left to keep watch over the flickering flames? Ironically, although so much else in my spiritual life fell by the wayside after I became a parent, it was then that I began lighting candles regularly. It was impossible for both Daniel and me to go out on Friday night because someone had to stay home with Matan, and so we could leave the candles burning while one parent—not necessarily Daniel—went to synagogue to welcome Shabbat.
As I lit candles each week, I was increasingly troubled by the way this commandment is treated in the Talmud. The rabbis teach that every Friday evening a man must ask his wife if she has lit candles (Shabbat 34a), as if she could not possibly be relied upon to observe the law. Even worse, the sages enjoin that there are three sins for which women die in childbirth, namely for not being careful with the commandments regarding menstrual purity (niddah), the separation of a portion of dough (challah), and Shabbat candle lighting. All of these commandments are gendered: Niddah relates to a woman as a reproductive vessel, challah assumes that the woman’s place is in the kitchen, and candle lighting keeps her stuck at home. I did not wish to see myself in any of these lights. Even so, I was haunted by the Talmud’s cautionary words, especially because I was pregnant with twins.
The Talmud goes on to question why a woman is punished specifically during childbirth, and Rabbah responds, “When the ox is fallen, sharpen the knife.” That is, when a person is at her most vulnerable, her life is most likely to be endangered. The Talmud then asks when a man’s life is most at risk, concluding that it is when he crosses a bridge. (Apparently the bridges of the early centuries of the Common Era were less structurally sound.) The passage concludes with the warning that “a person should never stand in a place of danger and assume that a miracle will be performed for him, lest it will not.” Such miracles are indeed performed—the Talmud later tells of a man whose wife died in childbirth but who could not afford a nursemaid; this man miraculously sprouted breasts and was able to nurse his son (Shabbat 53b). But I certainly wasn’t going to count on it. And so at a time when my physical body included more than half the family we were creating, I made sure to light candles on time—with considerable trepidation.
Even so, I was not content with the rabbinic understanding of childbirth as a time of vulnerability and danger. That may be true, but childbirth is about something much more profound a
s well. It is while birthing a child that a woman most resembles the divine Creator, the One who created the first human beings on the day preceding the world’s first Shabbat. The rhythm of Shabbat, of course, is about imitating the Creator, creating for six days a week and then resting on the seventh. On Friday evenings a person is obligated to recite the verses from Genesis (2:1–3) that describe the Sabbath, beginning with, “And the heaven and earth were finished.” The Talmud (Shabbat 119b) teaches that since the Bible is not vocalized, the word for “finished,” vayehulu, may also be read as vayehalu, meaning “and they finished,” suggesting that God and humanity are partners in creation. And so it seems reasonable that if a woman is not careful about her Shabbat observance, then she will not merit to emulate the Creator by bringing life into the world.
And yet I preferred to look at it in a more positive light. The Talmud teaches that the reward for lighting candles is the promise of scholarly children (Shabbat 23b). I hoped that our children would watch both their parents light candles, attend synagogue, and study Talmud, and grow up to do the same.
* * *
My pregnancy lasted through the fall and into the winter, the period of time in which we read the book of Genesis in synagogue each Shabbat. In Genesis, conception is a sign of divine favor. One of the primary ways that God intervenes in the world is by enabling the barren to bear children, as with the matriarchs Sarah and Rachel, who undergo long periods of waiting before they become mothers. Rebecca, in contrast, is spared the pain of barrenness and is blessed from the outset with twins.
Avivah Zornberg points out that in Hebrew, Rebecca’s name, Rivkah, is an anagram of kirbah, that interior space where the babies struggled. “And the babies struggled inside her [b’kirbah].” While pregnant with twins, Rebecca’s very identity was jumbled inside her, to the extent that she could no longer recognize herself: “If so, why do I exist?” (Genesis 25:22), she asks in a moment of existential doubt. Rebecca did not have the advantage of modern ultrasound technology, nor did she have an entire shelf of books to tell her what to expect when she was expecting. Instead, God had to serve as her ultrasound and her sounding board, illuminating the reason for her distress and discomfort: “Two nations are in your womb. Two separate people shall issue from your body.”
If All the Seas Were Ink Page 23