“But please, whatever you do,” she said, “don’t start off with Shalom. It sounds like a serious affectation from a non-Jew. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been ‘shalomed’ by a well-meaning Christian tourist. It mostly makes us laugh and roll our eyes a little.”
This little insight helped explain why the rest of the rabbis weren’t returning my messages. I needed to keep this lady around.
With a spiritual seeker for a mother and a devout atheist for a grandmother, Ahava was unaware of her Jewish heritage until her teens, when research revealed that her great-grandmother was an observant Jew. According to Orthodox law, which determines Jewish identity through matrilineal descent, this made Ahava a Jew too. And it’s a good thing. As Ahava embraced her heritage and became more observant, friends connected her to a Jewish dating service, through which she met Michael, whose priestly descent required that he marry a Jewish-born virgin.
“He also wanted a redhead,” she confessed. “So I fit the bill on all accounts.”
Michael and Ahava married, had three children, and emigrated to Israel in 2007.
I asked Ahava what she considered to be the most common misconceptions about Orthodox Jews.
“When we travel, people seem to think we are Amish,” she said. (Orthodox women typically cover their heads and wear modest clothing.) “There is this assumption that Jews are into a throwback/ Hutterite/granola-type lifestyle, but most of us own cell phones and use computers. Last winter, while visiting friends in Ohio, I finally got to go gawk at the Amish, and you know what? They gawked right back!”
Another big misconception, according to Ahava, is that eating kosher is healthy.
“WRONG!” she said. “Ever heard of schmaltz? Well, Jews invented it.”
After a few e-mails back and forth, I asked Ahava if Jewish women struggle as much as Christian women to live up to the Proverbs 31 ideal. For the first time in our correspondence, Ahava seemed a bit perplexed:
Here’s the thing. Christians seem to think that because the Bible is inspired, all of it should be taken literally. Jews don’t do this. Even though we take the Torah literally (all 613 commandments!), the rest is seen differently, as a way of understanding our Creator, rather than direct commands. Take Proverbs 31, for example. I get called an eshet chayil (a valorous woman) all the time. Make your own challah instead of buying? Eshet chayil! Work to earn some extra money for the family? Eshet chayil! Make balloon animals for the kids at Shul? Eshet chayil! Every week at the Shabbat table, my husband sings the Proverbs 31 poem to me. It’s special because I know that no matter what I do or don’t do, he praises me for blessing the family with my energy and creativity. All women can do that in their own way. I bet you do as well.
I looked into this, and sure enough, in Jewish culture it is not the women who memorize Proverbs 31, but the men. Husbands commit each line of the poem to memory, so they can recite it to their wives at the Sabbath meal, usually in a song.
“Eshet chayil mi yimtza v’rachok mip’ninim michrah,” they sing in the presence of their children and guests. “A valorous woman, who can find? Her value is far beyond pearls.”
Eshet chayil is at its core a blessing—one that was never meant to be earned, but to be given, unconditionally.
“It’s like their version of ‘You go, girl!’” I explained to Dan at the dinner table that night, glowing from the nerdy high of learning a foreign-sounding phrase.
“How do you say it again?” he asked.
“E-shet-hi-yil,” I responded with my stubborn Southern accent and all the confidence of someone who has no idea what she’s talking about. “You say the h from the back of your throat.”
“Yeah, I’m not going to remember that,” he said. “What does it mean exactly?”
“It means ‘woman of valor.’”
“Well, that’s what you are to me,” Dan said. “You’re a woman of valor!”
My heart swelled in my chest, as it would again and again in the months to come as Dan found ways to invoke the new blessing in the midst of our daily routines. When my blog sold enough ads to become profitable, he looked up from the computer, smiled, and declared, “Woman of valor!” When I finally got around to cleaning out the guest room closet, he high-fived me and shouted, “Woman of valor!” When I stumbled through the front door after a long day with nothing but takeout pizza to show for dinner, he stretched out his arms in absolute delight and cried, “Pizza? Woman of valor!”
It’s amazing what a little poetry can do for a marriage.
Ahava said that women use the blessing to encourage one another as well, so I started trying it out with friends, family, and readers. Sure enough, it caught on. When Tiffany’s pharmacy aced its accreditation, I congratulated her with a hearty Eshet chayil! When Amanda beat out about a million applicants for the job she wanted in North Carolina, I called her up and shouted, “Woman of valor!” When a fellow blogger went on national television to speak boldly against child abuse in fundamentalist churches, I sent her an e-mail with the subject line Eshet chayil! When I learned that three women had won the Nobel Peace Prize, I shared the news with my readers in a blog post entitled “Meet Three Women of Valor.”
Before long, I overheard friends repeating the blessing to one another in response to news of pregnancy, promotions, finished projects, and final cancer treatments. I saw it exchanged in tweets and on Facebook walls. Readers sent me links to dozens of articles about women of valor from around the world who had built hospitals in Africa, launched successful micro-financing initiatives in India, been elected to public office in Afghanistan, and staged protests in Egypt. Never before had I considered how many acts of raw bravery occur every day in the lives of women. One friend told me she was thinking of getting an Eshet chayil tattoo!
As I saw how powerful and affirming this ancient blessing could be, I decided it was time for Christian women to take back Proverbs 31. Somewhere along the way, we surrendered it to the same people who invented airbrushing and Auto-Tune and Rachel Ray. We abandoned the meaning of the poem by focusing on the specifics, and it became just another impossible standard by which to measure our failures. We turned an anthem into an assignment, a poem into a job description.
But according to Ahava, the woman described in Proverbs 31 is not some ideal that exists out there; she is present in each one of us when we do even the smallest things with valor.
She gets up while it is still dark; she provides food for her family and portions for her female servants.
—PROVERBS 31:15
I hoped it wouldn’t come to this.
But when the third week of January arrived and I still had no dress, no pillow, no sash, and no scarf, I was forced to succumb to the last resort, to subject myself to that which is most dreaded and despised among women, an act we suffer to avoid and fear above all else:
I had to ask for help.
Even the Proverbs 31 woman didn’t do it all on her own. According to verse 15, the valorous wife provided food for her family and portions for her “female servants.” So instead I sought help in the form of a “Proverbs 31 Sewing/Knitting Party,” with the promise that it was “in exchange for food as well as my eternal thanks and some good old-fashioned fellowship.” Participants could stop by my house anytime between 10 a.m. and 9 p.m. on Saturday to help me with “my unfinished Proverbs 31 sewing projects.” Missing from the invitation was any mention of servitude or the fact that in most cases “unfinished” was just an optimistic way of saying not started yet. Within forty-eight hours, I received fifteen RSVPs from an assortment of good-hearted souls ranging from neighbors to blog readers to church ladies with legendary reputations as seamstresses. It suddenly occurred to me that some people might actually consider this fun.
I rose early that morning to make yellow cupcakes with strawberry icing for my guests, who began arriving at 9:30 a.m., many with their own sewing machines, fabric, and supplies in tow. Darlene, an artistic sixty-something with more sewing expertise than the
rest of us combined, lugged through the front door an emerald green restored Singer Featherweight, which even to the untrained eye was a beautiful piece of machinery. She was followed by Betty, a matriarch in the church and the sort of person you feel naturally inclined to spill your guts to on account of the fact that she is slow to judge, quick to listen, and quick to offer help. I suspect everyone in Dayton has been blessed by Betty at some point—(she basically coordinated my sister’s wedding free of charge)—and yet no one seems to feel that they owe her anything.
Mom, who, in a true act of sacrificial love, had come over the night before to help me cut out the pattern for my purple dress, arrived at the house shortly after Betty, along with Jan, Dayna, Kristine, my friend Robin, and Robin’s grandmother. I felt a little out of my element playing host when most of these ladies were my mom’s age or older. But soon enough, a system emerged, and the dining room bustled with chatter, laughter, and the incessant hum of multiple sewing machines. Mom and Betty worked on the dress at the main table while Darlene and Dayna worked on the pillow on the foldout. Kristine knitted, Jan did some hand sewing, and Robin and her grandmother ironed. I mostly hid in the kitchen.
By lunchtime, both the decorative pillow and Dan’s scarf were finished. I managed to sew but one crooked seam on the pillow and knit a grand total of three rows of stitches on the scarf. At some point Mom and Betty called me over to carefully pull a pinned-together version of my lounge dress over my head.
“How does it look?” I asked.
The room got quiet and everyone cocked their heads.
“Maybe if we make it shorter . . .” Betty offered tentatively, reaching for the hem with a fistful of pins.
“Or took off the sleeves,” Robin added.
I looked down at the billowing tent of purple fabric hanging like a droopy bell from my shoulders. I may as well have been wearing a potato sack.
“I look pregnant, don’t I?”
The silence was broken by uproarious laughter. We grabbed the pillow and stuffed it under the dress just in time for Dan to come home from wherever he’d escaped to find his pregnant-looking wife surrounded by giggling women, fabric, and half-eaten cupcakes.
“Looks like a lot happened while I was gone,” he said with eyebrows raised.
Folks began trickling out after noon, but Saint Betty wouldn’t leave until that dress was finished, which happened around four o’clock. It still looked like an oversized smock on account of the homely pattern and cheap fabric, but I hugged Betty’s neck and promised I’d wear it out at least once.
“Was it cheating to delegate the majority of my sewing projects to other people?” I asked Dan as we surveyed the day’s booty: the dress, pillow, and scarf from my list, along with four homemade car seat covers, a rice-filled therapy sack, and two knit scarves for the auction.
I was like Tom grinning at his whitewashed fence.
“I didn’t marry a woman who knew how to sew,” Dan replied with a mix of amusement and incredulity. “I married a woman who knew how to get things done.”
Her husband is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land.
—PROVERBS 31:23
Spurred by the support of my friends and the encouragement of progress, I set about crossing the final items on my January to-do list . . . two weeks into February. The tasks that remained included:
□ Make Martha Stewart’s chicken curry—”She is like merchant ships, bringing her food from afar” (V. 14).
□ Create a proverbs 31 beauty queen sash to auction on eBay for charity—”She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies the merchants with sashes” (V. 24); “She opens her arms to the poor and extends her hands to the needy” (V. 20).
□ Invest in real estate or community-supported agriculture—”She considers a field and buys it; out of her earnings, she plants a vineyard” (V. 16).
□ Praise Dan at the city gate—”Her husband is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land” (V. 23).
The easiest of these was the chicken curry. I nixed it the minute Dan informed me he didn’t like chicken curry and would prefer that our regular ole Thursday-night taco salad count as the “food from afar” instead. Can’t argue with Commandment #1.
The sash took all of 45 minutes to finish. I took a wide white ribbon, ironed onto one side sparkly pink letters that read “PROVERBS 31 WOMAN,” and then added a hot-pink decorative pin that could attach the two pieces like a beauty queen sash. It was pretty fabulous actually. I auctioned it off on eBay along with the scarves, therapy sack, and car seat covers for $75 to benefit World Vision, thereby “supplying the merchants with sashes” and “extending my hand to the poor” all in one task. Before I shipped everything off, Dan took a picture of me holding my homemade pillow and wearing the dress, scarf, and Proverbs 31 sash. I made it my profile picture on Facebook.
We decided to put off an investment in community supported agriculture until we were independently wealthy and could afford luxuries like babies, iPads, and locally grown radishes.
I never made a knit hat or a second pillow. Most days I only accomplished three or four of my seven daily tasks, but I shoveled snow out of the driveway and bought the right kind of lightbulbs at Lowe’s to ensure that Dan had “full confidence” in me as a wife. Halfway into February, I had just one more task between myself and unmitigated valor: to praise Dan at the city gate.
And so on a cold Friday afternoon, right at Dayton’s four o’clock “rush hour,” Dan took me to the giant Welcome to Dayton sign off Highway 27, where I stood for thirty minutes holding a poster that declared DAN IS AWESOME! to all thirty-five people who drove by. No one honked or waved or crashed their car in surprise. I suspect that most of them thought I’d simply lost a bet. It was a bit anticlimactic, but we had a good time with it, and the month from hell was finally over. We laughed victoriously all the way home.
I suppose that the moral of this story is that trying to copy another woman, even a woman from the Bible, is almost always a bad idea. As Judy Garland liked to say, “Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else.” When I tried to conform my lifestyle to that of an ancient Near Eastern royal Jewish wife, I was a second-rate version of the Proverbs 31 woman, which misses the entire point of the passage.
The Proverbs 31 woman is a star not because of what she does but how she does it—with valor. So do your thing. If it’s refurbishing old furniture—do it with valor. If it’s keeping up with your two-year-old—do it with valor. If it’s fighting against human trafficking . . . leading a company . . . or getting other people to do your work for you—do it with valor.
Take risks. Work hard. Make mistakes. Get up the next morning.
And surround yourself with people who will cheer you on.
READ MORE AT ONLINE:
“Dear President Obama . . .”— http://rachelheldevans.com/dear-president
VASHTI, THE OTHER QUEEN
But when the attendants delivered the king’s command, Queen Vashti refused to come.
—ESTHER 1:12
Just about everyone has heard of Queen Esther, the beautiful young maiden who saved the Jewish nation by capturing the affections of a Persian emperor and then daring to enter his presence to plead for their cause. But not so many know of Vashti, the other queen, whose defiance enabled Esther to fulfill her destiny and without whom there would be no story to tell.
According to the book of Esther, Vashti was the wife of King Xerxes of Persia. At the height of his glory and wealth, Xerxes threw a lavish, seven-day banquet for all of the nobles of his court. Feasts were held day and night in the palace garden, where fine blue and white linen hung from marble pillars, and merrymakers lounged on couches made of gold and silver and precious stones. Wine was so abundant that the king allowed each guest to drink without restrictions. Servants were told to give each man as much as he wished, and as the days wore on, the party grew wilder and wild
er.
On the seventh day, when Xerxes was “in high spirits from wine” (Esther 1:10), he commanded the seven eunuchs who served him to bring Queen Vashti to the garden. He wanted to display her body before all the men of the court, for she was beautiful to behold. Tradition holds that he wanted her to strip naked of all but her royal crown.
When the attendants delivered the king’s command, Vashti refused to obey. Her defiance infuriated the king, who consulted his closest advisers on how to respond to his wife’s disobedience. A confidant named Memukan replied, “Queen Vashti has done wrong, not only against the king but also against all the nobles and the people of all the provinces of King Xerxes. For the queen’s conduct will become known to all the women, and so they will despise their husbands and say, ‘King Xerxes commanded Queen Vashti to be brought before him, but she would not come.’ This very day the Persian and Median women of the nobility who have heard about the queen’s conduct will respond to all the king’s nobles in the same way. There will be no end of disrespect and discord” (VV. 16–18).
At Memukan’s suggestion, Xerxes issued a royal decree to be written into the laws of Persia and Media, that Vashti would never again enter the presence of the king and that the king would bestow her royal position on someone else, someone who was “better than she” (V. 19). The decree, delivered to every province and in every language of the empire, proclaimed that “all the women will respect their husbands, from the least to the greatest” and that “every man should be ruler over his own household” (VV. 20, 22).
A Year of Biblical Womanhood Page 11