Written by Maya B. Alma. Maya B. Alma is Jewrotica’s new Double Mitzvah columnist!
Larry is a Rabbi at Temple Mount Sinai in El Paso, Texas. He was ordained a rabbi in 1998 at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. Larry is a practitioner and teacher of Jewish Mindfulness Meditation and an alumni of CLAL’s Rabbis Without Borders program. Larry and his wife Alanna have three wonderful daughters.
Check out last week’s column, Double Mitzvah – Bereishit.
Near the end of this week’s portion, as we are introduced to the family who will occupy our attention for the rest of the book of Genesis, we learn this bit of information: “Now Sarai was barren, she had no child” (Genesis 11:30). Of all the things we might have learned about Sarai (later Sarah), this is what Torah leads with. Not her beauty, not her kindness, but her “barrenness.” To would-be parents who have struggled to conceive, the Torah‘s take on childlessness can have the effect of rubbing salt in a fresh and painful wound. Understanding the Torah‘s seeming obsession with fertility can be helpful, and is the focus of this week’s “Double Mitzvah.”
My goal is not to defend the text from the justifiable anger of those who’ve been hurt by it. Were we to write a new Torah today, knowing what we do about fertility, we would probably not choose to make fecundity (or the lack thereof) such a prominent theme. But for our ancestors, it was God, and God alone, who “opened” or “closed” the womb. (Well, they did know what caused it…but you get the picture). Children were a symbol of divine blessing…and the inability to conceive was evidence of a lack of divine favor (for the woman…always the woman).
Sarai’s barrenness foreshadows that of Rebecca (Genesis 25), and Rachel (Genesis 29). Indeed, the only Matriarch who conceived with little trouble was Leah, the less-loved older sister who only wound up married to Jacob because of a bait-and-switch at the altar (and even she is described as having her womb “opened by God” because she was unloved by Jacob). But we’re getting ahead of ourselves; we’ll unpack that story in a few weeks. Further along in Torah, the mothers of Samson (Judges 13) and Samuel (I Samuel 1) are initially unable to conceive, and their births are understood to be miraculous.
And this is what I take away from the Bible’s obsession with barrenness: even from the biblical authors’ perspectives, it is not so much a negative judgment on the woman as it is a signal that someone special is about to be born. Isaac. Jacob. Joseph. Benjamin. Samson and Samuel. So many of the Bible’s protagonists are the children of mothers who had difficulty conceiving, and whose wombs were opened by God. God didn’t choose Israel because they the greatest, the most powerful; to the contrary, they were small, they were slaves. The most powerful, most central message in Torah is that God loves the underdog…and the women of the Bible who conceive after a long stretch of difficulty doing so are certainly that.
Something else we can learn from the biblical barrenness stories is what NOT to say to people who are having trouble conceiving. Jacob’s outburst at Rachel (Genesis 30:2), in which he drags God into her pain is instructive. But it’s Hannah’s husband, Elkanah, who takes the prize for Stupidest Thing Ever Said By Any Husband To His Wife Ever, when he attempts to console her pain at her childlessness by pointing out that he’s a really great guy, and that ought to be enough for her (I Samuel 1:8).
No, for people who wish to bring new life into the world and find it difficult or impossible, attempts to comfort will almost always fall short. Resources help and this book is a good place to start. Ultimately, there is nothing better we can offer people who are weeping with Hannah, Rachel, Rebecca and the rest than our hearts.
Celebrating 10 Years & Marking the End of An Amazing Project
Celebrating 10 Years & Marking the End of An Amazing Project
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Learning about sex and what’s right and wrong when it comes to sex from a Biblical standpoint was an eye opening experience. I completely enjoyed it and think something like this could be a very cool thing to bring to even high school aged Jewish youth groups.
What an incredible night Jewrotica was!!!! There was this fantastic moment, in a sea of Jews of all sexualities, ages, backgrounds and denominations, that I realized we were all in this together! I hope that there are many more events coming to Austin soon!
I’m Heshy Fried from Frum Satire and I am very, very frum. And I completely support Jewrotica – it’s doing a service to the frum community. We need some sort of kosher sexual education. Jewrotica even has a system that allows frum filters to filter out certain things to make it PG for us. It’s mamish Torah. It’s like The Little Midrash Says for sex.
Such an amazing experience! The Sarah Lawrence Jewrotica workshop was more than I could have ever expected – a comfortable, safe, sultry environment where participants clearly felt good about sharing or listening to each other’s intimate experiences and relating them to sexy stories from the Torah. From the moment the workshop began, Ayo had a sweet presence that was kinetic and spread around the room; her storytelling abilities had everyone enraptured and made the conversation topics relata… Read more
At Jewrotica’s Evening of Bedside Readings, students declaimed monologues on sexual encounters that had a Jewish twist. At Columbia/Barnard Hillel, the speakers pushed their own boundaries by performing a range of explicit narratives that challenged how the audience thought of the relationship to Judaism and sex. During the speakers’ preparation, the arguments about which narratives would be appropriate forced students to take a stand and voice their opinion on their own beliefs about Judaism an… Read more
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