The miracle of birth : A New Book for Expectant Jewish Women
The miracle of birth:A new book explores the spirituality women find in pregnancy

By Sarah Bronson
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/435247.html

While pregnant with her first child, American immigrant Chana Weisberg searched for books about Jewish women's experiences with pregnancy. Assuming that Orthodoxy's emphasis on childbearing and rearing would have led to literature on religious women's emotional and spiritual relationships with their babies and with God during pregnancy, Weisberg was surprised when she emerged empty-handed.

So, when she became pregnant with her second child, now four, Weisberg set out to write the book she had sought but had not been able to find.

The result is "Expecting Miracles: Finding Meaning and Spirituality in Pregnancy Through Judaism," which was released this week in Israel by Urim Publications. The book is a collection of interviews with 23 Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox mothers in Jerusalem about their physical challenges and spiritual growth during their pregnancies. Of the interviewees, 15 are immigrants from the United States, England, or South Africa. Almost half only became religiously observant as adults. Weisberg also includes interviews with female Jewish educators and two Jerusalem-area midwives. The book will be available outside of Israel at the end of August, the publisher says.

According to Weisberg, like many women, "I used to see birth as something just to get through with as little pain as possible."

But her book, she says, expresses "the school of thought that it's not something just to get through, but something to learn from and grow from, that it can be the highest spiritual experience of your life."

Most previous books about Judaism and pregnancy focused on Jewish legal aspects of childbearing or on health and fitness, sometimes weaving in Jewish folklore or special prayers for pregnant women. One, "A Time to Be Born," written by Anglo-Israeli Michele Klein, describes pregnancy-related traditions and folklore from different Jewish communities and time periods. Sarah Goldstein's "Special Delivery" is a collection of Jewish women's birth stories. "Expecting Miracles," however, is the first publication to use interviews with contemporary Orthodox women to examine how they use their pregnancies as vehicles to feel closer to the Divine.

Weisberg, who says she was "blown away" when she discovered the lack of rabbinic literature about pregnant women's relationships with God, said that the absence of such discussion in traditional Jewish texts allows women to "have their own ways of seeing their connections between Judaism and pregnancy. We make up our own perushim [interpretations of religious texts or ideas] - perushim on our lives."

"Men wrote Jewish law," Weisberg notes, "but [finding spiritual meaning in life events] is something [women] are excellent at. It's so clear to us that childbearing is a way for us to serve God, that we don't need someone to tell us how to connect it to Hashem."

Rebetzen Chana Henkin, founder and dean of Jerusalem's Nishmat Center for Advanced Jewish Study for Women, who is featured in "Expecting Miracles," told Anglo File that "there cannot be a body of rabbinic literature speaking about the spirituality of pregnancy, because it's an experience that is totally feminine. The issues of feminine spirituality have to be developed by women." Weisberg's book, Henkin said, exposes the secret thoughts that praying women had always "inserted between the lines to make the prayer relevant to their own self." Indeed, Weisberg says that since the interviewees knew their identities would not be revealed in the book, many shared thoughts or experiences that no one had ever known except their husbands.

According to Weisberg, almost none of the featured women are prominent members of their communities, simply friends of friends who were willing to open a window into their emotional lives. "I think people who are not religious just see these women at the Western Wall with their kids and don't really know who they are," Weisberg said. "As much as I hope the book will reach the hands of mothers and those who want to be inspired, I [also] hope it will reach the hands of those who have seen religious women and wondered what it is like for them."

The book does not, however, whitewash the experience of pregnancy. The stories include infertility, miscarriages, pain, exhaustion, high-risk births, C-sections, unsupportive grandparents, nausea and the ambivalence of first-time mothers about having a baby to begin with. The interviewees are frank about their physical and spiritual challenges, how they overcome them, and how they feel when they are unable to overcome them.

In anticipation of the book's publication, Weisberg created JewishPregnancy.org a couple of years ago, an online resource center and interactive community for Jewish women seeking spiritual meaning in pregnancy despite the morning sickness and aching backs. The site receives 300,000 visitors a year; Weisberg has received 1,000 grateful letters, particularly from residents of diaspora communities where a pregnant Jewish woman might feel isolated.
- posted by Izak @ 12:53 AM