I loved being pregnant. Not just because I could stop worrying about my bulging midriff—though that was nice too—but because I felt that I was engaged with God in an essential act of creation. Every ultrasound revealed to me another step in the master plan, every kick and turn, another miracle. Nurturing the life inside me made me feel more alive and more fulfilled as a human being than anything else I have ever done. And the births themselves were moments when I truly felt yirat Shamayim, awe of God.
My three children were born on a foggy, ethereal night atop a mountain in Hong Kong, in the middle of a summer’s day in bustling London, and early on a Shabbat morning in a preternaturally quiet (and luckily traffic-free) New York. Each was welcomed into the specific Jewish community where we were living, and into the larger Jewish community as well. For my son, the welcome was fairly traditional, as brit milah is perhaps Judaism’s longest-standing ritual. Nevertheless, his father and I did add some new flourishes to this ritual: naming him with both our names, both of us saying hatov vehameitiv, and learning together to make a siyyum for his seudat mitzvah.
For daughters, the established ritual is naming the baby in shul. The desire to commemorate the birth with something “more” is an opportunity, but also a challenge. Many people love the freedom to be creative and personal, to express their thanks to God in an individual way, rather than with rote words and actions. For me, creating new ritual felt like an oxymoron, because the power of ritual lies in its repeated use over time, connecting us to our collective community across the generations. We chose to use the zeved habat ceremony because it stretched back to the seventeenth century and so felt more “authentic,” but we still made our own tweaks to add some personal flavor.
This issue of the JOFA Journal is dedicated to exploring how we commemorate the experience of bringing a child into the world and into a specific family and community. Which rituals do we use for sons and which for daughters? What roles are there for fathers and mothers, and for the community? How do individuals and communities deal with different paths to building a family? Given that this March marks the ninetieth anniversary of the first official bat mitzvah, will the new choices for daughters’ birth celebrations affect how we think about celebrating bringing a boy into the world, just as bat mitzvah choices have enabled bar mitzvah celebrations to broaden and morph?
JOFA Celebrates Its Founders
We recently had the opportunity to honor three women who helped give birth to JOFA. At our firstever dinner celebration in November, we paid tribute to Blu Greenberg, Carol Kaufman Newman, and Zelda Stern, who have worked tirelessly to “Put Women Back in the Picture.” The gala event featured toasts, presentations, and an amazing art exhibition curated by Audrey Axelrod Trachtman.
This special dinner also marked the retirement of our long-time executive director, Robin Bodner. Robin has worked tirelessly for women and for this organization over the past ten years. She has been an amazing partner in helping to execute the vision of JOFA. Robin leaves JOFA with many victories under her belt, but there is still much work to be done.
Women’s Dignity Challenged in Israel
One area where work cries out to be done is in response to the distressing news coming out of Israel: the now-infamous incident in Beit Shemesh, where men harangued and spit on little girls for their “immodest” dress; the refusal of the Puah Institute to allow women speakers at its annual conference on gynecology and halakha; the denial by the Ministry of Health of the public presentation of an award to a woman doctor; and the lack of women on the panel that appoints religious judges to adjudicate issues of personal status, such as marriage and divorce. These are developments that we care about and have a stake in—and we will not let them go unnoted.
But not all of the news out of Israel is gloomy: The announcement earlier this year of the formation of Beit Hillel, a new national-religious rabbinical group that will include women Torah scholars, was certainly a step in the right direction. In February, two of JOFA’s Board members and I met with the head of Kolech, Israel’s feminist organization, to explore how we can work together more closely to support our mutual agenda.
These developments in Israel will certainly be among the key topics at our next conference, which we have already started to plan for 2013. By then, we also intend to have published the next halakhic source guides in our Ta Sh’ma series, including one on birkat hagomel, a blessing some women find very meaningful as part of their birth-related events. I hope everyone has had a chance to order our most recent Ta Sh’ma publication, A Daughter’s Recitation of Kaddish (available on Amazon), and to attend one of the book tour events. JOFA is proud to support such outstanding works of scholarship that empower all of us to achieve greater ritual participation in life-cycle transitions and during the cycle of the year.
Hag kasher v’sameah!