Synagogue Sermon
Jewish Mothers: Part I, Co-Creators (1969)
The figure of the Jewish mother has always been rather sacrosanct in traditional Jewish life and lore. Even in ages of transition, during and after the Emancipation, when all that was sacred was held up to criticism and analysis, the Jewish mother somehow remained above the din of battle and emerged unscathed. In recent years, however, the classical type which comes to mind when we speak of the Jewish mother, has become more and more replaced by a new and competing sort of mother. Furthermore, there has been a trend in English literature, both in this country and in England, subjecting the Jewish mother to withering criticism and attempting to debunk her value and influence.We shall leave this contemporary reaction against the Jewish mother to our next sermon. This morning we shall make some remarks about a universal aspect of motherhood, namely, motherhood as creativity.There can be little question that childbearing is the most immediately, directly, and obviously creative act known to mankind, even if it is not deliberate, but unconscious and perhaps even involuntary. By the act of giving birth, a woman performs the creative act of perpetuating the species, of adding another link in the chain of generations.But is this act purely biological, or does it have any religious value? Is it an ordinary, natural process, devoid of special spiritual significance, or does it, even as a natural act, participate in a higher order of meaning?Our question is intensified by what appears to be a decidedly negative answer. In reading of the phenomenon of childbirth, at the very beginning of this morning’s Sidra, we learn that it occasions a period of tum’ah or uncleanliness, for a period of seven days for the birth of a boy and fourteen for a girl. Does this not indicate that the religious significance, if any, of childbirth is negative, that perhaps the Torah rejects its animality, its primitiveness, its thorough and exclusive naturalness, as opposed to any transcendent signific…
