One Baby Step at a Time: Seven Secrets of Jewish Motherhood

by Chana (Jenny) Weisberg (Urim Publications, 2007)

Step Two:
Learning to Let God Help You Out

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Step Two Introduction

Rabbi Shimshon David Pinkus tells a story about a doctor working one night in his hospital's Intensive Care Unit. At the beginning of his shift, the doctor's supervisor tells him that because of a staff shortage, he will be the lone doctor on duty that night. "As long as everyone stays asleep," the supervisor explains, "you should be fine. But," he adds, "if one of the patients wakes up, he will make noise and wake up the other patients. And then you will have a big problem on your hands. If that happens, you must call me on the emergency phone so that I can send in reinforcements immediately."

So the doctor spent several uneventful hours on the ward, until one of the patients woke up right before dawn. The patient started yelling out in pain, and before long all of the patients had woken up. The doctor ran from bed to bed, trying to calm all of the patients down, and working frantically to care for all of their urgent needs. But in the end, despite his tremendous efforts, one of the patients died.

Soon after this happened, the doctor was taken to court for negligence. The indignant doctor pleaded his case to the judge, and said that on that terrible night he had displayed rare medical acumen as well as great self-sacrifice. But the judge just shook his head, and said, "Who said that you had to manage on your own? Your supervisor explained that if the situation becomes too difficult, you must call for help."

And this story, Rabbi Pinkus explains, is a metaphor for the difficulties we face in our lives, and how we must turn to God for help through prayer.

All of the essays and readings in this chapter are about turning to God when the challenges, stresses, and hardships of motherhood force us to pick up the red phone, and place an emergency call to our Supervisor.

Blaah-Buster Tidbit: Praying with Rebbetzin Yemima by Chana (Jenny) Weisberg

When I first started becoming observant twelve years ago, I loved keeping Shabbat, learning Torah, and observing the holidays. I also didn't mind keeping kosher, wearing long skirts, or any of the other new mitzvot that I took on. But, for years, every time I sat with a prayer book in my hands, my mind started wandering to distant locales. I felt it was so pointless, as though the Creator of the World could care less that I was reciting these boring, archaic words to him?

When I became a mother, and started studying with Rebbetzin Yemima Mizrachi, she revolutionized my attitude to prayer. Every week, over and over, she implores her students to pray, and in particular, to discover the power of spontaneous prayer. It is in Rebbetzin Yemima's merit that prayer has become a staple in the daily diet of hundreds of mothers, including my own.

The following selection is a quotation from one of Yemima's weekly classes:

"Rabbi Volbe explains that we are making a big mistake when we think that prayer as a monologue. You think that you are speaking to the wall, that nobody hears and that nobody will answer either. This is why you don't pray when things are tough, and instead of speaking with the Master of the Universe, you prefer to call your mother, your neighbor, or your friend. But Abraham shows us over and over that when we speak with God, we are always engaged in a dialogue.
Parenting expert Rachel Arbus writes that the smartest thing you can do when you are in a situation surrounded by question marks is to stop everything, lift your eyes to Heaven, and ask, "God, what do I do now?" If you really listen, you will receive your answer. Suddenly, you will have clarity.

"The Piasetsner Rebbe explained another idea that amazed me, and that gave me a tremendous urge to pray. He wrote that God answers prayer by sending you immediate relief. You won't hear Him speaking to you. Rather, God will reveal Himself in what happens after you pray. When you really pray, notice the relief that you feel afterwards. If you think that this relief comes from you, as in, "I feel better now that I got everything off my chest," you are mistaken. This alleviation doesn't come from you, but is rather the direct response of God to your prayer. This is how God answers you, by sending you patience, happiness, and strength.

"The amazing idea here is that prayer is answered on the spot, at that very moment. This knowledge provides a desire to pray that is impossible to describe.

"This is a gift from God, because prayer is not a monologue. When you speak with God sincerely, He answers."

 

Crying with our Children by Chana (Jenny) Weisberg

Every year right before Passover, the women's yeshiva where my husband teaches organizes a trip for all of the students and teachers to go up to the Golan Heights. When we went a few years back, the kids had gone crazy on the bus, and I had gotten all stressed out, and it had just seemed impossible, so we didn't go again for a few years. But this year, my husband said, "We're going, and I'll take care of the kids on the bus." So we went, and on the bus I sat next to Dafna, and showed her on the map how we would follow the Jordan River up to the Sea of Galilee, and she asked a lot of questions about the different fruit trees and towns that we passed on the drive up. And Tiferet was amazed into silence by the sheep and occasional camel clustered by the Bedouin tents on the mossy sand dunes. And Nisa fell fast asleep on my sleeping husband's lap, and I felt so happy to be able to go with everybody on this big adventure.

And once we started the hike in the northern Golan Heights, we walked along an incredibly beautiful stream. It was the kind of gushing, waterfal-ly stream that only someone in Israel's dry climate could get excited over- where even the teensiest pond with a few malnourished goldfish is justification to set up a national park.

The hike led us alongside huge rocks that had been carved out by the stream over thousands of years, so 95 percent of the hike consisted of going from one pile of boulders to the next pile of boulders, trying to figure out where to find a foothold and a handhold, and then, several times, trying to figure out how to cross the stream without falling off the few slippery rocks that led across it. I absolutely loved the hike, and my kids did too, and reaching the end was exhilarating.

The only problem was that while we were hiking we couldn't really enjoy the incredible scenery, since we had to spend the entire time going from one challenge to the next, focusing only on each little pile of boulders and rocks we had to climb over, and never looking up. It was like going through a hundred separate obstacle courses set up in a row without stopping.

The next day, all the other teachers with little kids joined us. We went on a long hike which was really easy, walking down a path that led through gently rolling, Kermit-green hills. The kids ran around looking at the hordes of caterpillars, and in search of the wild boars that the guide had assured us were around there somewhere. And I just spent the whole time talking with the students and other mothers, looking around, breathing deep, and gazing into the distance towards the snowcapped Hermon Mountain, just thinking about what an unbelievable thing it is that I, Chana Weisberg, am able to live in the land of Israel.

 

Over Shabbat, I found myself thinking over and over about these two hikes, until I realized I was thinking about them because of how they reminded me of two distinct ways that I find myself living my life. I have a tendency, and maybe all mothers do, to go through life like the hike on the first day. We go from activity to activity- from giving our kids Cheerios, to taking them to kindergarten, to going to buy yogurt, to going to check our Emails. We don't see beyond the immediate task we are involved in, and if we do see beyond the immediate challenge, it is maybe to see the whole day, or maybe, if we are really organized, to see our whole week- all the steps that will lead me from today until Shabbat, for example.

There are times, though, rare moments when I am able to see my life as a whole, like how I looked into the distant landscape on the second hike, looking far into decades to come, to think of what I am really aiming for, what I want to accomplish in life as a mother and a human being.

And that is the case at this rare moment in my mothering life because next year Dafna is going into first grade, and we have to choose a school for her right after Passover (and this is also why I've been hyperventilating pretty much non-stop for the last two weeks). What do I truly value, I am now forced to ask myself almost constantly. I look at Dafna, and try to figure out what I dream for her, what I hope she will live like and be like at the age of thirty. A friend of mine with older children smiled and nodded knowingly when I told her about our school dilemma. She said, "Oh, I remember! It is so hard to choose. You feel like you're deciding your child's future… And, well, the truth is, you are."

Another friend who is a teacher said something very different. She said, "You know, there are three iron rules in successfully educating a child- prayer, prayer, and prayer." This was also the theme of Rebbetzin Yemima's class this week in which she quoted Rabbi Shimshon Pinkus, who asks what it means when the Passover Haggadah says, "Our hard labor- this means the children." And no, Rabbi Pinkus explains, it's not giving them baths, and chasing after them to get them to brush their teeth, and cleaning up their mess after they go to sleep. The hard labor the Haggadah is talking about is all the praying we do for our children, and the crying we do for them.

This teacher and Yemima reminded me that the other rare moment of my life when I glance up from the moment-to-moment, boulder-to-boulder approach to motherhood is when I pray every day for my children as a part of my morning blessings. While part of what I request in these prayers changes over time, as the girl who finally stops wetting her bed gets pinworms that we just can't seem to get rid of, there is also a standard, unchanging prayer for each of my children that has stayed the same for years. Every morning I pray that I will raise my little girls to Torah, chupah, and ma'asim tovim- to grow up to love the Torah, to one day stand under the wedding canopy with a man they love, and to perform acts of kindness for those around them- for their own families, for their communities, and possibly beyond.

In other words, I am praying for things that will only happen twenty or thirty years from now, and that's very good. This long-term focus keeps my head above the tantrums that give me palpitations, above the cornflakes that Nisa poured this morning all over the newly washed floor, and even helps a bit to keep my head above this stressful decision over choosing a first grade for Dafna. Prayer keeps my eyes focused and my feet walking towards the Promised Land lying just beyond the horizon- a place and time when I, God willing, will be the mother of daughters grown-up into happy and confident mothers who are good people and good Jews.

This morning, for example, somebody gave me some money to distribute to needy families in my community before Passover. I thought it would be easiest to do this after I leave my kids off at nursery school and kindergarten, so I could give out the money more quickly on my own. But then I realized that I want my girls to also be involved in this act of charity, in hope that my daily prayer that they should grow up to do acts of kindness will come true.

Prayer also means recognizing, on a daily basis, that not everything is in my hands. Prayer means that I am leaving a space between all of my mothering efforts for Hashem to put in His input, so that He can guide me and my children in the right direction- so that He can work miracles.

And what about this crying Rabbi Pinkus says we are supposed to be doing? There is a famous story about the Chofetz Chaim, one of the leading rabbis of the previous century, who found his mother's book of Psalms many years after her death. Already an old man, he began to kiss it and cry over it. When his students looked surprised by his behavior, he said, "Do you know how many tears my mother of blessed memory poured onto this book of Psalms? Every morning she would pray and cry that her son should be a good and faithful Jew. It is only in her merit and in the merit of all those tears that I became a rabbi at all."

 

Yesterday I was in a taxi and saw that the driver had a palm-pilot like device that enabled him to see his own taxi driving along as if he was watching himself from an airplane, moving little by little along the correct route leading him to his ultimate destination. I thought about how we mothers desperately need this same feedback for our own lives, to see ourselves making slow but certain progress towards our destination within what so often appears to be a vast decades-long gridlock of mundane mothering moments.

Thank You, God, for the gift of prayer- which keeps us progressing along the right path even without the benefits of cutting edge satellite-enabled technology. So what do you all think about pledging two minutes a day to pray for our children? Two minutes a day to open our mouths and pray for the impossibly stubborn child, the terribly sad child, the chronically sick child, as well as the happy, confident child who we desperately hope will stay that way. To spend two minutes every day standing up on a high hill and looking down at our lives and our children's lives, to get a good look at the destination we are heading for, and to keep walking with our children towards it, hand in hand.

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Also in Section Two: Personal essays "Crying with our Children," "Mitzvah Morsels," and "Winning Shabbat" as well as inspirational readings from Rabbi Lawrence Keleman and author Drora Matlofsky