The Spirituality of Conceiving Your Abbeville, GA Baby

A Rabbi Reflects on the Spirituality of Her Unborn Child.

by Rabbi Zoe Klein

The first night we tried to conceive a child was on Christmas Eve. I set out for the mikveh, which is a ritual bath where traditional married Jewish women go once a month for 'purification.' The streets were very still and the apartment windows above me were blinking with colored bulbs. It felt as if the whole world was inside wrapping gifts and trimming trees, and God and myself had quietly slipped out to take a romantic, moonlit stroll. The crisp blanket of snow had yet to be sullied with city soot, and the air felt scrubbed and clean.

When I immersed in the mikveh, I imagined myself returning to the womb. The water had buoyancy that cradled me like the palm of a giant hand. When I came home, my husband and I recited a blessing over two crystal goblets of grape juice, and then we went to bed.

I am now six months pregnant. The baby has not yet arrived, and already it has taken me on the longest journey! All my life I have been focused on the spiritual. As a child, I loved to pray and contemplate the afterlife. I pursued holiness and longed for the ethereal to a point near absurdity. My knees trembled when I studied Hebrew, a language filled with nuance and angels. The cities and wildernesses of Israel unlocked secret gates to my soul filled with weeping, wonder, and joy. I fell in love with the man I married because of his goodness and because he had a certain angelic presence. He proposed at dawn on the top of Mount Sinai in the Egyptian desert.

But you, child, have jolted me into the world of the body. You fastened yourself to me and plucked me out of a dream. All my life I have focused on the spiritual...never on the physical. You have awakened me to the muscles in my legs and the ligaments of my abdomen by stretching them and throwing my balance. My nasal passages, veins, belly button and breasts, though always a part of me, have never been as close as they are now. They were far from my thoughts, and now, because of tenderness and change, I find it hard to think of anything else. I used to go to great lengths to nourish my soul with wisdom and devotion. Now I am consumed with nourishing this body with multi-vitamins and green leafies. As you make yourself comfortable beneath my lungs, my 'breath of life' has become more like huffing, sighing, and panting.

The doctor says you weigh only a pound. Only a pound! And already, you've eclipsed my sun with your earthiness! Only ten inches, and you've already cast your long shadow over the supernatural, astonishing me with the wonder of the natural. While our umbilical cord brings to you oxygen and nutrients, it brings to me, for the first time in my life, anchorage.

In Judaism, the body is not a prison from which the soul yearns to be free. Rather, the body enables the soul to perform acts of loving-kindness, and therefore the soul has great affection for its home in the body. One idea in Jewish mysticism is that when we die, while our soul returns to the Garden of Eden, a small portion of it remains with the body. Tradition talks of an age when soul and body will be reunited, and resurrected to everlasting life. The prophet Joel taught, "they will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks." He does not prophesy that our swords will become harps and our spears wings. Rather, this world will become paradise, with no shame and no death, and the land will respond to our touch with lush abundance. The perfect age will see the ultimate equanimity of body and soul.

Because of my profession, I have found myself many times holding a newborn for a baby-naming, standing with a couple under a wedding canopy, in hospital rooms with people who are sick and suffering, or standing graveside as a coffin is being lowered. At moments like these, I have always drawn upon the language of prayer and belief to help me understand and to talk with others. But now, when I find myself under the canopy or standing graveside while a baby is squirming inside me, suddenly I see that the natural world has an order and a magnificence that I did not recognize before. I now know that in order to be a spiritual person; one does not have to deny his or her own humanity.

In fact, the rabbis of old taught that each of us should carry two notes, one in each pocket. On one note should be written, "I was made in the divine image," and on the other note it should say, "I am but dust and ashes." This way we can always remember that we have in us a little of both heaven and earth, soul and body. It is not only how passionately people pray that makes them good, decent or pious, but also how they treat others on a daily basis in every mundane transaction.

I am grateful to this unborn child for teaching me the beauty, complexity, and holiness of the outermost husk of this world, for awakening me to the sensations of touch, taste and smell. I am grateful to this unborn child for tuning me in to the sounds of my own body, rather than only that distant chiming of spirit, for adding matter to form, for adding substance to dream, for reminding me that soaring oaks have sturdy roots.