Why was the mother of the human race called `Chava',
rather than `Chaya'? Because, in distinction to the
`mothers' of the animal kingdom, she uses the power of verbal
expression in rearing her young.
"When my children are hungry, I give them bread. When they
are hungry for life affirmations, I try to give them loving
words that will satisfy them."
We are now being served a picture of motherhood that makes
the skin crawl, that makes any real human being want to wail
with pain. It is the mothers who send their husbands and
children out with bombs and nails strapped to their bodies so
that they can be messengers of death to themselves and those
they hate.
Later, in the press, they speak of their pride in the
husbands and children who have become `holy martyrs.' They
have not only sent their own dear children to their deaths,
but they have murdered the innocent children of others.
Perhaps it is the pronouncements of these Mothers of Death
that can wake up the world to remember what is a Mother of
Life. As these Mothers of Death embrace the death of their
husbands and children, can we remember how to embrace the
precious lives of our children and our precious identities as
Mothers?
`Mother' is a word fraught with connotations and deep, heavy
associations.
And then there was the widespread portrayal of "The Jewish
Mother" in successful books and movies. It was a caricature
that made people laugh, but a horror because of its ugliness,
and its way of robbing us of our Jewishness and our
womanhood.
It got so bad at that time that I never wanted to be a mother
or a Jew. And it seems there are still many Jewish women who
hold on to these misrepresentations.
Without apologies and proudly, I declare: I am The Mother.
Furthermore, I am the Jewish Mother. I refuse to be reduced
into a caricature on either extreme, whether it's a
controlling, bossy and smothering giant effigy or a sweet,
harmless, passively house-bound cartoon of a mother.
I am willing to stop all my `productive' activities in the
world to clean the rice and put it up to cook on the gas. I
am happy to write in `Mother' on my school applications. I am
more than happy -- I am startled and delighted every time I
am reminded of the fact.
When my children are hungry, I give them bread. When they are
hungry for life affirmations, I try to give them loving words
that will satisfy them.
I am The Mother. Our Mothers in the Jewish Tradition are
Sora, Rivka, Rachel and Leah. Let us focus on Sora, the first
Mother of our tradition after Chava, who was the Mother of
all life.
Sora was beautiful. She was wise; she was subtle and
circumspect. She was brave. Sora was as fresh and filled with
wonder at life when she died at the age of one hundred and
twenty-seven as she was at the tender age of seven.
I am getting older, but I am also getting younger, returning
to the beauty of innocence and belief in myself that I had at
the age of seven.
The laughter the Mother laughs is a laughter of joy, of
sudden redemption and release. She laughs without a trace of
cynicism or cruelty.
The Mothers don't have the value system that most of the
world uses. With the birth of each child, their salary is not
raised. In fact, they are unsalaried, even though they work
all three shifts. What they do, no one would do for love or
money -- except for another Mother.
The mothers can create the privacy of a home even when there
is no real home with real walls and a roof. In the Egyptian
exile, they met their husbands out in the fields at the end
of a long day of backbreaking labor. They bathed their
husbands and anointed them with oil. They gathered twigs and
built small fires. They took pots of water and cooked fish
for them in the fields, making the fields a miniature home
and creating a sacred space.
The mothers of every generation are adept at creating light
out of darkness. My neighbor's grandmother was interned with
her husband and ten children in a concentration camp in
Hungary when the conditions were very difficult, with only a
limited amount of food.
When she received one small chicken to feed her large family,
she divided it up with great sensitivity and good humor. The
children remember how she described each small sliver of meat
as she handed it out. Even the smallest piece became a
delectable feast. She was a Master of Transformation. She was
able to divide up that chicken so that it satisfied the
hearts of her children, if not their stomachs, and she kept
them alive on the force of her love and her unbreakable
spirit.
Mothers see beauty where others are blind to it. At a recent
wedding, I sit across from my sisters's friend and her little
boy who has multiple handicaps. I watch him trying to eat the
food on his plate by himself. My sister's friends is the
Mother. She carefully assists him without being too obvious.
She is totally absorbed in his running conversation. There is
not a trace of sadness or disappointment on her face. This is
her child; he is perfect, and she is his happy and grateful
mother.
I watch this Mother's delighted face as she sees the beauty
of this child. She really sees him. What she sees and what
she knows is a deep knowing and a deep seeing.
This mother-presence across the table is riveting. In all the
conversation among the woman at the table, the arrival of the
bride, the dancing, nothing touches me so acutely and is
remembered so completely as this vision of a beautiful boy
and his mother. Her appreciation of his life, his proximity
to her, her total concentration, her joy in serving, her
profound love.
The Mothers are busy with reality and what makes life really
worth living. They build the fires in the hearth. They bake
the bread. They sew the torn; they bathe and bandage the
bleeding. Their love flows through their hands. It flows
through their voices.
Let their voices create the songs that will usher in a New
World where their values of service, love, and forgiveness
are shared by everyone.
Before I had children, I was at a gathering of Jewish women
in Colorado. There was a woman with an infant in her arms and
a toddler hiding in the folds of her skirt. She told me about
something that mothers do, something that I had never heard
of.
She told me that she was conscious of shielding her children,
even when they were out of her sight. She had created a
psychic nest that surrounded them. She prayed for them, their
safety, their flourishing, and the nest of prayers was always
with them.
That was a long time before I heard about energy fields, but
it sounded right to me. It gave me a sense of how constant
and powerful is the bond between a mother and her
children.
The Jewish mother is the quintessential anti-establishment
figure. She ignores the cultural trends when mothering is
either `in' or `not in' to continue her holy work of raising
up the generations.
While the world is busy with more important matters, the
mothers are rocking the children in their arms. They are
humming lullabies till their children fall asleep. They are
stirring the pots, stirring and stirring and whispering their
hopes and dreams into the warmth that flies up into their
faces. The Mothers are losing sleep for one thousand and one
nights, and in the mornings, they are running after the
school bus and waving little lunch bags.
When all my children were little, I used to pray that Hashem
make my arms stronger. I had to be able to grab my children
up suddenly and whisk them across a busy street. I had to
bend down and scoop them up in my arms when they'd fallen
asleep in a corner.
For them, I would have turned myself into a tree, an eagle, a
flowing stream to soothe their thirst, a field full of
cucumber and tomato salads. I would have sung myself into the
sound of the wind on the shutters. I would have warmed myself
into fires that licked their bedroom walls and heated the
coldest night. I would have spread myself thin across all
their beds to keep them covered. I would have turned myself
back into rays of the sun that surrounded them.
The Mother that I was is just a small measure of the Mother
that I will be. Now I turn my attention to the world outside
my home. I see the lost sheep, the lost children, the lost
adults, the lost. I see the need for all the Mothers to be
Mothers finally without apology and surround with love the
whole world that contains their children. To make the world a
nest of warmth, a place of solace where no one is lonely and
abandoned, without a Mother.
We are Mothers, and what more can you want? What more than
you need? Do you have something that can't be healed by a
real Mother?
