The Lilith Blog

March 6, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Friending

A friend of mine was visiting from out of town for a conference recently, and a group of her women friends gathered to see her. We ordered in pizza, and the woman who was hosting lit candles, which she arranged on her twin boys’ ping pong table, opened a bottle of wine, and baked heart-shaped mint brownies. I arrived first, and watched as everyone walked in and gushed “It smells so good!” “Wow – candles!” as the hostess handed them glasses of wine. We sat around and caught up, talking about our kids and our work, the pros and cons of being on Facebook, and finding time to exercise. The conversation could not help but come back, over and over again, to how nice it was to be sitting together in this house, eating on pretty plates (which we would not have to wash), drinking wine, candles lit, on a week-night.

The hostess told us all we had to get out more.

We told our visiting friend she had to visit more.

We thought about starting a non-book club book club.

Then dessert was served and one woman said that she should come here to get her daily dose of fruit – it looked so much more appealing than in her house. I agreed – who ever has time to cut up a pineapple? We all laughed at ourselves, acknowledging how nice it was to be mothered.
When I first moved to the West Coast, before I had children, I was tired of making new friends. I missed my old friends, my “real” friends, dispersed across the globe. I hated the phone, the time-differences, and all of the superficial technological innovations that create the illusion of “being in touch.” I missed touching them. I still do, terribly. But I have become more open to my definition of friendship. I’ve realized that there are many types of friends; for me, the common denominator for the basis of all friendships is sharing pivotal life experiences while living in close proximity. Friends are the people who have at some point given you a hug when you need it. They are people with whom you’ve shared pineapples, face to face, and then, later, the people with whom you talk about that pineapple, and whose hugs you remember.

When I became a mother, I became friends with other mothers, mothers who live nearby, whose kids play with my kids. We are sharing together one of the most profound journeys, and, thrust together by circumstance, we have become friends. In today’s age of countless Facebook friends, and of vast geographic distances separating us from the people who have known us our entire lives and with whom we feel the closest, these friends are precious. I’ve come to accept that new friends don’t annul old friends, just as a new child does not diminish the love one has for an older child. As Papa Bear sings to Baby Bear in Three Bears and a New Baby, “I love her cuz she’s curly and small; I love you cuz you’re furry and tall – curly and small love, furry and tall love, everyone loves through all their days, different people, different ways.”
We have a capacity and a need for endless friendships; these friendships arise in different circumstances and fill different needs, and, rather than negating one another, they accentuate the uniqueness of each era of our lives, revealing the infinite prism that compiles our very selves.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

March 2, 2009 by admin

My Cup of Tea

The only thing I consume as often as books is tea. A box of tea, like a good novel, usually lasts me about a week; by that point I am sick of the characters and ready for a new flavor. Yet I buy my tea in boxes, and it always seems wasteful to throw away so much cardboard. And so a few years ago I developed a strategy for my reading and drinking lives: I began cutting up tea boxes into book marks—four per box—and using them to mark my place.

My tea-drinking habits have changed as I have moved around the globe. When I lived in New York I would drink steaming cups of Celestial Seasonings Swiss Mint, and with good literary precedent – this was also Ruth Puttermesser’s favorite flavor. My childhood bedroom walls are still plastered with the inspirational quotes I cut out from the backs of the Celestial Seasonings boxes, and once, in high school, I even wrote to the company headquarters in Boulder Colorado to suggest various literary selections. They responded by sending me free coupons for their newest flavor, which kicked off a teenage habit of writing suggestion letters to companies. (Somewhere in my files I have responses from Nutri-Grain (does the locust bean gum you list in your ingredients really contain locusts?!), M&Ms (before there was green, I suggested it), and Pringles potato chips (who responded to my complaint about the paucity of green flakes on the Sour Cream and Onion chips by sending me a case of eight free containers, which arrived on our doorstep one week before Pesach.) With time, I like to think that I have become a healthier eater; the one constant has been the steaming mug of tea that accompanies nearly every meal.

In England, I tried to learn to drink Earl Grey with milk after I made the mistake of inviting an esteemed Cambridge don to tea – only to find him horrified that my refrigerator contained neither milk nor clotted cream. (He was unimpressed by my dainty little cucumber sandwiches – apparently being earnest is far less important that knowing how to serve a proper brew.) After most of my British literature seminars, all the students would retire to the local pub. I had never drunk a glass of beer or even a social glass of wine, and I quickly learned that ordering tea in the Red Lion or the King’s Arms was simply not done.

In Israel, I lament the weakness of Wissotzky and need to put two tea bags in every glass I drink. I have read in the novels of Meir Shalev that early Russian immigrants to Israel used to hold sugar cubes between their teeth as they sipped their tea, but I cannot adopt that habit; I often drink tea while snacking on gummy candies (which explains a lifetime of dental woes), but the sweetness must always be outside of the mug. If anything, I put slices of lemon in my tea, a habit I learned from my mother, who also relishes the bittersweet. In Israel I drink tea with every single meal, since I still can’t get used to the taste of the water but also can’t be bothered with all the wastefulness that bottled water entails. Once, during a particularly long dark teatime of my soul, a friend served me loose leaf tea from the shuk, offering me her own blend of tea and sympathy. It was the best tea I’ve ever drunk, and I’ve purchased it several times since; unfortunately, though, each time I drink that tea I am overcome by a flood of memories so intense that I cannot abide another sip.

I suspect that my rate of tea consumption outpaces the rate at which I lose bookmarks, since I have an entire top desk drawer filled with cut-up tea bookmarks waiting (along with New Yorker subscription cards) to be called up for reserve duty. Sometimes, if I do not want to write in the copy of the book I am reading, I scribble notes on the back of the tea box cut-out and then shelve the bookmark along with the book, as an index to my favorite passages. My grandmother, who used to review books professionally, did this as well – the books from her personal library not only reek of her sweet perfume, but are also stuffed with torn-up sheets of paper with her scribblings, which she used as both post-its and bookmarks. In many books I have finished, though, I do not need bookmarks: I have a favorite passage that I quote so frequently that the book naturally falls open to that place when I open the front cover, as if it knows just what I am seeking.

In my current apartment I have a reading couch with a ledge that perfectly balances a cup of tea. I like to spend several hours each Shabbat steeped in a good book besides a steaming mug, my own celestial taste of the world to come.

–Chavatzelet Herzliya

The Lilith Blog

February 27, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

I’ve Been to the Mountaintop

And it was cold. And snowy. A blizzard, actually, and the winds were so strong that despite the gravity and despite the skis and despite the thick wet snow we were stopped in our tracks. And my gloves were soaking wet, inside and out, and the mountain was steep.

But I didn’t mind.

Because my husband and I were on the mountaintop without our kids.

And we peered at each other through foggy goggles and skied down to the Promised Land. Of ten hours of uninterrupted sleep. Of reading novels, all in one sitting. Of eating what we wanted when we wanted. Of adult conversation. Of quiet. Of hiking and long baths and did I say sleep? Sleep. And sushi and mango ice-cream and movies.

Vacation. From the Latin vac re (variant voc re), to be empty. A strange root; I had always thought of vacation as being filled, like sitting down to a good meal and re-energizing, filling the tank with gas, moving from a state of depletion to a state of fullness, rejuvination. It is a strange notion, to think that we need to be emptied, rather than filled. We are always trying to be filled, and to fill others, and to fill time, and to fill space. On the four hour drive that took us from one life, that of parents, and one climate, spring, to another life, that as a couple (it’s strange, isn’t it, that we wear wedding bands as a public symbol that we are in a committed relationship, and that there is no public symbol that we are parents, the most binding relationship of all? I felt like an impostor all weekend), and another climate, winter, my husband asked me what I was most looking forward to. I thought for a moment, and answered sheepishly, and honestly – “to forgetting.”

Is it healthy to forget that we have children? To empty ourselves of that which fills the most? I had pure moments of forgetfulness. They were few, and didn’t last, but they were, and they were joyous. Like long exhales in a yoga class, exhale fully, exhale the fullness, and empty yourself of breath, of memory, of the selves beyond your self, and, finally, of self. Abraham Joshua Heschel, writing about the Sabbath, says: “Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation, from the world of creation to the creation of the world.”

Children, before they are born, are sparks of passion and potential, part of the mystery of creation, the empty eternal. Once they are born, they too are subject to the tyranny of things of space, and subject us to them as well – endless piles of laundry, fevers and stomach-aches, the infuriating cuteness of wide-eyed 6am awakeness, night after night of what should we make for dinner, and the endless variations on “are we there yet.” Now that we are living again in the blessed fullness of the tyranny, I see that it was good to be on the mountain, the storm and winds and cold all around us, and we, fully empty, silent and warm within.

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

February 24, 2009 by Mel Weiss

Fiscal Discipline

I am, as my friends, family and girlfriend can tell you, kind of cheap. Not super-cheap, not inhibiting-my-social-interactions cheap, just I-live-in-New-York-go-to-grad-school-and-work-at-a-non-profit cheap. You know what I’m avoiding saying right now, don’t you? Because in fact, I think this impulse might be in my blood; although I grew up in very comfortable circumstances, my mother is a compulsive coupon clipper, a woman who takes the leftover bread in the basket home with whatever anyone didn’t finish when we eat out, a woman who taught me to think it was totally normal to buy bras pulled from huge cardboard boxes six feet up tiny little hallways on the Lower East Side. I was aware of both the stereotype and the fact of over-privileged Jewish women with lots of cash (though I was to learn more later on in life), but to me, the relationship of my primary Jewish female role model to money was more about thrift than anything else. That, too, of course, comes out of a particular historical situation, and I could go on for a very long time, but let’s just say you should go read some Joyce Antler and leave it at that.

So fast-forward to my current far-left view of the world and, most obsessively, of my national government. I can see why there might be some conflict between an ethos of personal thrift and thinking that the government should spend a lot of money—goodness knows it has been pointed out to me. But I would like to clear the record on something here: I and many of my fellow lefties don’t want to see profligate spending towards no end. We don’t want the government to flush money down the toilet bowl (or for to renovate the toilet bowl, either); we do think that society that shells out cash for those who need it can be a more just society, although God knows where we got that idea. So, sometimes cash needs to be spent and, yeah, sometimes it can get to be a lot of cash. But, the same way I was sat firmly down and taught how to keep a checkbook, there needs to be some sense of accountability for how money is spent, and we need to spend it in the most productive way.

According to people way, way smarter than I, it turns out that tax cuts are not a good way to spend government money. This would be less of a problem if a) we hadn’t just spent about 40% of a huge-ass stimulus bill on them and b) they didn’t cost the government the same as all of our national defense. Yeah. Of course, I also just learned that for years, the wars we’ve been fighting haven’t been on the national budget. Instead, we’ve had a series of “Emergency Supplemental” appropriation bills, which let us pay a whole lot for things without having them show up on the budget, which strikes me as a liiiiiiiiiiiittle bit disingenuous. Kind of like doing a monthly budget and forgetting to include, I don’t know, your rent, and then mooching cash off of your family, friends and roommates when the bill-paying time of the month rolls around. As my personal hero likes to call it, “bullpuckey.”

But, fear no more, because at the same time that this new administration is spending loads of your cash on roads and tax cuts alike, they’re at least going to be honest about how much they’re spending. Calling the budget process in recent years an “exercise in deception,” President Obama has promised to spend lots of your money to try to keep the bottom from falling out of the economy, to be transparent about the actual cost of the two wars (remember them?) that we’re fighting, and to cut the deficit in half within four years. I have no idea how the heck that’s going to happen, but I would like to assure you, Mr. President, that my mom is ready by the phone if you ever want her two cents. I recommend her; you’ll just have to note those two cents down.

–Mel Weiss

The Lilith Blog

February 19, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

The Milky Way

When my friend’s son was one year old, she and her husband threw a big party in their back-yard to celebrate the baby’s weaning. It was June in Northern California. People arrived in sundresses and sandals, on bikes and roller-blades, and drank lemonade in the dappled shadows of the late afternoon. There was a lot of wine and beer, and champagne too. And delicious food – someone brought a red-pepper dish, in honor of the mother who had abstained from red peppers throughout her pregnancy and lactation, for the baby’s sake. Another friend brought an anatomically correct mammary gland cake, icing and all. On a tree in the yard, my friend and her husband had hung laminated sheets of paper, cut in circles, which fluttered and twirled in the early summer breeze. On one side of each twisting orb was a question; on the reverse side an answer. “Approximately how many GALLONS of milk did our family farm produce?” quivered one side. “58” twisted its response, slowly turning against the bright blue sky.

This was no ordinary weaning party. My friend was wearing a tight t-shirt that read “Exclusive Pumper.” Her son was unable to breast-feed at birth, and, despite “How many lactation consultants did we see (bonus: what were their names?)” “4 – Nancy, Nancy, Joanna, and Nancy,” he was never able to nurse. My friend and her husband made the commitment to feed him his own mother’s milk, and so, “on average, how many pump and bottle pieces did they wash each day?” “100.” My friend told me that once, when she was pumping on an airplane, and her husband was bottle-feeding her breast-milk to the baby, a woman leaned over and said: “Wouldn’t it be simpler for you to just feed him directly?” It took all of my friend’s will-power, and then-some, not to knock her out with the pump and gag her with a hands-free bra.

I could identify, slightly, with this friend. I had pumped exclusively for two weeks and was then able to nurse my baby. My eldest daughter was born six weeks early. My water broke in the middle of the night, seven weeks before my due date; I rolled over and went back to sleep, and then immediately awoke, my eyes wide with awareness. I was put on bed-rest in the hospital for a week and then induced. The baby was whisked away to the NICU, and though, thank God, she was healthy, after I’d rested the nurse brought me a pump instead of my baby. I pumped four or five drops, which my husband extracted from the bottle with a syringe and raced to the NICU. A week later, when we were home and the baby was still in the hospital, I would pump bottle after bottle, and my husband, the milk-man, would wrap them in a towel to keep them warm, and drive them to the hospital, in time for the evening feeding. I pumped exclusively for two weeks, filling the freezer with bottles (“How long can breast milk be stored in a freezer?” “3-4 months”) which we later left out for the baby-sitter when we went out, tentatively, rarely, to the movies.

On the New Yorker’s blog, Jell Lepore, answering questions about pumping, writes: “I found pumping miserable (Dear God, how did it come to this? is the question pumping always made me ask).” What drives us to such irrational madness? Yes – there are rational, and terrible, answers. A child who cannot nurse, a work schedule that does not allow us to be with our babies, sickness, other reasons. Many women decide, willingly, joyfully, or unwillingly, heart-wrenchingly, not to nurse their babies. But what could bring a woman who has a dreadful Pavlovian reaction to the sound of a breast-pump to “cluster pump” (“What is a cluster pump?” “For a period of several hours, you pump until your milk runs out, take a break for 10-15 minutes, and pump again. In a four hour “cluster pump,” you pump between 10 and 12 times. For the first two months of her son’s life, my friend did a 4-hour cluster pump every afternoon”), a wild gleam in her eyes?

When we become mothers we become bewildered. A child, a breathing human being, comes out of our bodies. We, like Naomi returning from Moab, are left – empty husks of corn in the fields of Bethlehem. We eat fenugreek. (“What is fenugreek?” “Fenugreek is an herb that can be taken as a dietary supplement to increase milk production. It smells – and makes you smell – like imitation maple syrup”). We know that our fullness is beyond us, and we leak. Motherhood is the gathering of this endless flow of love, sheave by sheave, with a syringe, with the hope that the baby will taste one wild drop.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

February 17, 2009 by Mel Weiss

Tzedek or Bust?

I find it almost impossible to discuss the recent stimulus package, passed by Congress last week, in any sense of coherence; I feel so strongly about the outcome I wanted to see that it hinders my clarity. Certainly, I am unable to speak about it with anything resembling brevity. With the possible exception a Shabbat guest who actively solicited my opinions—and, fifteen minutes later, when I stopped to catch my breath, probably regretted it—I worry that I am boring the living daylights out of every single person I know.

That said, let us leave the stimulus plan right now. Let’s discuss that much calmer, safer, clearer subject—the Israeli elections. Oh…wait. So as you may well have heard, Tzipi Livni won…sort of. While Ms. Livni took the largest number of votes, neither she nor any of the candidates pulled in enough votes to actually have a majority in the Knesset. This means that a government-sharing situation is probably around the bend—actually, Livni’s party of Kadima has already called for this—provided she’s in charge of it.

It’s not a wholly unknown phenomenon—it happened before, a quarter-century ago, when Yitzkhak Shamir and Shimon Peres traded off midway.

I keep reminding myself that this could have been worse—I have a recurring nightmare, honestly, about Bibi Netanyahu being the next Israeli PM—and, as such, I guess that power-sharing is okay by me if it means that Livni is mostly calling the shots. It certainly sounds, at least superficially, like the kind of political compromise someone with self-identified feminist sensibilities should embrace: sharing instead of beating each other to a pulp non-stop.

And yet, and yet…

When I watch a certain American political party, which shall remain unidentified, attempt to stymie whatever progress might be made towards pulling our economy out of the toilet, I burn with honest rage—rage so real it literally renders me inarticulate. It’s not about partisanism for the sake of partisanism, though I’m capable of that as well—I just think that when things are dire, the people in charge with the good ideas shouldn’t have to take much input from the people with the terrible, destructive ideas. Playing nice is not as much of a feminist virtue to me as fixing the things in this world that are really, really wrong. And I happen to throw my lot in with those who value funding for infrastructure and peace talks aimed at a peaceful two-state solution. (Surprise!) So, really, it’s not like sharing is a bad thing, politically. It’s just that maybe sharing is merely the means to a larger end, and if that means stops working, we can try something else.

It’s very easy to feel powerless in both of these political situations, but it’s probably not good for us to despair. I remain cheered by the fact that much of the international progressive community is as interested in reaching out to Israel as some progressive Jewish American organizations—a la Avaaz and Jstreet. We have no way of knowing how the Israeli political kaleidescope will shake out in its new formations, but I’m ready to say that while any functioning government deserves its people’s initial respect, there’s nothing wrong with saying, these are our ideals. These are our dreams. This is the way of being a force for tzedek in the world—so help us onward or get out of the way.

–Mel Weiss

The Lilith Blog

February 12, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

The Nanny Diaries

I was in a meeting with a colleague when my cell phone rang; I didn’t recognize the number, but I picked it up anyway. It was the head of the home-owner’s association of my complex of townhouses. He is an older gentleman, owns a big Dachshund, is relentlessly jolly, and never calls me. He began what at first seemed to be a casual conversation, “how are you, sorry to bother you, by the way, are any of your windows open upstairs,” and turned out to be a conversation about the fact that my Russian nanny, Albina, had stepped into our yard to throw away a diaper, and the wind had blown the door closed behind her. Now she was outside, locked out, and my one year old was inside, awake, at large in a world we’ve really been meaning to baby-proof, really. She had stood there for a while, trying to figure out what to do; the baby crawled to the glass door and smiled, trying to figure out what game they were playing. Then she left the yard, and the baby inside, and ran to get help. We all kicked into action, and, five minutes later, they were inside, and I was 45 miles away, still on the phone. I heard the baby screaming, and heard Albina pick her up and soothe her. There was nothing for me to do, so I hung up, felt my legs turn to jelly, took some deep breaths, and went back to my meeting, systematically ignoring the relentless images of what could have been.

When I was growing up, I had a Jewish Russian nanny. My parents helped her daughter and grandson get out of Russia. Genya had been happy in Russia. She taught German at the university level. But her only daughter had wanted to immigrate to the United States with her young son, and had applied for a visa. Genya and her husband could not imagine living apart from them, and so they applied for visas, too. In a move typical of the Russian government at the time, Genya and Jack were granted Visas, but her daughter, Simona, and grandson, Artur, were not. In the early 1980s, if you were Jewish in Russia and received a visa to the United States, you emigrated. So when I sat on my father’s shoulders at rallies at the Russian compound in the Bronx, everyone around me chanting “Free Sharansky Now,” I was shouting “Free Simona and Artur now!” Eventually, they received their visas, and the family was re-united. My family is still in close touch with theirs, though Genya stopped working for us when we moved to Israel, in the late 1980s. She danced at my wedding with me; I cried with her when her husband passed away.

When we returned from Israel, my family hired another Russian woman, Zeena. Zeena was hard-working, and helped raise my younger sister; she was part of our family for ten years. One afternoon, my mother went upstairs to a locked drawer in the attic where she kept jewelry and other valuables, and found that it was unlocked, and empty. After a lengthy investigation, it emerged that Zeena was culpable, though she was never officially convicted. My mother’s diamond engagement ring was gone. A charm bracelet her grandmother had lovingly compiled for her was gone. Cash was gone. And Zeena was gone, a sniffing cop and rancid after-taste in her place. I was working in Russia at the time, running a summer camp. The day I heard about what had happened at home, a basketball was stolen from the counselor’s room. Poor campers, poor staff. I called camp to a halt. I gathered everyone together outside, under the trees. We sat there in silence. I was mourning the trust that had been broken between Zeena and my family. I was mourning a world in which you didn’t know whom you could trust, and what was safe. Then I talked for a long time about the basketball.

On the evening after Albina was locked out of our house, when I told my husband what had happened, I watched him respond. He knew that our baby was by now sleeping soundly in her crib. First he wanted to know all of the details – how long was she outside? How long did it take them to get into the house? Then he wanted to know why I hadn’t called him. Then I watched as he became angry. “We could fire her over this. She should have made sure the door was unlocked. She should never leave the baby’s side. She should always carry her cell phone.” Then the “what could have beens” swarmed around him, and he sat down.

How can you trust anyone with your children? Yes, we read resumes and look for CPR certification and check references, and watch, during those first few days, like hawks. Some go so far as to install video cameras in teddy-bears. Ultimately, though, trust is a decision of hope, a delicate sheet of ice thinly coating a roaring river of unknown.

When I got home day, I hugged my baby tight, and Albina broke down crying and hugged me, and I hugged her, and then the baby’s diaper needed changing, and then I had to make dinner, and before Albina left I reminded her to come early the next morning, so I could catch my train and go to work.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

February 4, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Leben Oder Theater

After college, I spent a year living in Germany, working with the Jewish immigrants from the Former Soviet Union who were flocking to cities across Germany in such numbers that, to this day, render Germany the fastest-growing Jewish community in the world. My friend and I worked as Lauder Fellows in Frankfurt am Main. Twice a month, we would drive three hours to Trier, Marx’s birthplace. We would park ourselves in Trier’s synagogue and lead programs all day long, first for pre-schoolers, then for high-schoolers, and finally for adults. Neither of us knew how to drive a stick-shift, so we couldn’t be picky about the cars we rented; we often ended up in mini-vans, and laughed at how one day we would actually own these types of cars, shuttling our children from soccer practice to piano lessons, and that we would always associate them with this strange, free time of our youth, driving across this beautiful, scarred country, with no speed limit.

Once, we got pulled over on the Autobahn for driving too slowly. When the cop approached the car, I blasted Garth Brooks, rolled down the window with a smile, and put on my best fake “Howdy, Officer, How Ya Doin’, Ah don’t speak German” Southern accent, just to get my friend to laugh, which she did, convulsing in nervous shakes in the passenger seat. At the end of the year, before we returned back to real life, grad school and courtship and jobs and marriage and children, she got me a poster by Charlotte Salomon. It depicts a woman, close to the foreground, sitting on her knees, back to the viewer, the profile of her face gazing down at some unidentifiable object in her hands (the skeleton of a kite, perhaps?), and blue horizon all about her. On her back, the words “Leben Oder Theater” are written – Life? or Theater? The dichotomy used to resonate; which to choose? Life, the trodden path, in which you look out at the world as you engage in it, or theater, the path less traveled, in which the world looks in at you?

After my daughters were born, the notion of the dichotomy disintegrated, and the illusion that one could choose between them. Life happens in between the choices. And theater is thick in its midst. I felt this most strongly when I first became a mother, and realized that all of the people closest to me now had new “titles.” My mother was a grandmother, my grandmother a great-grandmother, my sister an aunt, my aunt a great-aunt, and on and on. It was as if we were all part of the theater of the absurd, a show in which we had been acting forever, and the director, on a whim, had decided everyone should switch parts. The show is the same – but you’ll be reading the part of “mother” from now on. Just pass your scripts on over, one person to the left please.

Sometimes, I catch my daughters gazing at me. When I nurse my baby, and she looks at me and reaches for my face, I see myself sitting there, a woman, feeding her child. Or, when I put my three year old to bed, and her eyes are wide as saucers, wondering how she’ll get from here, by my side, to the other side, alone in sleep, I wonder how I have gotten to this side, by her side, the mother side. It’s breathtaking. The gaze of this new generation, and of generations past, on me, a-twirl in the theater of mothering. It stops me in my tracks; for a moment, I sink to my knees on the stage, my back to them, gazing into the blue.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

February 2, 2009 by Mel Weiss

Tav HaYosher for Republican Women Senators (Really)

There’s so much to say about what’s going on in the world of politics right now—the stimulus package is headed to the Senate, where it may or may not have some of its stripped provisions reinstated (um…family planning, anyone?) and also may or may not face a shutout by the Republicans there, not to mention Tzipi Livni backing away from her promises to remove settlers and Iraq holding fairly peaceful elections. Whew!

However, I’d like to take a moment to savor the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. (One of my political gurus—the one I happen to live with—says she plans to never call it anything but the Lilly Ledbetter Act. The woman deserves that much!) I am, of course, thrilled that the legislation passed, and thrilled that, to put it less delicately, hardworking Americans aren’t going to be continually screwed based on the ridiculous and discriminatory whims of their bosses. I was also thrilled by a trend in how the votes went—because despite an otherwise predictable partisan split over this legislation, all of the women in the Senate, including four Republicans, voted yea. Given the awesome and utterly asinine showing of partisan lowballing that came with the House Republicans’ decision (after the stimulus package had been hung with tax cuts like a Hanukkah bush, of course) to take their toys and go home, this display by the Senate’s Republican women is pretty impressive.

It’s not like I now support everything these women want (although I have always, always had a soft spot for Maine’s Olympia Snowe, the woman who should have been John McCain’s knee-jerk female pick for a running mate). There’s still plenty left to disagree about. But I did feel a little flash of pride that the people out there supporting the “post-partisan” message President Obama embodies for so many—the idea that things are so messed up that maybe fixing them is more important than hitting each other over the head—were, by and large, women. (And Arlen Specter. But you get my point.)

There is so, so much work to do, and I don’t think hysterical liberals can be blamed for feeling like we need to get as much done at once as we can. (By the way, PLEASE call your senator and tell him or her to support the stimulus plan—with the family planning provisions reinstated!) In that spirit, a moment of applause for the Republican women of the Senate, who have, in their long and illustrious careers, probably wondered about their salaries more than we’d believe. They get this week’s Tav HaYosher (Ethical Seal).

And then, after a moment of applause, it’s back to rebuilding the U. S. of A.

–Mel Weiss

The Lilith Blog

February 2, 2009 by Modesty Blasé

The Tehillim Tipping Point

In the latest attempt to resolve the ‘shidduch crisis,’ women across the religious globe have been scuttling to each other’s homes to huddle and recite Tehillim (Psalms), entreating God’s kindness for a good shidduch [match] for all the single people in their community. In London, one matchmaking organization, Made in Heaven, offers regular classes for women on Shmiras Ha Loshon [not speaking slander] as a means of mystically helping single people.

Women are the corrections of a community: when disasters strike, the rabbis often blame the women for gossiping or immodest dress (gossiping while dressed immodestly is a double whammy). As if women don’t have enough to do, now they are responsible for the marital and spiritual well-being of a whole community and have been instructed to say Tehillim to avert further disasters. What was the Tehillim tipping point? How did these verses come to substitute serious learning and empowerment for women? Isn’t it strange that while women’s voices are accorded tremendous power to change the divinely ordained course of events, they have virtually no voice in the decision-making process of a religious community?

However, when it comes to shidduchim, a person needs more than Tehillim – they need yichus [status] – about the only thing that e-Bay doesn’t sell. Yichus is the delicate tissue paper and silk bows used to wrap up a very ordinary gift. Once the fancy packaging is stripped away, all you’ve got is the very ordinary, and often very disappointing, gift. A distinguished lineage and respectable breeding can make a difference to one’s social standing, and so yichus is touted by the matchmakers when the boy or girl in question doesn’t have very much to offer themselves. For example, the son of well-known Rosh Yeshiva has excellent yichus while the daughter of a Latvian convert to Judaism would have very little yichus.

Where serious yichus is at stake, marriages are often about forging dynasties, establishing power bases and consolidating the number of loyal followers. While many parents regard good yichus of their prospective son or daughter-in-law as a drawcard, it hides the very real failings of some people. Paralysed by their yichus, a young person living in the shadow of their ancestors’ achievements may never amount to much. While they may get the proverbial ‘foot through the front door,’ their accomplishments are often mimized precisely because of the head start granted by their yichus.

Occasionally, a lack of yichus can be compensated by other factors. For example, potential brides are also gauged by their beauty and despite all exhortations that a girl’s kindness, modest demeanour and homemaking skills are highly valued, the fact is that unless she is pretty and skinny, her chances of finding a ‘good boy’ are severely curtailed. Unless, of course, she has a rich father – in which case, she can eat as much as she wants.

Traditionally, young men were measured according to their learning prowess. I have always found it strange that the young women only willing to go out with boys who excel ‘in learning’ are actually unable to understand what these potential husbands are actually learning because the women are barred from Talmud study. They can of course continue to say Tehillim, but how sad that they must rely on other men for an evaluation of their potential spouse’s intellectual capacities.

The contemporary Ba’al Teshuvah [return to (religious) Judaism] movement has impacted on the traditional notions of yichus, given that many young Jews who become observant have actively chosen a life path that is radically different from their parents. The family reputation and lineage of a ba’al teshuvah, although there may have a smattering of rabbis from the shetetls of Eastern Europe, has been ravaged by assimilation and mothers who probably did not attend the mikvah. These blemishes continue to punish the struggling ba’alei teshuvah and often hinder their ability to marry into some of the most prestigious religious families.

However, one constant remains – the young pretty woman who becomes religious, and has a wealthy father, will always have less trouble finding a husband than her poorer, plumper sister.

–Modesty Blasé

Cross-posted to the Jerusalem Post blog.