by Carol Levithan, delivered at Minyan M'at

I was inspired last year by Gail Leibovitz who gave a version of her senior sermon here at the minyan. This is the 9th anniversary of my senior sermon on Parshat Va’yetzee at JTS.
When Benyamin called a few weeks ago, it was the one parashah he needed covered so I couldn’t refuse since I’d thought a good deal about it once upon a time. I also realized when I reread what I’d written 9 years ago that there is a strong relationship between some of the things I had to say about Vayetzee then and some of the things I said last year about Va’yishlach

Last year – Va’yishlach - I was prompted by Rachel’s death in childbirth to talk about the striking absence of miscarriage, infant mortality, and maternal death in childbirth in the Bible; presented some statistics – both ancient and modern - that spoke to how striking this absence is

Suggested that the Torah’s silence on this subject has a theological explanation – to quote myself - “Could the God whose omnipotence enables the barren woman to conceive really also be responsible for miscarriages, premature birth, infant or maternal mortality? A God who really controls all events – both wonderful and terrible – would be such a God; a God who opens up closed wombs but also one who empties the womb through miscarriage or takes the life of a mother like Rachel in childbirth. That would be the logical extension of the omnipotent God. But that would be too horrible.”

So there is the connection between this week’s parshah and next week’s. In the matter of the barren woman conceiving and bearing a child, we have God’s omnipotence manifesting itself in precisely the way we need an omnipotent God to intervene in human life. As Psalm 113 has it: Moshiv akeret habayit, em habanim s’mechah –
“God sets the childless woman among her household as a happy mother of children.”

And in Va’yetzee we have the example of both Rachel and Leah being barren and then being able to conceive as a result of God’s intervention:

Gen 29:31-
HEBREW
The Lord saw that Leah was unloved and he opened her womb; but Rachel was barren.

Gen 30:22 –
HEBREW
Now God remembered Rachel; God heeded her and opened her womb.

God cures not only Leah’s infertility and Rachel’s barrenness, but also Sarah’s, Rebecca’s, Hannah’s, Samson’s mother and others. In all these cases, God enables the woman to conceive a child with her husband and thereby demonstrates divine caring, commitment and omnipotence

So, just as striking as the absence in the Bible of miscarriage, infant mortality and maternal death in childbirth, is the frequency of infertility and is cure –
And while the Bible is silent on the subject of the perils of pregnancy, delivery and infancy, presumably because it would be too theologically threatening, there is an epidemic of infertility in the Bible and God’s capacity to effect a cure is really at the heart of Biblical theology
While it is unimaginable that God’s omnipotence could explain the catastrophic end of pregnancies, it is entirely reasonable to believe that this very omnipotence can explain the end of barrenness, especially when it involves maintaining the covenant through the birth of a child to a patriarch and the appropriate wife
There is, then, a kind of inverse theological relationship between Vayetzee where God’s omnipotence is on display and Vayishlach where Rachel’s death is not described as an “act of God”

When we turn from the Biblical perspective on these issues to the rabbis, we find a very different set of assumptions regarding both of these issues.

As I discussed last year with respect to Vayishlach, the rabbis do not ignore the issues of loss surrounding pregnancy. Unlike the Bible, the rabbis make a connection between such loss and God’s omnipotence. Just one example – Shabbat 32b – R. Nechemiah quoted in a braita as saying: As a punishment for a person’s unwarranted hatred, there will be a great deal of discord in his house, his wife will miscarry, and his sons and daughters will die young. And this is not the only example of the rabbinic sin-punishment equation regarding infant mortality, miscarriage and the like.

When we turn to the issue of infertility and God’s intervention to “open the womb”, we see another discrepancy between the Torah and the rabbis. The Torah isn’t at all silent on the subject of God’s role in conception – especially when it comes to important pregnancies such as that of the patriarchal line or a prophet such as Samuel or a hero such as Samson. However, the Torah makes no judgments about why women are barren.

Gen 21:1
HEBREW
“The Lord took note of Sarah as He had promised, and the Lord did for Satah as He had spoken. Sarah conceived and bore a son to Abraham….”

Judges 13:3
HEBREW
“An angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, ‘You are barren and have borne no children; but you shall conceive and bear a son.”

1 Samuel 1:19
HEBREW
“Elkanah knew his wife Hannah and the Lord remembered her.”


In Biblical theology, closing and opening the womb describe acts of God which are beyond human control or comprehension. God controls our reproductive ability.

In The Wake of the Goddesses, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, argues that God’s total control over conception represented a radical shift in religious ideas in the Ancient Near East. In ancient pagan religion, it was a mother goddess who asserted control over conception just as other gods and goddesses controlled their domains. But in the religion of the Israelites, the one God – and God alone – causes conception. There is no difference between powers that were once in the domain of male gods and those once attributed to goddesses; in the Israelite view all of nature is unified under the control of one God. Fertility is neither a male nor female prerogative and the cause of infertility is assigned to neither gender.

In her doctoral dissertation, Sing O Barren One, Mary Callaway, a Christian Bible scholar, refers to barrenness as “unexplained suffering” since there is no cause and effect relationship established in the stories of barren women. Even the most faithful and pious, like Hannah, cannot conceive until God intervenes.

In short, the Bible does not assign responsibility for infertility. God opens the closed womb..

When we turn to rabbinic literature, however, there are a number of sources that do assign responsibility. Just as we saw with the issues of maternal death, infant mortality and the like, some rabbinic sources make theological points when discussing infertility.

A midrash in Bereshit Rabbah (71:6) maintains that Rachel’s jealousy towards her sister Leah was due to Leah’s good deeds, reasoning that if Leah had not been righteous, she would not have borne children. The implication seems clear: Rachel’s infertility was due to her lack of righteousness. Of course, in terms of the Biblical text we have no reason to believe Leah was more righteous than Rachel.

In Genesis 30:1, Rachel desperate for children, pleads with Jacob – HEBREW
“Give me children or I will die!” Jacob responds in anger, asking her:
HEBREW
“Can I take the place of God, who has denied you fruit of the womb?”

In BR 71:7, the rabbis imagine the rest of this conversation, and have Jacob passing the blame for barrenness to his wife. According to the midrash, Jacob says: “From you he withheld it (i.e. a child), but not from me,” while in the Biblical text Jacob only says that God has denied Rachel fruit of the womb – HEBREW; he does not blame Rachel for their failure to conceive. He simply asserts God’s control in this area.

As the rabbis imaginatively continue the conversation, Rachel reminds Jacob that Isaac had prayed for a child on Rebecca’s behalf and Jacob replies that Isaac had no children when he prayed for his wife, whereas he, Jacob, has already fathered two sons by Leah. But, asks Rachel, didn’t Abraham pray on Sarah’s behalf even though he already had a song by Hagar? Jacob’s response is a challenge: “Can you do what my grandmother did?” And of course Rachel does just what Sarah did – she sends her handmaiden, Bilhah, into Jacob to conceive a surrogate child for her.

The rabbis create this dialogue as a bridge beteen Rachel and Jacob’s brief exchange in verses 1 and 2 and Rachel’s decision in verse 3 to send Bilhah to her husband. But in this rabbinic literary construct blame is placed on Rachel for the couple’s infertility. The rabbis imagine that Jacob’s response to his wife’s pain would be to say that the cause of their infertility certainly can’t be him and to point the finger of blame at his wife.

Another midrash offers a reason that suggests quite powerfully that the sages did not comprehend the suffering that infertility can cause. In Bereshit Rabbah 45:4 the rabbis ask why the matriarchs are barren. R. Levi answers that God yearns for their prayers and supplications; R. Azariah suggests that they are barren so that in spite of their beauty – which they might use to attract other men – these wives have to stay faithful to their husbands to have any hope of bearing children; and, finally, R. Huna, R. Idi and R. Abin explain barrenness this way: “So that they husbands might derive pleasure from them, for when a woman is with child she is disfigured and lacks grace. Thus the whole 90 years that Sarah did not bear she was like a bride in her canopy.”

It turns out that the Bible is more in touch with the pain of infertility than the rabbis.
The rabbis see barrenness not as proof of divine providence but as a divine judgment or an incentive for women to turn to prayer or as a way of preserving the dependence of wives on their husbands or even as a way of preserving their girlish figures. The Bible, however, places no blame on barren women nor does it trivialize their plight or, has v’halilah, suggest that barrenness keeps men interested.

Frymer-Kensky argues that in general, the picture of women we derive from a close reading of biblical texts is dramatically different than what our religious and cultural traditions have led us to believe the Bible says. She maintains that there is nothing particularly “feminine” about the way in which the Bible portrays women: there is no “women’s toolkit” stocked with female strategems; there are no characteristics of human behavior that are particularly feminine or masculine in biblical tales. A good example of what Frymer-Kensky calls the “gender-blindness of the biblical view of human nature” is the Bible’s understanding of barrenness as a problem soluble only by God. In the Bible infertility is not a punishment for wrongdoing or a way of keeping women desirable or a method by which God can count on heartfelt prayers from the womenfolk. The reasons for infertility are known only to God and the blessing of children comes only from God; these reasons cannot be discerned by human. But as Frymer-Kensky concludes, Jewish tradition altered this gender-free concept of humanity:
“These stories about women were reinterpreted, and these later reinterpretations, masquerading as the biblical message, were used to support sexist ideology and practice. The stories themselves remained to be rediscovered by an age that could understand and appreciate the biblical metaphysics of gender unity.”

To sum up…while the Torah is inconsistent theologically – attributing conception to God’s omnipotence while avoiding almost altogether the difficult subjects of miscarriage and other complications of pregnancy, rather than drawing the logical conclusion that God’s omnipotence controls all of this, the rabbis are theologically consistent: to our dismay, they tend to blame humans for the catastrophic experiences surrounding conception and childbirth.

In my senior sermon, after contrasting the Biblical and rabbinic views of infertility, I ended with a caution against relying on the rabbis as our only guides in exploring the text. However, what I wanted to say then – and was advised to avoid – is that it is impossible to ignore the fact that Hazal’s attitudes towards women reflect their sociological milieu, a milieu from which not only the midrash emerged; it was the milieu that produced the halakhah as well. While the tradition accords a different level of authority to the halakhah, it seems forced and unnatural to draw a boundary between rabbinic exegesis of the text and rabbinic law and say that one is fraught with cultural baggage and the other is neutral and without bias. If the rabbis thought that women were infertile so they would retain their figures and please their husbands, or that their lack of piety could result in their barrenness, what does that suggest about the underpinnings of the halakhic system with regard to women?

This is certainly not an argument for dispensing with the halakhah but it is to suggest some reflection about the way in which attitudes expressed in the aggadic parts of the tradition may be built into the superstructure of Jewish law and to reveal how those imbedded attitudes affect the halakhic system.. As the Orthodox feminists are fond of saying, “Where there’s a rabbinic will, there’s a halakhic way,” thus summing up succinctly the causal relationship between rabbinic attitudes and Jewish law both in ancient times and in our own. While within the Conservative movement there has been enormous change in the role of women since the 1950’s, the piecemeal approach to investing women with the full range of religious prerogatives reflects a failure to go to the heart of the issue: which is that the rabbis of the Talmud and codes, no less than the rabbis of the midrash (and in many cases they are the same sages) were of the opinion – to use Tikva Frymer Kensky’s wonderful phrase – that there is, in fact, a women’s toolkit and that this toolkit doesn’t include the sharpest tools in the shed! For gender-blind texts that presume no such toolkit we are blessed indeed to have the Biblical text, however theologically inconsistent!

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