The Jewish Mother: A Theology

By Meir Soloveichik

A new look at matrilineal descent.

Christianity is therefore not a familial association; members of the Church are bound together by their professed faith. As the influential Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas put it, “family is not at the core of our identity as Christians.”¹² After all, a Christian couple’s children are, prior to baptism and belief, not Christians at all, and must be converted to the faith.

Classical Judaism, however, insists that man is a divinely, and intentionally, created composite of spirit and body, and therefore to deny the significance of natural familial kinship is to deny a part of ourselves. Nothing illustrates this more than the fact that God sought in Abraham not only the father of a faith but of a family. “By electing the seed of Abraham,” Wyschogrod notes, “God creates a people that is in his service in the totality of its human being and not just in its moral and spiritual existence. The domain of the family, the most fundamental and intimate human association, is thereby sanctified.”¹³ While the Church contended that the “new Israel was open to anyone who embraced the message of the Church,” Jews maintained that membership in Israel is bestowed by birth, because “God chose to embrace a people in the fullness of humanity,” and “this had to include the bodyness of this people alongside its national soul.” In the election of Israel we truly see that “the divine does not destroy the natural, but confirms it by placing it in its service.”¹⁴

Had God asked Abraham to found only a faith, and not a faithful family; had God chosen as his messengers to humanity a set of individuals who had no natural bond to one another, finding kinship only in their shared spiritual aspirations, then the message would have been that man must seek the spiritual by denying the physical aspects of his life. By choosing a family, God illustrates that the most basic instincts of man are not a profane shell that must be discarded by the spirit. They are, rather, the foundations of our spiritual existence.

The election of Abraham thus bespeaks Judaism’s affirmation of familial bonds. Without question, no familial bond is stronger than that between a mother and her child. Inasmuch as the natural bonds of family are paradigmatic of the spiritual affinity among Jews, the significance of motherhood in Judaism takes on a special role. That this is the case is evident throughout the Hebrew Bible.

Motherhood first makes its appearance on the biblical scene by serving as the source of the first woman’s name. As told in Genesis: “The man called his wife’s name Eve (Hava) because she was the mother of all living things (em kol hai).”¹⁵ Though the woman’s name is integrally associated with motherhood, the name of the first man, Adam, is in no way connected to his serving as the progenitor of humanity. As Rabbi Soloveitchik has pointed out, Adam and Eve found themselves in a Hobbesian state of nature, one devoid of moral responsibilities and covenantal commitments. In such an environment, man is able to father children without taking responsibility for them, indeed without even knowing about them. Woman, on the other hand, is physically linked to any child she bears:

In the natural community, the woman is more concerned with motherhood than the man with fatherhood. Motherhood, in contrast to fatherhood, bespeaks a long-enduring peculiar state of body and mind. The nine months of pregnancy, with all its attendant biological and psychological changes, the birth of the child with pain and suffering, the nursing of the baby and, later, the caretaking of and attending to the youngster—all form part of the motherhood experience.... Physically, fatherhood implies nothing tangible and memorable. The male, bodily and mentally, does not experience his fatherhood.¹⁶

As a result, the mother in nature plays the central parental role. For this reason, in the Bible it is only after the formation of a divine covenant that there emerges a man whose very identity implies fatherhood: Abraham, the “father of many nations” (av hamon goyim).¹⁷ At this point, fatherhood is endowed with tangible duties and spiritual responsibilities. Though not naturally bound to a child, the father Abraham accepts upon himself the responsibilities for transmitting ethical principles to the generations of the future: “For I know him,” God testifies about Abraham, “that he will command his children and his household after him, to perform righteousness and justice.”¹⁸

Here we see the distinction that the Bible draws between the ideal roles of mother and father. Whereas the mother is charged with the duty of giving the child its most basic spiritual and physical reality, its very substance of life, fathers are depicted as teachers, commanders, and discipliners—that is, providers of normative content. From its very beginning, the Bible paints diverse pictures of how mothers and fathers relate to their children, and the contrast continues throughout. The archetypal scriptural father loves his child, of course, but this love often manifests itself as educational discipline, as is stated in Deuteronomy: “For the Eternal your God disciplines you just as a man disciplines his son.”¹⁹ The biblical archetype of the father, Rabbi Soloveitchik argues, “is basically a teacher… he gives advice, he offers opportunities, he blazes the trail for his offspring,” yet “he expects the children to learn to act on their own, to utilize the counsel they are given gratuitously, to take advantage of the opportunities and finally to attain complete independence and maturity.”²⁰

The mother, on the other hand, will always see her child, no matter how old he may be, as the baby she bore. According to tradition, when the book of Proverbs describes a king reprimanded by his mother, it refers to Batsheva’s reproof of her son Solomon after he married the pagan daughter of Pharaoh: “What, my son? And what, child of my womb?”²¹ No matter how old a child may be, Rabbi Soloveitchik observes, for the mother, “the image of the baby, the memory of an infant held in her arms, the picture of herself playing, laughing, embracing, nursing, cleaning, and so forth, never vanishes. She always looks upon her child as upon a baby who needs her help and company, and whom she has to protect and shield.”²² He continues:

The mother can never forget the biological fact that her child was once a part of her, that she gave him her blood and that she brought him into the world with suffering and pain. When she says “my baby,” she means to say: “Once we were one body. I gave you life. We together were involved in the same organic processes.”²³

The Bible employs these two archetypes in order to describe the ways that God relates to the Jewish people. God is, on the one hand, the father who expresses his love by educating us, teaching us to mature, disciplining us “as a man disciplines his son.”²⁴ But God is also the mother, one who sees her sons and daughters as the children they once were. The Psalmist says: “Surely I have stilled and quieted myself, like a weaned child beside his mother; my soul within me is like a weaned child. Let Israel wait for the Eternal from henceforth and forever.”²⁵ It is because of God’s maternal relationship with Israel, Isaiah emphasizes, that the Jewish people will never be abandoned: “Can a woman forget her child, refrain from having mercy on the son of her womb?” In Rabbi Soloveitchik’s view, while the love of a father, as depicted in the Bible, “consists in helping the child to free himself from paternal authority, in moving away from him,” the love of a mother “expresses itself in steady intensification of her emotional attachment, in surging toward her child.”²⁶

This view of the distinctive power of motherhood finds further expression in the rabbinic literature. In the Talmud and Midrash, the rabbis expanded on the biblical conception of mothers as more naturally inclined to bestow a nurturing love upon their children. The women of Israel are portrayed as the saviors of Jewish continuity, who desired to have children when their husbands were reluctant to do so:

“And there went a man from the house of Levi.” Did Amram, the man referred to in the verse, go anywhere? No, nowhere—so taught R. Judah bar Zevina, but rather Amram went and acted upon his daughter’s advice. He, as is well known, was the most eminent man of his generation. Aware that Pharaoh had decreed, “Every son that is born you shall cast in the river,” he said: “We labor in vain,” and was the first to divorce his wife. At that, all the others divorced their wives. Then his daughter said to him, “Father, your decree is more cruel than Pharaoh’s. For Pharaoh has decreed only against the males, while you decree against both males and females. Pharaoh decreed only concerning this world, while you decree concerning both this world and the world to come. Now, since Pharaoh is a wicked man, there is doubt whether his decree will or will not be fulfilled; but since you are a righteous man, your decree is sure to be fulfilled.” At once he went and took back his wife, and so did all the others.²⁷

While Amram is one of the leading Jews of his generation, it takes a woman, his daughter, to recognize and impress upon him the danger to Jewish continuity that is implicit in his reaction to Pharaoh’s decree. Similarly, the rabbis said that “Israel was redeemed from Egypt on account of the righteous women of that generation,” since they seduced their husbands when the latter were unwilling to have children:

When they went to draw water, the Holy One for their sake caused so many small fish to be scooped up into their pitchers that only half of what they drew up was water and the other half fish. They would then heat two pots, one with hot water and the other with fish, both of which they brought to their husbands in the field. There the women washed their husbands, anointed them, fed them, and gave them to drink. There, lying secluded between mounds in the fields, they responded to their men.²⁸

It is the woman’s natural maternal inclination that, for the rabbis, ensured the continuity of the Jewish people. In the picture painted by the midrash, the Jewish mother emerges as savior of the Jewish family. Here, too, we see the fundamental connection that the sages drew between motherhood and Jewish continuity. Jewish women are depicted as keepers of the most basic trust, that of preserving and continuing Jewish life from one generation to the next.