opinion
Rabbi Jessica Fisher
I recently attended a bris in my
community where the mohel
announced to the new parents
and the whole room, “Raising this
child is the most important and
impactful thing you will ever do.”
These words were offered to anchor the already
exhausted and overwhelmed couple in the sanctity
of the job they are embarking upon; the holiness of
shaping a person into adulthood; the pride in doing
something meaningful and lasting.

At the same time, these are the sentiments that
form the foundation of parents’ guilt when they have
to work or when they choose to be with friends and
not their children. They create the basis of self-re-
crimination when a child struggles and the parent
is made to feel they are to blame. They foment
anxiety over not enjoying aspects of parenthood or
feeling lonely or isolated in the endless exhaustion
of rearing children.

These are also the words that shame those of us
who have no children.

The year I turned 30, I was not on any identifiable
path to parenthood. I was, however, in rabbinical
school and deeply committed to the ways I could
and would serve the Jewish people as a rabbi. Until
rabbinical school, I experienced my own private grief
about not having a partner or kids, but no one had
ever imposed those feelings on me or pressured me
on my timeline.

As part of a counseling course in rabbinical school,
I was assigned a reading where I learned that 13.9%
of married women ages 30-34 experience infertility
(a percentage that only increases after 35). Thirty
years later, the author who shared this data did so
again at an all-school gathering, reminding us that
women pursuing education were largely responsible
for the decline in Jewish population, since the ideal
age for a woman to get pregnant is 22. He added, in
essence, “Don’t come crying to me when you finish
your education and realize you missed your window.”
I was shocked by his callousness and also by
the overt implication that delaying parenthood for
the sake of education was damaging to the Jewish
people — an assertion, overt and implied, reached
by many Jewish social scientists, as others have
14 FEBRUARY 2, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
pointed out. Apparently, nothing I could do as a rabbi
would ever have the same impact on Jewish people-
hood and the Jewish future as producing babies
above “replacement level.”
While the presentation surprised me, the idea
that the ideal role of anyone with a uterus is to bear
children is embedded in our scripture and liturgy.

Even the way many of us have chosen to add women
into the daily amidah prayer to make it more egalitar-
ian attests to this role: Three times a day we chant,
“magen Avraham u’foked Sarah,” that God is the
one who shields Abraham and remembers Sarah.

This line about remembering Sarah refers to the
moment when God undid Sarah’s barrenness, giving
her a child (Genesis 21:1). Every time we recite these
prayers we are reifying the idea that a woman’s
relationship with God is directly linked to her fertility.

According to the medieval sage Maimonides,
“Whoever adds even one Jewish soul it is consid-
ered as creating an entire world.” How many times
do I have to sit on a beit din, or rabbinical court,
before the number of conversions I witness adds up
to a child? How many weddings and b’nei mitzvah
and tot Shabbats and hospital visits and adult educa-
tion classes? This is math I should not have to do as
a rabbi or as a woman. It is not math we should ask
of anyone.

I know I am not alone among my peers in express-
ing frustration around such rhetoric. If we truly
believe that a person’s value is derived from being
created b’tzelem elohim, in the image of the Divine,
then we need to demonstrate this in the ways we
speak and teach about parenthood and fertility,
celebrating the role and value of an individual within
a community with no correlation to the number of
children they raise, how they parent, or how those
children connect to Judaism.

While there are plenty of sources in Jewish liter-
ature and a range of sociological data that offer all
kinds of reasons that Jews should “be fruitful and
multiply” — often expressed with urgency after the
devastation of the Holocaust — the Torah, our most
ancient and sacred text, also presents a model for
what it means to be a person without a child who
makes a tremendous impact on the Jewish future.

According to the most straightforward reading of
the Torah, Miriam, the daughter of Yocheved, sister
of Aaron and Moses, does not marry and does not
bear children. And yet, Miriam played a crucial role in
ensuring the possibility of a Jewish future. She was
the sister who watched over Moses as he floated in
a basket, the girl who connected Moses’ adoptive
mother with his birth mother and the prophet who
led the women in joyous dancing when the Israelites
finally attained freedom.

In a recent conversation, Rabbi Rachel Zerin
of Beth El Temple in West Hartford, Connecticut,
pointed out that what is powerful about Miriam is that
she appears content with her life. Unlike most of the
women we encounter in the Hebrew Bible who do
not have children, we never see Miriam praying for a
child; she is never described as barren or unfulfilled
and yet she is instrumental in securing the Israelites’
— our — freedom.

Through this lens, we can understand that the
Torah offers us many models of a relationship
to parenthood: Some of us may yearn for it and
ultimately find joy in it, some of us may experience
ambivalence around bringing children into the world,
some of us may encounter endless obstacles to
conceive or adopt, some of us may struggle with
parenting the children we have, some of us may not
want to be parents at all and some of us may experi-
ence all of these at different times.

Like Miriam who fearlessly added her voice to the
public conversation, we, too, can add more voices
to the conversation about Jewish continuity that
counteract the relentless messaging that raising
children into Jewish adulthood is the most conse-
quential thing we might do.

Yes, parenting can be miraculous and beautiful,
something we should continue to celebrate. But we
each have so many gifts to offer the Jewish people —
our communities just need to create space for all of
us to contribute in a broad variety of ways, by making
fewer assumptions and speaking about parenthood
with more nuance, expansiveness and compassion. ■
Jessica Fisher serves as a rabbi at Beth El
Synagogue Center in New Rochelle, New York.

mattjeacock/Getty images
I Am a Single Rabbi Without Children.

I Shouldn’t Be Made to Feel I Am Not
‘Doing My Part’