A Time for Identifying with my Biblical Namesake
My Hebrew name, Chana (Hannah) was announced when my dad received an aliyah to the Torah on the Shabbat following my birth. In high school, reading about my biblical namesake in the Book of Samuel I, a powerfully dramatic scene was conveyed to me. Some 15 years later, I identified with her “anguish and distress” (Samuel I, 1: 15-16). Perceived as “inebriated,” she plead for a son, promising to relinquish him to serve God, if granted to her.
Wish granted! Promise honored. She sacrificed. By association, recalling God asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac (Genesis 22:1-19). Demand withdrawn upon Abraham demonstrating willingness to comply.
Chana, consumed with helplessness in prayer as she asks to be blessed with a child, commits to sacrificing her desired child to a life of service, is encountered in the liturgy on the first day of Rosh Hashana. The chronologically earlier story, when Abraham prepares to sacrifice his son is read the second day.
On Rosh Hashana, equated with recreating the world, passionate prayer by a woman to bring new life to the world is given precedence. The next day we read how God tests a father. Leading Isaac to the sacrificial site, did Abraham believe the explanation he conveyed to his son? God would provide the sacrifice? With Rosh Hashana prayers relating to God as compassionate, we ask forgiveness and that we be sealed in the new year’s Book of Life.
Personifying attributes of God engenders personified discourse. Does this facilitate excusing human shortcomings or exclude them from God’s image?
Questions. Texts. Subtexts.
Chana personalized, taps into memories of my self-inflicted judgement confronting infertility. Anguish, my femininity denied me, in my mind. Typing the words, I choke back tears. Labeled “barren,” though chided by some for accepting this as accurate. Yet technically, it does apply.
The release of tears imminent, my fingers pause above the keyboard, charged to clench fists, determined that my tears retreat to their ducts.
Guilt. Unable to give my ex-husband what we wanted, nor a grandchild to my parents.
Fertility treatment stress exacerbated by accusations from my ex-husband’s parents. Impotently, if not complicitly, he failed to shield me from them. They said I knew, not disclosing my infertility before marrying. Feeling worthless. Impotent. Wondering if motherhood would ever be part of my identity. (Spoiler: it wouldn’t, but I’m blessed with five granddaughters by extension.)
My ex-in-laws proposed fertility treatments be my fulltime job. I declined. Their regard for my professional endeavors, enmeshed in sociopolitical issues was cynical. They “knew” I mistakenly chose studying humanities and social sciences over “practical degrees.” I continued working, lest I be reduced, years later to “barren, failed fertility treatment survivor.”
My kind boss believed someday he’d tell my children what I endured to have them – conventional treatments, helpless submission to alternative medicine: an experiment with growth hormones, a homeopathic grape diet including vile nettle tea for two weeks, egg donation IVF treatments, an ectopic pregnancy, another miscarriage. Registering to adopt despite my ex-in-laws’ objections echoed by their son, because they couldn’t love an adopted grandchild like their daughter’s biological children.
Against engulfing waves, gasping, I thrashed to stay afloat.
From overseas, my parents assured me parenting is not birthing but raising a child.
Lingering grieving perpetually escapes in voices I release, or strangle and curb, hardly identifiable as such in evolving episodes of unrelated stories – personal and beyond the personal, but inseparable from my identity. Mostly, I’m unlike Chana. Disqualified for judging Abraham.
God answered Chana’s plea. Attentive, compassionate, God rewarded her heartfelt prayer. Superficially suggesting faith yields answered prayers.
Infertility shouldn’t dispel faith. Perhaps revelation of hidden meaning is the reward of prayer. Maybe Abraham’s conviction, shared with his son, that God would provide the sacrifice is a lesson in considering the power of self-fulfilling prophecy – if only by potential, or what to tell children under terrifying circumstances.
Slipping into prayer for the tangible and explicit – for a way towards a workable synthesis for continued commitment to a Jewish state that actively complies with democratic principles.
Despite elements of Israel’s Jewish population arguing otherwise, Avrum Burg in a recent piece reassured me that our sources offer foundations for a democratic state cemented in Jewish values, dictating that Judaism must dissolve hierarchy, not sanctify it, nor claim superiority: “One law shall there be for you and for the stranger who dwells among you, an everlasting statute for your generations; as you are, so shall the stranger be before the Lord” (Numbers 15:15).
A people loving itself need not deprecate the value of others.
Harriet Gimpel – September 26, 2026
