Bigger than me

When my 4-year-old daughter is in a particularly affectionate mood, she likes to remind us of something.

“I chose you and I chose Daddy and I chose Rosie and I chose Momo,” she will tell us. 

What she is referring to is rooted in Rabbeinu Bachya’s interpretation of a commandment in Devarim:

All creatures were created according to their own desire and will. At the beginning of Creation, the Holy One, blessed be He, made known to them all the circumstances of their lives and everything that would happen to them. He told them how long they would live and how they would die. He also told them how they would be sustained, whether with ease or hardship, through their own efforts or through the support of others.

So our Sages taught that all the works of Creation were created with their consent and according to their wishes… They all willingly accepted what lay ahead.

This is something I learned in school as a child, and it gave me a lot of chizuk (encouragement) when things were tougher. When I had my own daughter, I wanted her to feel that agency and commitment. 

We don’t always appreciate how mysterious childbirth was in ancient, and even early modern, time periods. With little medical technology and no comprehension of the microscopic, fertility, conception, gestation, and delivery were fraught and inexplicable. Old wives’ tales and wise women’s techniques formed around this unfathomability. 

And that is why, too, much of ancient Jewish wisdom scrutinizes these topics, trying to find answers to the unanswerable. Many of these teachings are profoundly meaningful, especially when read in context; they are stories of the intractable desire to continue a legacy, human persistence and pain, parents’ hopes and dreams for their children, and — perhaps above all — a belief that God lives in the process from start to end.

I find so much of that in this parasha, where the matriarch Rivkah becomes pregnant and is overcome by the movement within her. She asks a question that can be understood any number of ways: “lama zeh anokhi — [literally, why is this me]?”

The commentaries make much of her words and choices here. Remember that Rivkah has finally become pregnant after years of infertility and is suddenly beset by this strange restlessness inside her. Some sages understand this as her inquiring of other women whether this was normal of their pregnancies; any woman who has been pregnant can likely understand that experience. Some opine that she was bemoaning the pregnancy because of the discomfort, another unfortunately relatable experience for so many women who suffer painful and miserable pregnancies — and feel even guiltier, often, when this was a pregnancy they wanted so desperately.

Others, though, see it as an existential question, translating her words as why do I exist?

The Midrash Aggadah sees it as reflective of the struggle of worlds: “Esau said to Jacob, ‘Let’s divide the world.’ Jacob said to him, ‘You take this world, and I will take the world to come.’ And likewise did Esau say to Jacob, ‘You take the world to come and I will take this world.’” Similarly, some understand it as the fundamental struggle: good against evil. 

I had two really hard pregnancies. Both times, I developed hyperthyroidism and anemia and, once the second trimester began, started to get nauseous (and stayed that way). I was high-risk and visited doctors again and again and again. When I was induced, both times, the labor was very fast — a couple of hours with my first and six hours with my second — which may sound like a dream but was terrifying. 

When I read Rivkah’s experience, I feel an immediate kinship with her. Pregnancy, for me, was intensely existential; I was beset by anxiety but also by a strange burning energy that compelled me to understand what things meant on a spiritual level. For both of my pregnancies, I felt closer to God than I ever had before, in possession of a secret knowledge that connected me to every generation that came before me. Why do I exist? What am I for? What is all of this for?

And Rivkah doesn’t just ask the questions. She goes out in search of answers: VaTelech LiDrosh. When the regular P’shat (simple) answers were no longer sufficient, she pursued Midrash. “She went to investigate the very nature of God’s existence,” wrote Kli Yakar on these words. 

When I was pregnant the first time, I finally understood what a pregnant silence really meant. It means a silence that is bigger than silence. And I understood that is what pregnancy is, too: a state that made me bigger than me. It was a state of Midrash — of questions that don’t truly have answers, of communion with God and angels, of searching and wanting and threading together the unthreadable motion of life.