Ima, what do you want for Mothers Day?

“Ima, what do you want for mothers day?”
(this piece is dedicated to who we mother and who mothers us?)

One of our strongest Jewish values is to be a mother. But not in the traditional sense of birthing or adopting a child.

We are charged as Jewish human beings to care for the orphan, the widow and the stranger. This is so paramount in understanding the responsibility of motherhood and the role each of us plays in this world and toward humanity. It creates a framework of who we want to be as a part of the Jewish people. These mandates or laws or commentaries are the most important values to uphold in our very vulnerable society.

These individuals are the ones in our world that we need to SEE, that we need to speak with, that we need to care for, that we need to feed, cloth and embrace.Of course, it may not be easy when we look around our own home and see those who need us. Can you imagine what HaShem sees when He looks around at his home (His world) and sees how many are in need.

He calls to each of us to mother each other. He calls to each of us to find that stranger because “we were once strangers in Egypt” to find that one who sits alone and invite them to our table. He invites us to open ourselves up to understand that we are all equal in his eyes.

These are the members of our society that we must mother.

Those of us who have been blessed to birth or adopt or call certain children our own, meaning the ones that we raise and shelter and cloth and feed, this is just one aspect of motherhood in this world.

I’m sure Mother Earth will tell us that there are many more Souls in our society to nurture and that need our mothering and that we too need to be mothered.

This Jewish value expands our understanding of what it is to mother one another. And as Mother’s Day is approaching, this is a conscious piece on how to open ourselves up to those who need us the most. Sometimes they live in our home with us, and sometimes they do not. Sometimes they are fed at our kitchen table and sometimes they are not. This Jewish value expands outside the home and creates an awareness about “the OTHER” and reminds us that a many times we are the OTHER.

When we truly see one another, we connect on a deeper level. That’s when an orphan becomes a child of our own. A stranger becomes a member of the family and is welcomed into our home and a widow no longer feels alone with the weight of the world on her/his shoulders.

So when our own kids ask us, “Ima, what do you want for mothers day? Let’s SEE who need mothering together.

(This piece is also a tribute to my mother, Chana Rachel Bat Blima whose table always expanded at every holiday and who has always lived this value to the fullest.)