Introduction

“Despair, bliss, despair, bliss. And it’s only Tuesday. It’s only 11 in the morning. Despair again. Bliss again.”

—MERLE FELD1

Everything is terrible. Nothing can possibly ever be right. I gave my son Yonatan more tomatoes, but his brother Shir wants more tomatoes, too! Even though he has tomatoes on his plate! Shir is howling, hysterical: He needs more tomatoes! He doesn’t want these! Oh no! He wants those! He wants cottage cheese, but wait, actually, no, he doesn’t!

I’m exasperated, I’m annoyed, I’m irritated. Just an hour ago Shir had been so sweet and charming during his annual physical. He was delighted to tell his doctor that he had just turned three, that he could jump up and down, that he was wearing big-boy underpants now. He gamely weathered the eye exam, was brave about the otoscope even though it hurt his ear and even braver when the doc needed to check the health of his testes, even though he really didn’t like that. Regardless, he obediently did all the things asked of him, was gleeful in picking out his Mickey Mouse sticker, cheerful and patient when we had to wait on the nurse for something.

Now it’s dinnertime, and I’m holding what is ostensibly the same child, but he’s beside himself, crying, screaming, demon-possessed. He makes a move to throw his plate on the ground, and when I manage to intercept him, he gets even more frenzied. Oh, come on, I think to myself, where did that adorable, engaging, puppy-like kid go? Why won’t you just … chill out? But then I realize that he’s probably so upset now precisely because he was so calm earlier. It was hard to get poked and prodded, and though he had held it together there, maybe he needs to fall apart now.

As soon as this thought hits me, I am flooded by that feeling—the same one I’ve been experiencing on a regular basis for six years, since Yonatan was born. It’s a thick compassion, a sense of being stretched to my limit and finding, against all odds, more love available. It’s the feeling that keeps me going through the exhausting nights and willful disregard for our rules and basic respect; it’s the feeling that helps me interpret the pouncing on my head and toppling me backward as joyful and fun; it’s the feeling that allows me to read Captain Underpants or Moo Baa La La La another time, and another time, and another time after that. It’s the feeling that enables me to see my kids as the fragile, vulnerable, resilient, exquisite little creatures that they are. It’s a feeling that doesn’t come from within me as much as flows through me, from someplace else.

Part of me wants Shir to just stop and calm down and let me eat my dinner like the civilized human being I used to be (before kids). But this little boy of mine is unnerved by a hard afternoon and wants some comfort as he expresses this. And at that moment, the most important thing for me is to get that feeling—the sweetness, the grace—to him. To be the conduit that lets it pour onto him, into him, through him.

So I hold him, and I pet him, and I whisper into his ear that it’s going to be OK, and that he can cry until he doesn’t need to anymore. And once I’m able to offer him tenderness—after first rediscovering the well of love in myself—it doesn’t take him very long to calm down. Not very long at all.

*   *   *

My mother always said that she never believed in God until she had kids. Something about my brother and I coming into being—from sex into clumpy cells, and then somehow into little creatures that emerged from within her with noses, ear canals, and personality quirks—changed everything about how she understood the world to work. She never told me, really, what had happened for her, but if I had to guess, I’d imagine words like miracle, impossibility, and soul would be involved.

Obviously, not everybody has the same experience, but it does seem to be the case for a lot of us that becoming a parent tends to rearrange our perception of the world and ourselves in ways that are both easy to articulate and impossible to name.

Some of that transformation is physical, of course, with fatigue and perhaps stretch marks and how we think about living in bodies and human reproduction and what it means that there’s now a whole new person here who has skin and hair that grows and who poops and all the rest of it. Some of it’s logistical—life as we once knew it is now inexorably different, and that has implications for how we think about our time, our relationships, our careers, our pocketbooks, and all the identity questions that go with these things. Much of it is emotional, from a powerful, often overwhelming new understanding of love, to extreme tests of our patience, our compassion, and our ability to really see another person and their needs.

For many of us, becoming a parent can reboot our experiences of spirituality—or show us, for the first time, where our spirituality is installed. Certainly that was true for my mother, and it was true for me as well, though in a different way. When Yonatan was born, I was a thirty-four-year-old rabbi who had spent a lot of time chasing, and sometimes finding, transcendent experiences. And even so, my son threw my understanding of God, prayer, and practice utterly against the wall. Things look very different over here, on the other side of three children and so many long hours of care.

It’s been a long, strange road. I didn’t grow up religiously observant, or particularly interested in my tradition, faith, or any of that stuff. My family went to services a couple of times a year and held Passover seders, but that was about it; my bat mitzvah was much more of a social event than a holy coming-of-age ritual. I became interested in philosophy in high school, which led, somehow, to a college major in comparative religion, with a focus on early Christianity. I was drawn to the big questions, the meaning of life stuff—though I was pretty sure there weren’t any easy answers.

When my mother died of cancer my junior year, we observed Jewish practices for grief and mourning for the same reasons that so many people turn to their tradition at major life events. I wouldn’t say it was a deliberate or thoughtful choice; it was more like, this is just how you do a funeral, of course you invite people into the house of mourning afterward, it’s just what you do. As part of that, I decided to go to synagogue once a week to say the Mourner’s Kaddish—it’s customary for a child to say the Kaddish for a parent three times a day for almost a year, but going once a week was about my limit. Little by little, though, over a year of services, things started to shift. I started to enjoy attending services, singing the prayers. I wasn’t quite sure why, but I began to look forward to Friday evenings.

I realized that my academic study of religious ritual and thought actually gave me a whole new set of tools with which to understand the Jewish prayerbook—to see how the liturgy was designed to carry people on a certain kind of journey, with peak and less peak moments and a means of opening and closing the experience.

At the same time, in grief, I was torn open, more open than I’d ever been. Weird stuff started happening—things that might be best described as “mystical experiences,” not that I called them that at the time. I’d have moments, usually when I was alone, when I’d find my mind quiet, feeling suddenly both focused and open, and like the lines between me and everything else maybe weren’t as defined as they had been. Or I’d feel a powerful energy around me, pouring through me, suffusing me. They were strange encounters that I didn’t know how to make sense of, so I went looking for language to help me understand them. For the first time, I was willing to consider the possibility that all of my academic, philosophical questioning might, in fact, be awfully personal.

After college I moved to San Francisco, and eventually found myself in a synagogue where the rabbi—Alan Lew was his name—said startling, eye-opening things, things that made a lot of sense to me. He talked about how the stories in the Torah were actually metaphors that could illuminate the messy, fragile gorgeousness of our humanity. He claimed that Judaism was a series of intentional gestures aimed at pushing us to become softer, kinder, more gentle, more aware of the sacred, more in tune with the divine and ourselves. I learned that this faith tradition could enable us to grow into people who lived out empathy and service. I was hooked.

After a few years of intensive study with Rabbi Lew, the still, small voice of my intuition—which, these days, I consider the voice of the divine—started making noise about rabbinical school. The prospect was preposterous, but the little voice got louder and louder until I finally gave in to it and packed myself off for five years of study, mostly in Los Angeles.

Part of rabbinical school involves a year in Jerusalem, though, so we can make our Hebrew less embarrassing and learn some good Torah. During that year I found a dance party that I really liked, called the Boogie. It’s a funky, unpretentious affair, with eclectic world music and a down-to-earth hippie vibe. People dance like they’re alone in their living rooms. It’s joyous. One night in January, a cute boy with a shaggy beard and a great smile made eye contact with me. We danced next to each other for a bit, and then he introduced himself. His name was Nir, he was a graduate student. Unlike a lot of secular Israelis, he didn’t find the fact that I was studying to be a rabbi off-putting or bizarre, despite the fact that lady rabbis are not very common in Israel, where ultra-Orthodox ideas about Judaism dominate the public discourse. Nir just wanted my number.

That was ten years, three-ish weddings, and three kids ago. (Between the civil elopement for visa purposes, the party in Israel with his family, and the California wedding that bound us according to Jewish law, we have nuptials pretty well covered.) Now we live in the Chicago area with our kids; Yonatan, at the time of this writing, is a sweetheart of a kindergartner missing a couple of teeth, frequently lost in the rich folds of his imagination. Shir was almost two years old when I started this book and just three when I finished; he’s an exuberant, effusive little trickster, a wayward forest gnome. Nomi was born after this manuscript went into production, too late to be included in any of its stories, barely on time for a mention here but already lighting up our home. I can’t believe my good luck, that these people are part of my life, that I get to love all of them as my family, and to learn from all of them as the greatest teachers that I have in my life—when I’m able to actually hear what they’re telling me. This, too, is so much of the work.

*   *   *

Somewhere in my first year or two of parenthood, it dawned on me—through the haze of fatigue, laundry, diapers, and tantrums (Yonatan’s and mine both)—that I actually had access to a treasure trove of wisdom that could help me do the exhausting, frustrating, challenging work of loving and raising my kid. It took me a while to realize it, though, because how I was changing as a mom seemed to be taking me away from my tradition’s ideas about what spiritual practice is supposed to be. It had been panic-inducing for some time there, honestly, feeling like I was on a boat that was drifting, slowly, from the island on which I’d made my home for almost fifteen years.

And yet, when I looked more closely, I realized that the treasures that had sustained me for so long could nourish me through this new, hard, bewildering thing. In fact, the Jewish tradition (as well as other religious traditions that I’d studied, even if I didn’t live as intimately with them) can actually illiminate the work of parenting—the love, the drudgery, the exasperation, all of it.

This fact isn’t necessarily intuitive, though, because, let’s face it, for thousands of years, books on Jewish law and lore were written by men, mostly talking to other men. These guys were, by and large, not engaged in the intimate care of small children. Somewhere else, far from the house of study, other people—women, mothers—were wrangling tantrumy toddlers and explaining to six-year-olds that they really did have to eat what was on their plate. At least, I assume that was what was happening—again, for most of history, the people who were raising children weren’t writing books, so we don’t totally know.

This means a few things. This means that a lot of the dazzling ideas found in our sacred texts about how to be a person—how to fully experience awe and wonder; how to navigate hard, painful feelings; how service to others fits into the larger, transcendent picture—was never really explicitly connected to the work of parenting. It just didn’t occur to the guys building, say, entire theological worldviews around love and relationships to extend their ideas to the kinder—probably because the work of raising children just wasn’t on their radar screen.

For example, the Babylonian Talmud is the Jewish tradition’s great compendium of rabbinic culture. It contains legal debates, legends, wise words, deep theology, and stories from and jokes about the lives of the ancient rabbis. It’s a huge work; if you study one double-sided page every single day, you’ll get through the whole thing in seven years. It’s comprised of thirty-seven tractates and covers the comprehensive, and sometimes outrageous, hypothetical gamut—from the status of an egg that’s laid during a certain part of a holiday2 and instructions about what to do if a snake attempts to drink your wine while you’re on a boat,3 to the number of alcoholic drinks one must consume in order to repel demons.4 An entire order—a seven-tractate set—deals with issues related to women, addressing things like marriage, divorce, and suspected adultery.

But you know what isn’t in there? There’s no Masechet Yeladim, no tractate dedicated to children and the process of raising them. Kids come up, sure, as asides in inheritance law, in trying to figure out who is obligated to pay for a wet-nurse (if she can be afforded), in sorting out some of the logistics of the Passover seder. But you don’t hear the rabbis swapping stories about the funny thing their seven-year-olds said the other night or what to do if the toddler tries to climb up to where the Sabbath lamp is burning, let alone what to call the heart-melting experience of chubby little arms wrapping themselves around your neck or how to deal with despair when a kid is suffering in a way that can’t be fixed. Children just didn’t enter many of the discussions of the talmudic rabbis—even though most of them were fathers.

A few years ago, the Dalai Lama gave a lecture in Boulder, Colorado, to an audience of about eight hundred people. He talked about the importance of kindness, the role it can play in people’s lives, and how it fits in Buddhist thinking. After he finished his remarks, it was time for questions. A man in the front row jumped up and began speaking at length about his three children, ages two, three, and five—about how he wants to raise them to be good Buddhists but the reality on the ground with such little kids is just so challenging. What advice did the Dalai Lama have to offer him amidst the chaos of life with small children?

The Dalai Lama’s interpeter began to translate his question, but the Dalai Lama interrupted him with his famous, infectous giggle.

“Tee hee hee! Why you ask me? I’m a monk. Next question!”5

*   *   *

Even though centuries’ worth of thinking and writing about what spirituality is and how to access it were developed by men who were, by and large, oblivious to one of the most transformative experiences a human can have (parenting), there are still a ton of great resources, concepts, frameworks, and lenses already sitting in the metaphysical warehouse, in the theological library of the ages. There are ideas in there—about relationships, about drudgery, about pain—that can have a dramatic impact on our experience of the good, the crazymaking, the confounding work of raising kids. Ideas that can help make the hard parts easier and the magical stuff even more so. What do ancient sources of wisdom—Judaism in particular—have to offer parents? In this book I will make some of those connections explicitly, hauling some important concepts out of religious storage that might have a big impact on how we regard the work of parenting.

But it’s not a one-way street. If our sacred texts can shine a light on the experience of parenting, those engaged in the work of raising children also have something to offer our constantly evolving thinking about what religion and spirituality are and can be. What would the Babylonian Talmud look like if we were writing it today? How are our experiences of power and powerlessness, of frustration, awe, humility, and those breathtaking moments of connection part of a larger story? How can the insights gleaned through the work of raising kids offer new perspectives on what the holy even is, and how a person might experience it?

My biggest question, though, is this: What if parenting were considered a spiritual practice in its own right? There are a lot of things we think of as spiritual work these days—such as prayer, meditation, painting, writing, yoga, hiking, running, and more. But what if engaging in the intimate care of our children was understood as a legitimate path to understanding the universe, the transcendent, and our place in it? My suspicion is that some mothers throughout history have experienced the work of parenting in deep ways—not necessarily because people of one gender are inherently more or less or differently spiritual than people of other genders, but because the work of caring for kids can be chock-full of powerful moments.6 And even if those mothers didn’t experience something special, that doesn’t mean we can’t.

Raising kids forces us into a lot of different emotions, processes, skills, encounters with the world and ourselves—to say nothing of the variety of ways in which we relate to the tiny little people in front of us. When we care for our children, we can go so far down into love that we might find infinity on the other side; we can use the boring and the hard moments to pop us open; we can find new means of experiencing our bodies; we can open the doors of perception in immersive play; and even find within the depth and intensity of these bonds something akin to the mystic. We experience transcendent love in a million decidedly nontranscendent moments every single day. What if we engaged our parenting as a serious spiritual practice—that is, as an ongoing, repeated activity that, performed with intentionality, can transform how we understand ourselves, others, the world around us, and our place in it? If we go deep enough into our parenting, it can take us everywhere.

So this book is about that. It’s written as a series of meditations on various themes, dancing around these three questions: What can religious and spiritual traditions teach parents? What can parents teach religious and spiritual traditions? How is parenting a spiritual practice in its own right?

It’s anchored in the Jewish tradition because that’s what I know best, what I practice every day, what gives my own life shape and meaning and heft. I believe, though, that the things Judaism brings to this conversation might be informative, useful, and illuminating to parents of any background. And every once in a while, a voice from another religious tradition (whether that voice be from a dead theologian or an actual I-talked-to-them-yesterday friend) says it best, so I lean on that wisdom, too. This book is primarily illustrated by stories of babies, toddlers, and elementary school kids because that’s the world I live in now, but parents of teenagers and adults have told me that most of these ideas have relevance long after the kids have gone through puberty.

This book is not a guide to raising spiritual children—or any kind of children, for that matter. Like so many parents, I’m muddling along, trying to figure out how best to care for the specific human beings I have been issued, and I’m not always sure if I’m making the right decisions. (I mean, I think we’re doing OK, but we should probably set up a therapy fund just in case.) I’m certainly not going to tell anyone else whether they should co-sleep, cry-it-out, attach, or free-range their kids. This is not a parenting book; it is a parenthood book. It’s about the adult’s experience of parenting—about what it so often is, and what it can be. The details of raising children will have to be sorted out elsewhere, family by family.

Sometimes, in this book, I talk about mothers. And sometimes I talk about parents. Obviously, these days, people of all genders are getting up in the middle of the night and attemping to enforce nap time and rearranging their work schedules when another virus comes to town. But childcare has been women’s work for most of history, and as such, some of the parenting baggage that affects people’s experiences today—as well as some of the parenting context of Judaism and other religious traditions—is gendered. So my use of language is inconsistient; I haven’t found a single elegant way to encompass both our historical legacy and the shifting-under-our-feet contemporary reality in one easy pronoun.

Needless to say, parents, and parenting, look like a lot of things these days, with all sorts of family configurations, gender identities, and biological and nonbiological connections in play. A person is a parent if they parent. Love is what makes this kid your kid. We’re all in this together, one big, chaotic village of people trying to figure out where that other tiny shoe went, kissing a knee that just got scraped, taking a deep breath when the screaming starts, and hoping to remember to pick up milk on the way home. These acts of care are our work, our offering. They are our holy office, a liturgy of love.

Copyright © 2016 by Danya Ruttenberg