Prayers & Kids
This might be a bold statement, but there are probably few things in the world that cause people to pray more than children. We pray for their health, their safety, their growth, that they’ll find their place in this chaotic world. Even if you don’t have kids, you’re probably praying for them, and if you’re trying to have kids you’re definitely praying, and praying harder the longer you keep trying.
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Written Format*
This might be a bold statement, but there are probably few things in the world that cause people to pray more than children. We pray for their health, their safety, their growth, that they’ll find their place in this chaotic world. Even if you don’t have kids, you’re probably praying for them, and if you’re trying to have kids you’re definitely praying, and praying harder the longer you keep trying.
This week, the Torah offers the story of Sarah, and the birth of Isaac, after ending last week’s parsha with the birth and banishment of Ishmael along with his mother Hagar. This week, agents of the Lord visit Abraham and Sarah at their tent in Mamre. Abraham rushes to prepare food for them, and to wash their feet, calling for Sarah to knead choice flour into cakes for their guests.
Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, “Quick, three seahs of choice flour! Knead and make cakes!” Then Abraham ran to the herd, took a calf, tender and choice, and gave it to a servant-boy, who hastened to prepare it. He took curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared and set these before them; and he waited on them under the tree as they ate.
They said to him, “Where is your wife Sarah?” And he replied, “There, in the tent.” Then one said, “I will return to you next year, and your wife Sarah shall have a son!” Sarah was listening at the entrance of the tent, which was behind him.
This is the part where Sarah laughs out loud, at the sheer thought that she could even have a baby, physically, at her age, much less have the energy to chase a toddler through the sand. As the Torah says,
Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years; Sarah had stopped having her periods. And Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “Now that I’ve lost the ability, am I to have enjoyment—with my husband so old?”
I’ve been rewatching How I Met Your Mother recently. It’s one of my favorite shows, maybe because I was Ted’s age when it came out, and I’ve watched it probably a dozen times. As you can probably tell, I’m a sucker for gleaning something new from the same recycled content.
There’s an lengthy plot line in How I Met Your Mother, involving Marshall and Lily, that gets incorporated in the show’s third season, after Lily and Marshall get married at the end of Season 2–when should they have kids? The first time this comes up, Lily is worried that Marshall isn’t taking the challenge of children seriously enough, and they agree to put it off for a few years while they enjoy their lives together. But eventually, they take up the challenge again, and start trying, but not before looking for a sign from the universe that they’re making the right choice. They keep seeing doppelgängers of their gang around–people who look like their friends but aren’t. So they agree, ridiculously, that once they’ve seen all five doppelgängers they’ll take it as a sign to start having a baby. In the end, though, Lily convinces herself that she’s seen Barney’s doppelgänger while Marshall quietly begs the group to “just go with it.”
Marshall and Lily aren’t the only ones who want a sign that a baby is in their future. That’s probably why Sarah laughs in the first place, because the idea that she’ll have a baby at her age, when she’s already stopped menstruating, just seems ludicrous, and despite the arrival of angels at her doorstep to announce the birth of Isaac, she wants a more significant sign. She doesn’t get one though. Abraham calls her out for laughing, saying, “is anything too wondrous for the Lord,” before the Torah cuts to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
We see this story repeated, in a sense, in the Haftorah portion this week, from Kings II, which recounts the story of Elisha and a Shunammite woman.
One day Elisha visited Shunem. A wealthy woman lived there, and she urged him to have a meal; and whenever he passed by, he would stop there for a meal. Once she said to her husband, “I am sure it is a holy agent of God who comes this way regularly. Let us make a small enclosed upper chamber and place a bed, a table, a chair, and a lampstand there for him, so that he can stop there whenever he comes to us.” One day he came there; he retired to the upper chamber and lay down there. He said to his servant Gehazi, “Call that Shunammite.” He called her, and she stood before him. He said to him, “Tell her, ‘You have gone to all this trouble for us. What can we do for you? Can we speak in your behalf to the king or to the army commander?’” She replied, “I live among my own people.” “What then can be done for her?” he asked. “The fact is,” said Gehazi, “she has no son, and her husband is old.” “Call her,” he said. He called her, and she stood in the doorway. And Elisha said, “At this season next year, you will be embracing a son.” She replied, “Please, my lord, agent of God, do not delude your maidservant.” The woman conceived and bore a son at the same season the following year, as Elisha had assured her.
The Shunammite woman, you might have noticed, didn’t receive a more significant sign than Sarah. Both had to trust in that the Lord’s agent who had appeared before him–angels for Sarah and the prophet Elisha for the Shunammite woman–both had to trust that these agents were true to their word, no matter how impossible it seemed. Maybe that’s why Lily gave up and convinced herself that she’d seen a sign, even if it wasn’t there.
The prays don’t stop at conception, though, and there’s one more moment, usually before the birth, that folks tend to pray over–the gender reveal.
One of my favorite scenes in How I Met Your Mother involves Lily and Marshall trying to get pregnant, but also trying to affect the gender of their future baby. Marshall, for his part, turns to his father, Marvin, who passes down ancient Viking wisdom that Marvin claims is responsible for his track record of all sons. So Marshall chokes down some pickled herring, and plunges his sensitive bits into ice cold water before having sex with Lily. For her part, Lily has been sucking down lemons, and putting a blow dryer between her legs, advice from Marshall’s mother that’s meant to increase the likelihood of conceiving a girl.
It’s super ludicrous, but honestly, not that far from normal for most people. We all say that we just want a healthy kid, that we’re praying for ten fingers and ten toes, but most people harbor secret hopes for a boy, or a girl, even if they won’t share them. And that’s been true for at least as long as people have been reading the Torah.
Commentators throughout Jewish history have puzzled over the angels’ declaration to Abraham this week, that Sarah would bear a son the following year. How, they ask, other than divine providence, could the angel’s know that Sarah would have a son? The story of the Shunammite woman further complicates this, because Elisha too predicts that she will bear a son the following year. We can easily brush aside the proclamation in the case of Sarah. After all, she needs to have a baby for the Jewish people to ever come into existence. But the Shunammite woman doesn’t, so why do we see the same gender specific fortune being told?
Or HaChaim, the 18th century Moroccan commentator who I love to quote, picks up on this, and takes it to an even weirder place than the writers of How I Met Your Mother. It’s not the presence of lemon or herrings, whether the body lays north or south, or how hot or cold your groin is when the moment comes. Or HaChaim building on arguments made by prior rabbis, claims that gender is determined by which element, male or female, is preponderant in that moment. Mostly, that means who came first, but in Sarah’s case, it’s her laugh that seals the deal.
Another meaning of the words “Sarah would by then have a son,” is to tell us that a son i.e. male issue, is dependent on the female element being predominant whereas daughters are the result of a preponderant male element during marital union. We know this from [the Talmud, in] Nidah 31 based on Leviticus 12:2.
The angel prophesied that the physical union of Abraham and Sarah which would result in her impregnation would correspond to the rules laid down, or hinted at, in Leviticus 12:2.
[compare Midrash Hagadol in the name of Rabbi Yitzchak that the sex of the embryo is determined in accordance with whose orgasm occurs first. If the male completes his orgasm first, the result is a daughter, if the female is first, the result is a son. Ed.]
Accordingly, the angels attributed the forthcoming son to the predominance of the female, i.e. Sarah's input [her laughter].
Of course, when you’re trying to have a baby you’re not supposed to tell anyone. That’s how Lily feels, in How I Met Your Mother, and it’s how my wife feels too, and that’s all I have to say about that. But like Marshall, and Sarah, I have a hard time keeping my mouth shut when it comes down to it. So I wrote this episode instead, because I know my wife doesn’t listen to this podcast. It’s my version of the Marshall’s office walkout.
Of course not everyone wants kids. Barney Stinson says never buy a woman flowers because giving her a living thing will remind her of babies. It’s also not always so easy to have kids, even if you’re not a post-menopausal woman like Sarah. Robin, for one last How I Met Your Mother reference, finds out late in the series that she can’t bear children, and it breaks her heart even though Robin “hates babies.”
Next week, I’ll probably have more to say on the subject of infertility, but for now, let’s leave it at prayers, of all kinds, for babies, of all kinds. But if you want a good cry, check out the study sheet for this episode, there’s a link in the show notes, and watch the clip at the bottom–a mashup of HIMYM tearjerker parenting moments.
As for the rest, do what you want, what makes sense to you, and know that whether you’re scarfing down herring, trying not to spill the beans, or crying over a future that doesn’t seem possible, you’re in good company.
Shabbat shalom.
*written formats may differ slightly from the podcast recording
