by: Shimona Tzukernik
About a year ago I spoke to a group of women in
Pittsburgh. The topic was, “Will the
Real Jewish Woman Please Stand Up?” The
energy was already upbeat and intimate by the time I made reference to the famous
text, “Woman of Strength” which Jews customarily sing at the Friday night meal. Before I could work my way into the point I
intended to make, a woman blurted out something to the effect of, “I hate
that song.” I turned to her inviting her
to elaborate.
“Well…She’s just so…perfect! I feel like a complete failure every Friday
night. I mean, do you know anyone
like her?” Laughter all round.
I love when that happens – a real, visceral response
to the topic at hand (especially when it resonates with my ownself’s inner
passion, hesitancy or conflict around a particular idea.) How many times had I balked at the words?! Using the Hebrew letters as a springboard it
is a veritable Alphabet-Soup of Perfection.
I won’t overwhelm you with all the details but how’s this for
starters?
·
Alef – She’s an Eishet
Chayil, a “strong” woman. The word chayil
connotes the power of war. She’s a
warrior. And a spiritual one too, with
all the attributes needed to carry out any task at hand. Friday night rolls round, we haven’t even
gotten past verse one and I’m up against “Jewish Tiger Mom!”
·
Beit – Batach bah lev
ba’alah, her husband’s heart trusts in her.
Hmm. I can count on one hand
(okay, two fingers) the number of girlfriends whose husbands’ are at peace with
their wives’ take on life and what’s best for them. Verse two and I’m dealing with not only a
powerhouse but someone who’s wise and gentle enough to inspire confidence in
her mate!
·
Gimmel – Gemalthu tov,
she imparts goodness and kindness to him, never evil. Who is this gal?
In short, a brief read-through of the song reveals that Kosher
Tiger Mom has a loving, trusting husband; she’s an entrepreneur and successful
business woman; she’s industrious, charitable, wise, empathic and
intuitive. To boot she’s well groomed
(read manicures, facials and Sacks Fifth Av if not Vera Wang) and even has the time
and cash to buy gorgeous bedroom linens in mindful attention to her sex life.
Is it any wonder the second phrase, in breathless pursuit of
the words Eishet Chayil, asks “Who can find (her)?” She is not me! All of which leaves me with the question of how
to read and apply King Solomon’s song to my life – along with the implications it
has for my role not only as wife but as daughter to my mother and mother to my
own children.
It seems to me that Eishet Chayil is “Everywoman,” an
archetype of us all. No, I’m not just
looking for a backdoor escape from my perfectionism, a way to avoid the reflections
of my flaws which I encounter on a daily basis. I ask myself whether she represents an
attainable goal. Certainly in a utopian
era we may each come to embody the Eishet Chayil described by King
Solomon but in the here-and-now of life-as-we-know-it, I’ve yet to meet the woman
who lives up to the persona he portrays.
Rather than take the text as a description of Supermom, it seems to me, it
serves to connect us with the universal image of wife and mother. After all, the passage has been interpreted as
a metaphor for the Shechina, the Sabbath, the Torah and the soul. Doesn’t it make sense that the acrostic,
spanning all twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, alludes not to one
woman’s all-encompassing virtues (Supermom) but to our collective identity
(Everywoman)?
Just before my marriage, a spiritual midwife told me, “King
Solomon says, ‘The wisdom of a woman builds her home.’ The literal translation though states, ‘The
wisdom of women (plural) builds her home (singular.) You will build your home on the wisdom of
many women. Pay attention to how they
live and what they have to say.” How right
she was. I have enriched myself and my
home through the collective wisdom and experience of the thousands of women
I’ve merited to connect with. I carry them
within me and am personally empowered by who they are. As Eishet Chayil is sung each Friday
night, it affords me some brief moments of contemplation to rejoin with them
and also to be eased by the knowledge that our physical and spiritual
interconnectedness mitigates my own flaws, enabling me to bring their lights
into my home.
By extension, I have access to the larger, cosmic Everywoman,
namely the energies and insights of the women who have come before me all the
way back to Sarah. (In fact, one reading
of Eishet Chayil is as the eulogy Abraham said for Sarah before he
buried her.) It may be a span of thousands
of years between me and my first mother but it’s not more than around 175
generations. That’s not an impossible
divide. I want some of the wisdom and
joy of the women between the two of us. I
now know how far from the truth my youthful stereotype of the shtetel Bubby –
naïve, somewhat simple, lacking emotional subtlety – is. Today I’d love to have her over for brunch
and glean her insights and tools on how to handle my life. The same goes for all the women throughout those
interceding generations each of who has her own shining letter from the
Alphabet-Soup of Perfection to impart to me.
As their daughter and grand-daughter I am bound with their point of
perfection. Thereby, at some level,
despite the fact that I’m no Supermom, Eishet Chayil is in my
home each Friday night. More so I even
carry her, the collective “Everywoman”, within my own being.
In this way, I gain access to a dimension of myself that is
way beyond my highest personal aspirations for if the totality of who I can be
is purely a result of my own endeavors; I will be very small indeed. Rather, it is in surrendering to my
imperfections and humbly admitting the bigness of Eishet Chayil that I
open the window to the full expanse of who I am.
But to me, the collective gestalt of Jewish womanhood
embodied by Eishet Chayil allows us even more than access to this
larger, truer self. In addition to this
priceless gift, she affords us the possibility to reconfigure our relationship
with our mothers. I know, easier said
than done. The most potent reaction I
ever got to a presentation was a lecture called, “Moms, the Magic and the
Madness.” The audience – and yours truly
– wasn’t quite sure whether to laugh or weep.
Our relationship with our mothers is incomparably multi-dimensional,
complex, overlaid with love and with anger.
It’s a real big one to navigate but one which we are nonetheless expected
to manage and even heal.
It’s not that we can disregard the relationship if it’s
uncomfortable for us. “Honor your father
and mother” made it to fifth on the list of the Big Ten! Yet for many, this instruction on how we ought
to relate to our parents is something they find absurd. I can hear the disdain: “My Mom hangs out at
the gym all day and gossips non-stop. She’s
dishonest in business, self-centered – nay narcissistic – and
materialistic. She never had the courage
to face her wounds so I get to be the beneficiary of her
dysfunctional inheritance! Yadda, yadda…” Alright, this is Everymom we’re talking
about. But you get the idea. How are we to honor and respect our Moms
despite their often startling imperfections?
Ultimately the reason we honor them has nothing to do with
their personal or moral stature. G-d’s
directive is rooted in the fact that at the moment of conception, our parents
take on something of the Divine. They
become co-creators with G-d in bringing us into being. That’s why honor of our parents is
immutable. It’s not about the gym or
manicures, how they do or don’t pay taxes and show up in life. It’s about the fact that in relation to us
they are G-dlike in a certain respect.
That’s the ground-zero of honoring our parents and until we get it most
nothing else we say or hear will be of use to us in moving the relationship
forward.
But this immutable point of greatness aside, each Friday
night Eishet Chayil reminds us of two key ideas which can change the way
we negotiate our very first relationship.
The first is that, as mentioned, none of us is perfect – and
that’s okay! The second is that in some
mysterious way we can, if we choose to, receive what we need through the
collective Everywoman. In this way, we learn
to lower the bar on our mothers. We
don’t have to hold them to an impossible standard. Whew! In
fact we can begin to accept our mother for who she is and learn to get our
needs met elsewhere if she is not able to do so. We can stop blaming our unhappiness on
someone who would not – or more accurately could not – come to the table in the
way we needed her to. Eishet Chayil,
Everywoman, becomes a reservoir of healing and nourishment for our being.
Through this forgiving of her for her imperfections, we
become able to put down the aspects of our own emotional and mental
inheritance we’d rather do without. One
of the first things we learn about our father Abraham is that he smashed his
parents’ idols! I am embarrassed to
admit it but it was only well into my thirties that I realized I had to do the
same. I’d spent decades bowing to my
folks’ false beliefs, accepting it as fact that I was doomed for time
everlasting to live with the limitations those beliefs generated. Then one day the teaching about Abraham took
hold in my mind with a vigorous vitality.
I took an inventory of what I’d inherited. In addition to the abundant goodness and
wonder, it included beliefs about how much I was likely to earn, how to respond
when angered, what the appropriate response to suffering is, who I am
and a whole lot more. I trust you get
what I’m talking about. How liberating
to realize that I could systematically smash those idols – without betraying my
parents!! I was not being faithless to
them in subscribing to different truths and happiness.
The catch in doing so is to disown the false beliefs yet remain
in the relationship. Abraham
smashed Terach’s idols but he continued to live with him – for another
seventy-two years. Granted Terach came
round to Abraham’s way of thinking but our first father would have managed to
negotiate the relationship regardless. I
believe that is because connection with G-d was the singular driving force in
his life and as such he was able to a) see his father’s flaws but b) not take
them personally and c) not feel limited by them, thereby being able to d) detach
with love so that he could e) actually help Terach. He was able to not own another’s dysfunction
and yet remain connected to the one he loved.
To accomplish this mode of conduct, we must discover a new
mental set and learn to shift our reading of the events and relationships in
our lives. Most of our pain in relation
to our parents (and pretty much everything else) has to do with our own
perception. We interpret things
to mean what they are not. As such, we
tend to live in the rather unhappy space between the way things are and the way
we think they should be. We walk around
confessing the sins of G-d and others in our life. And of course, we know our mothers’ sins best
of all! To be whole with her, we must
find that new mental set which allows us to let go of the expectations we have
of her as well as of our interpretation of the interactions between us. For me, Eishet Chayil enables me to at
least begin to navigate this. It teaches
me that I am not perfect but that that’s okay – and the same goes for my Mom;
that I no longer have to hold her to an impossible standard; and that I can be
enriched by my universal family of sisters and mothered by generations of women
whose sterling qualities are inestimable.
In other words, although I’m not Supermom I have access to the
superlative perfection of Everywoman. Turns
out that Jewish-Tiger-Mom liberates me through the abundant truth that although
none of us is perfect, we have access to a flawlessness that is way beyond
pearls.
Written for, "More Precious than Pearls," edited by Mark Pearlman. Check out his site Sinai Live
