Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year is a time for many things: reflection, apologies, personal accountability, renewal, celebration of the sweetest things life has to offer. For me, it's also about lots of time spent in the synagogue, variously praying and daydreaming. It's about dinners and lunches with family and friends over two days (well, three), with round challah and pomegranate seeds and apples and honey and, if you're lucky to have a mom like mine, at least one brisket. It's about hearing the blasts of the shofar, that ancient instrument with the power to shake both the stained glass windows of the shul and the forgotten and neglected strands of your soul. It is that annua alarm clock urging us to wake up, take stock, and present the best version of ourselves to the highest court for judgement. Or maybe just to the people alongside you in the pew. Whatever makes it meaningful for you. Throughout the paired holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we frequently say "On Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed." We maintain a tradition that each person's name has the opportunity to be inscribed in The Book of Life, ensuring you a good year should you merit it. To the sweet foods and melodies of the Jewish New Year this tradition lends a heaviness, a wariness of the oncoming judgement. Did I apologize to the right people? Did I pray enough? Am I good enough? Will I make it? This year, sitting in my pew with my prayer book in my lap, my hand drifted as if with a mind of its own to the growing roundness at my stomach and my thoughts shifted: Did I pray enough for you? Am I good enough for you? Will we make it? Even as someone who, personally, tends to put little stock in prayer, I'm finding that pregnancy is changing that just a little. Although I feel like little has changed about me (ignoring, of course, the added 25 pounds and increasing fatigue), this once progressive, feminist, 21st-century woman is now tapping into her 18th-century Russian roots, complete with all the superstition and mishegas of my forebears. As I progress week by week, I am realizing that these superstitions tend to fall into three broad categories:
Religious Superstition I know I may offend some by talking about religion in the form of superstition, but what else do you call the generationally reinforced extra-Biblical religious traditions that strive to bring people a sense of control in the face of much larger and more powerful forces? When we pray on Rosh Hashanah that we should be "inscribed for a good year," we cannot know for certain that our deeds will, in fact, merit such a blessing. And it does nothing to explain the most wonderful people we know suffering in the most unspeakable ways. But at least momentarily, it gives us power over our own destinies, reminding us of the reformative power of sincere apology and forgiveness. Does that make G-d grant us a good year? Or does it just make us better people and encourage us to live with more love and compassion in our hearts? Only Heaven knows, but with the anticipation of a baby on our horizon I'm not about to risk it. Cultural Superstition This is by far the most fun and inexplicable of the superstitions. This is the black cat, broken mirror, salt-over-shoulder kind of superstition. Those examples, of course, are ridiculous. I would never subscribe to such nonsense. But not making preparations for the baby before it's born so as not to attract the Evil Eye is absolutely, 100% justified. In my family, as with most Eastern European Jews*, there is a great deal of superstition surrounding pregnancy and childbirth. Most of it follows the "don't count your chickens before they're hatched" reasoning, because The Evil Eye is always watching and waiting to disrupt your well-made plans. This is why J and I will not share the sex of the baby, we will not have a baby shower, we won't officially name it (still just "The Gremlin" for now), and we won't even prepare the baby's room before it comes into the world. Silly? Maybe. But again, it's not a chance I'm willing to take. These traditions are too deeply entrenched in my being - and J's - to ignore them. Medical Superstition Let me make one thing clear: science is real. Vaccines are a necessity, medicine works, and doctors are an invaluable component of a functioning, healthy society. But there is still so much we don't know, and navigating health care as a pregnant woman reminds you how little control we have despite all the amazing medical advancements. Part of this is because it's extremely hard to test medications, therapies, and practices on pregnant women; you obviously can't put a subgroup of pregnant women at intentional or even possible risk just for the sake of a study. Outside of the things that we know are unequivocally bad for a mother's or fetus's health (alcohol, smoking, certain powerful medications), many of the things we're told are about avoiding possible negative consequences. We don't know that they'll happen for sure, but we're pretty certain there's at least a chance, and shouldn't we do everything we can to avoid unnecessary risk? Besides, the consequences are clear in the commands: Don't sleep on your back or right side because of pressure on the inferior vena cava; don't eat cold cuts or smoked meats because of listeria; don't eat raw fish or too much tuna because of food poisoning or mercury; don't drink more than 200mg of caffeine a day because it can affect growth; exercise because exercise is good but don't do it too much because that's bad. . . and so on and so forth. All of them are grounded in science, but few of them guarantee a specific outcome, good or bad. I'm pretty good about following these rules, but at some point I realized that these, too, share a common thread with the cultural superstitions of my family and the religious superstitions upon which we build our prayer: knowing how little control we actually have, we will do whatever we can to shift the outcomes in our favor. The medically over-informed mama is, at least in some cases, the postmodern charm-wearing friggatriskaidekaphobic. Superstition, in whatever form it takes, is an attempt to make sense of an often senseless world. It comforts us by telling us what to do in order to avoid the certain catastrophe that lurks around every corner. With my pregnancy has come the anxiety familiar to every parent, expecting or otherwise, the awareness that life is beautiful, terrifying, and more precious than we can fathom. Maybe our rituals and traditions and prayers and diets don't actually make the biggest difference. Maybe, but I'm sure as hell not going to test it. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go nap on only my left side. *It's possible that similar superstitions exist among Sephardic Jews, but I'm not familiar with them.
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AuthorNashira is a music teacher and proud Small-Town Jew who, after surthriving six years in Brooklyn for her husband's surgical residency, is finally back in Wisconsin where she belongs! At least until the end of the two-year surgical fellowship, that is. It's a wild ride, and she's ready to tell you all about it! Archives
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