CHAPTER 1 - Preparing for Children

C: Educational Activities

31. Responding to Rachel (Rachel Bluwstein)
Text discussion and role play. (One to one and a half hours)

The aim here is to provide another vehicle to examine attitudes to child bearing in Judaism through the issue of barrenness. It is based around a famous poem by the poetess Rachel. Rachel, who lived most of her life in Eretz Israel in the first decades of the twentieth century, wrote a very moving poem about her childlessness. She wrote it in 1928 when she was 38, three years before her death as a single woman, without a child.

BARREN

If only I had a son, a little child, bright, with black curls,
To hold his hand and to walk slowly,
Down the paths of the garden,
A child.
A little one.

I would call him Uri, my Uri,
The short name is soft and pure,
A fragment of brightness,
I'll call out to my dark little boy,
"Uri."

I will yet become as bitter as the mother Rachel.
I will still pray like Hannah at Shilo.
I will yet long
For him.

• Ask the group why it is hard for many people who find themselves without children. Ask them if they think it is harder or easier for people, specifically within the Jewish tradition, not to have children, or whether it makes no difference what culture people are born into, in this respect?
• Present the poem to the group. Explain that Rachel wrote this when she was a famous Tel Aviv poet, very sick with tuberculosis, three years before her death.
• Explore the references to Rachel, the matriarch and to Hannah at Shilo. What is she saying by bringing in these other examples of barren women?
• Ask them to write a response to the poem. Perhaps suggest that they have just received the poem from a friend, or alternatively, that they have read the poem at the time that it was written and that Rachel is one of their favorite poets.
• Read the responses. Is there anything that can be said at a time like this? Do they feel that their words could make a difference?
• Explain that there have been attempts to create caring community rituals in order to comfort woman that have had no children. Ask what sort of elements might be included in such a ceremony. For an example of one such ceremony you can refer to the book "Lifecycles" mentioned in the bibliography, where a ceremony is outlined (pp. 40-43).