For a while after I had my first child, I worried I had stopped praying. That my previous depth of Jewish prayer experience was no longer accessible or possible. With time passing and wise supportive guides, I have come to see this season of life as not only not prayer-less, but rather fully prayer-infused. It looks different than classical Rabbinic mitzvot (“commandments”, “practice instructions”) and it also looks different than traditional prescriptions for women’s practice (or lack thereof). It has emerged from lived trial-and-error. This is the prayer of the everyday. I used to see the adjustments and modifications I was making to my prayer life as some kind of diminishment. Now I see that these are transformations and elevations. 

Reb Zalman Shachter Shalomi z”l writes, “True prayer is a bursting forth of the soul to God.” [1] Having babies has changed how my soul bursts forth, but in ways that I have come to see as amplifications of the deepest essence of what prayer is. 

Tallis

My second baby is nearly five months old and is resisting breastfeeding with a cover over his head. He wants to see the world, he doesn’t want to miss anything. He eats best when his face is free to the air, able to glance around and take it all in. But sometimes I feel more comfortable covering myself in public, and so I have found the best way to meet both of our needs is by poking my head under the cloth with him, creating a tent for us both. As he suckles, he stares up at me, and I stare down at him. 

When I was ten or eleven, my mom took me to shul on Yom Kippur and we sat in the back. I saw an older man near the front, head covered in a tallis (“prayer shawl”), swaying fervently. “What is he wearing?” I whispered to my mom. “A tallit,” she said. “Why?” I asked. “Because he wants to be alone with God,” she said. “I want one,” I said. [2]

These days, the nursing cloth is my tallis. It cocoons around us, and the three of us—me, baby, and Hashem—are enveloped. 

Shuckling

My baby likes movement to soothe and fall asleep. As he nurses, I rock forward and back, forward and back. His eyes grow heavy and he blinks away sleep, then… surrenders. But if I stop rocking, he rouses. And so I keep moving. Sometimes I switch, side to side. My attention becomes more focused. My breathing slows. My body drops down and in. When I daven (“pray”), I love to shuckle [3], to let the prayers elevate through my body’s motion. These days, I rock my baby to sleep to similar effect. 

Tefillin 

I used to lay tefillin (ritual practice of binding head and arm with leather straps and boxes containing words of scripture). I began the practice at the start of the pandemic. Davening on zoom with geographically distant communities felt more embodied when I bound myself at home. I found comfort in being able to trace the Hebrew letter shin on the headpiece, the dalet at the base of my skull, the yud around my middle finger,

which spell Shaddai (a name of the Divine that means “God The Breasted One,” 

and is associated with nurturance and abundance). [4]

After my first son was born, I tried to lay tefillin a couple of times, but found it challenging to breastfeed and rock the baby with all of the straps. Later when he started grabbing with his hands, he would pull the strands, the headpiece tumbling from my head, or the wrappings unfurling from my arm. At first I felt frustrated, and stubbornly clung to the practice as it had been, resisting more change. But the tedium of it got to me, and I tucked my tefillin set up on a high closet shelf, sad and a bit embarrassed I couldn’t keep it up. 

Then, at a davenen leadership conference when my first was five months old, I was strapping him to my body with the cloth carrier before entering shacharit (“morning prayers”), and I felt as if the carrier was my tefillin, enshrouding my body with straps and buckles that bound me to my baby, and my baby to me. The comfort I had previously found from tracing God The Breasted One on my arm now came from the warmth of a little one clasped to my breasts. 

Niggun

Melodies come in the middle of the night, sometimes. Nursing a newborn creates a haze of fractured realities. Here and not fully here, there and also not quite there either. The hevrayya (“companions”) of the Zohar [5] found midnight a potent time for Torah study. [6] The Shechinah (indwelling, feminine divine presence) is particularly accessible then. For me, it's often the time when loneliness descends. The ache of feeling like the only sentient being awake. Sometimes all that makes sense is wordless melody. It comes from sleep deprivation and over-extending, insufficient support and existential questions of parenting—am I enough? Am I what they need? How can I care for them and also this aching world, violent and hurting in ways that feel all the more hostile when looking at a tiny face? Sometimes tears spill over. 

Reb Zalman writes about niggun (“wordless melody”) as a wellspring that is also the wellspring of teshuvah (“returning to God”). [7] These days, I don’t get very long in a shul (“synagogue”) service before baby or toddler needs to be tended to outside of the sanctuary. The collective singing of communal prayer that I love so much is something I hunger for— the type of hunger that only arises from a deprivation that is squelching something intimate and vulnerable within. But the power of niggun can be accessed anywhere that the heart is cracked open enough, and the mind is quiet enough, to let the notes overflow. 

Hitbodedut 

To talk to a little baby is to express language knowing that it won’t be reciprocated in the same form. We say things to them knowing they aren’t processing it as understood units of language, but that on some level it is landing. The emotional tenor of the words, the tone of voice conveying valences of love and playfulness. I like to think that God hears my rambling musings like my baby hears me. Perhaps received not as a human ear with cognitive functioning would, but received, nonetheless. 

This is the sacred art of hitbodedut, talking aloud in an intimate stream of consciousness to the divine. [8] In lieu of the right words, perhaps the desperation that a parent feels for the child to know how loved they are is enough. Knowing that the baby can never respond with the words, “I love you,” but can speak in other ways. 

I used to walk in the woods and talk aloud to God, as Rebbe Nachman of Breslov taught me to. I didn’t hear a voice back, but I felt an emptying, often so complete that a forceful quiet would descend. A yesh (“somethingness”) would fill the ayin (“emptiness”). Now, I talk to my baby, sometimes aloud, sometimes in a whisper, and sometimes just in my own head if he is sleeping lightly and the risk of waking him is too high. I still talk to God too—there are things I need to say to The Divine that aren’t meant for a baby. But the experience feels similar— the need to convey and empty and express, regardless of a complete assurance that the message is being transmitted. The act of transmitting it is the prayer. 

Conclusion: Call More Things Prayer

My second baby is crying his head off, overtired but resisting sleep. All my efforts to console him are for nought. Finally, I bring him up to bed, even though it is early for his bedtime. As I swaddle him, I know I need to soothe myself in order to be the grounding presence he needs to drift into peaceful rest. And what should come to my mind? A new melody for the Barchu (communal call to prayer). As I swaddle my baby, I feel as if a minyan (prayer quorum of at least ten people) of frazzled, unnerved parents joins me, lifting up a cacophony of communal prayer. Together. We are bending at the knee [9], in reverence saying, “I cannot do this alone.” I feel others who are relying on a relationship with the Holy One of Blessing to support them, and by doing so creating a safe haven for their children. 

The Slonimer Rebbe [10] teaches that there are three levels of emunah (“trust”): trust of the brain, trust of the heart, and the highest rung of all is trust of the limbs. He writes that this trust of the limbs can’t be seized by fear, or anything really: there is Divine protection from above. This is the wholeness of “when a person is saturated in trust until the point at which their bones will say ‘Hashem mi chamocha’ (Yah, who is like you?) [11] with the entirety of their being, from foot to head.” [12]  

In this moment, alone in my frenetic attempts to calm a distressed infant, all of my being surrenders to the need for spiritual help, the kind of balm that only a relationship with something more expansive can bring. This is a bow of full prostration to the mystery and closeness of an embodied trust. I suddenly see how prayer can come anytime. It can emerge through the body, it can overflow in praise even in tough moments, and it can join the prayers of others near and far. 

Now that I call more things prayer, the welcoming potentials of prayer continue to reveal themselves to me. 

Endnotes:

We are living through times of horrific erasures of trans experience and rights, as well as the dangerous rise of rightwing traditionalist ideas and expectations about motherhood. To write about motherhood has always been political, and certainly is now. Therefore it is important to note that 1) not all mothers breastfeed, and 2) not all who breastfeed are mothers. In this particular piece, I am solely speaking from my own experience as a breastfeeding parent who also identifies as a mother. Additionally, my writing is not meant to discourage or downgrade the many people who breastfeed and/or identify as mothers while continuing to practice Rabbinic mitzvot in their “traditional” form, but rather to present parallel manifestations of prayer that have emerged through my personal practice. My kavanah (“intention”) with this piece is to open more pathways to enter embodied Jewish prayer, not to close any off. Finally, this piece was influenced by Dr. Mara Benjamin’s The Obligated Self: Maternal Subjectivity and Jewish Thought, ongoing elevating conversations with Reb Nadya Gross, early encouragement on this piece from Rabbi Yafa Chase, and with deep thanks to Reb Elliot Ginsburg for his continued wise guidance on interpreting and translating Hasidic and Kabbalistic texts. The title is inspired by Ocean Veong’s Time is a Mother. 

[1] Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi: Essential Teachings, Edited by Or N. Rose and Netanel Miles-Yepez (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2020.) 66.

[2] With thanks to Jonah Mac Gelfand for introducing me to a a Reb Zalman story that parallels my own earliest tallis memory, and to Reb Nadya Gross for finding the citation, I share it here with awe of synchronicity: “Once I was under papa’s tallis [prayer shawl] when he had just finished leading a Rosh Hashana [New Year] or Yom Kippur [Day of Atonement] service, and I saw tears in his eyes. I said… ‘Why are you crying?’ And he said, ‘I just talked with God.’ I asked him, ‘Does it hurt when you talk with God?’ ‘No.’ ‘So why did you cry?’ ‘It’s because I remember [it’s been] such a long time since I really talked with Him.” [Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Portraits of Faith,  https://portraitsinfaith.org/reb-zalman-schachter-shalomi/.]

[3] Yiddish term to refer to the ritual swaying and shaking in prayer.

[4] For a sample instance of Shaddai in Torah, see Genesis 49:25.

[5] Central kabbalistic text first publicized in thirteenth century Spain.

[6] Melila Hellner-Eshed A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar (Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.), 121.

[7] Schachter-Shalomi, Essential Teachings, 84.

[8] For more on Hitbodedut, see Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, Liqqutei Moharan II, 25:1-9.

[9] Berekh (“knee”) and barchu (“Blessed are You”) have the same Hebrew root letters, and it is traditional to bow during the Barchu prayer. 

[10] Sholom Noach Berezovsky of Slonim (1911-2000).

[11] Exodus 15:11. Yah is a name of the Divine.

[12] Sholom Noach Berezovsky, Netivot Shalom, Parshat Beshalach, s.v. “v’yesh l’vaer ha-inyan, al pi ma-she-nitbaer b’makom acher she-yesh shalosh madragot b’emunah.” Translation from the Hebrew to English here is my own.