Tikkun Leil Shabbat 9/12/08Introduction to dvar tikkun by Althea Swett, DC Childcare Collective ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As we approach Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, we're getting closer and closer to the end of the Torah. Jewish communities around the world have been reading one portion a week for almost a year, and in about a month and a half, on Simchat Torah, we'll reach the end of the story, and dance around joyfully for a while, and start over again from the beginning.
This joyful reading and rereading reflects our sense that this is our story; that the narrative recounted in the Torah is the story that makes us who we are as Jews, and that all of us are, in some sense, a part of it.
But in a poem by Merle Feld, a contemporary Jewish poet, she creates a midrash, a commentary on one of the narrative high points of the Torah -- the revelation on Mount Sinai. She writes her poem in the voice of someone whose experience didn't get included in the story:We All Stood Together
My brother and I were at Sinai
He kept a journal
of what he saw
of what he heard
of what it all meant to him
I wish I had such a record
of what happened to me there
It seems like every time I want to write
I can’t
I’m always holding a baby
one of my own
or one for a friend
always holding a baby
so my hands are never free
to write things down
And then
As time passes
The particulars
The hard data
The who what when where why
Slip away from me
And all I'm left with is
The feeling
But feelings are just sounds
the vowel barking of a mute
My brother is so sure of what he heard
After all he's got a record of it
consonant after consonant after consonant
If we remembered it together
We could recreate holy time
Sparks flying
Of course, holding babies, and taking care of children more generally, both protecting and supervising children, and educating children, is important, holy work.
But if the same people are always left with these childcare responsibilities, those folks don't have a full opportunity to participate in the life of their community. As this poem depicts very concretely, if you're holding a baby, your hands aren't free to write down your story. In time, as the community's experience gets written down for the generations, the experience of those holding the babies may not get included.
So too in our own city, there are many citizens who cannot participate fully in the story of our city unless they have reliable childcare; their hands won't be free to advocate for their families and communities and schools and neighborhoods in the public square unless the community makes sure that someone can, well, hold their babies.
In the poem, the poet writes that she remembers the vowels, and her brother remembers the consonants. The Torah is written, of course, in Biblical Hebrew -- a language in which only the consonants are written down. So this modern midrash suggests that the Torah we read each year does not inclusively reflect the experience of our whole people. Unfortunately, they couldn't participate, because approximately half of them were holding the babies. We inherited a Torah that's less whole than it might be, a Torah with only consonants. It's too late to form a childcare collective for the ancient Israelites, in which everyone might have taken turns holding the babies. It's too late, so each year as we chant the Torah aloud, it's up to us to weave the vowels back into the text.
But it's not too late for us in Washington DC to act to ensure that no one is prevented from full participation in our city's story for this kind of reason. That's why I'm very excited to introduce Tia from the DC Childcare Collective, which acts in solidarity with low-income parents by providing free, reliable childcare that allows them to participate in local activist efforts.
-- Joelle Novey