But If I Know That You Know That I Know…

Hi everyone,

Hope you had a great week.  This week I had an interesting conversation with some of my kids about their friends who are expecting babies.  I realized childbirth stories that have passed down through the generations for countless millennia are somehow irrelevant to the childbearing families of today.  

Gone are the days when a woman would suspect she’s pregnant but have to wait for weeks before she could take a test to be certain.  The big innovation was that we no longer killed rabbits to diagnose a pregnancy. I learned the phrase ‘the rabbit died’ is now a gruesome and twisted image to an expectant couple. 

Today, pregnancies are announced on Facebook hours after conception.  The entire pregnancy is catalogued online, complete with regular baby bump selfies, diets, questions and suggestions.  It no longer takes a village to raise a child, apparently it takes a village to gestate one as well.

When I was pregnant with my first child I had an ultrasound (a new-fangled test in my day).  I was shown a black and white image of shapes and shadows that everyone called ‘the baby’. Technology developed quickly and by my fifth child I was given an ultrasound picture to take home with me.  It was a picture of shapes and shadows with a circle drawn on it and handwriting outside the circle that said ‘the baby’. I showed everyone the picture with joy and when a few people asked me if I could show them exactly where the baby was I would always point to the circle drawn around a blob.  In truth, I could have been holding an ultrasound of my left kidney.

These days I see ultrasound pictures of babies that are 3D with everything visible, including facial expression, hair and gender.  I’ve seen families gush over the pictures and comment on things like ‘he has the hands of a musician’ or ‘the legs of an athlete’.   There is an expectation that we rise to the challenge of having the most up to date, the latest and the greatest.  

My husband and I bought a swing for our first baby.  It was the ‘first generation’ of swings and needed to be wound up.  Everyone was discussing the latest information about how swings sooth the baby and will teach the baby to calm itself.  The swing’s mechanical casing sat just above the baby’s head. We somehow always managed to bean the baby in the head with it when carefully lifting her out of the swing.  Swing casing hits baby, baby wakes and screams, parent searches for head injury, baby goes back into swing, rinse and repeat…

We never stop to consider that the latest and greatest might not be the best.  So much information comes our way, we don’t have a chance to ask ourselves what kind of information is it?  Information that educates us is different than information that informs us which is different than information we should consider and, finally, information we should implement.  At first glance, we think it’s obvious, but information filters change everything.

As parents, we feel vulnerable and we default to thinking that the more information the better.  We feel most secure when we think we can choose our children’s destinies. Woody Allen used to say his birth announcement read: Mr. & Mrs. Allen are proud to announce the birth of their son, Dr. Woodrow Allen.

But we must never know our children’s destinies or we will raise them toward it.  In Judaism, our destinies are areas of negotiation – that is the meaning of Yom Kippur.  Locking into a vision of destiny creates a narrow view with no free will.

In this week’s parshah, Toldot, Rebecca is pregnant with twins and they are waging a war within her.  She seeks God to find out what is happening. God tells her that she is not carrying two babies but two nations who will live apart.  God tells her one will be mightier than the other and the elder will serve the younger. God tells her their destinies.

For the rest of her life Rebecca is left to wonder if God was describing the future or prescribing it.  Was she supposed to sit and watch it happen or was she supposed to actively make it happen?  In desperation, as time ticks away, she decides she must fulfill God’s words and enacts a plan to make it happen.  Rebecca doesn’t realize her sons had already traded their birthrights, it had already happened. Not knowing how to read the information she was given, Rebecca instructs Jacob to trick his father and a family will be torn apart.  The consequence of the wrong information filter causes Isaac to bestow ancient blessings, with national and land ownership implications of the region, that can still be felt in today’s world. When Isaac has full knowledge of what happened, he affirms his blessings but the family rift is complete.

The Torah commands us to behave a certain way and we take that information as authoritative and instructional.  But what do we do with the information that is more descriptive? When we are told we will be ‘a light onto the nations’, or ‘a holy people’, are we to understand that as our inevitable destiny (descriptive) or as a goal to actively journey toward (prescriptive)?  Do we consider it a birthright or a vision of possibility?

Rebecca prayed for information and God answered her prayer.  But the information alone resulted in divisiveness and enmity.  Not that long ago, fathers weren’t allowed in birthing rooms, it was considered information for women only.  Today, technology invites the world into every moment. The age of information triggers the need to understand that we know very little about how to use the information we access.  

So even when I know something in today’s world, I have to think back to our most ancient of texts and question if I actually know anything about what I know.