Toby Axelrod

Being Fruitful: On Forms of Creation

[German]

Ki Tetze, or Isaiah 54, is a particularly meaningful haftarah [Shabbat reading portion of the Prophets] to me. It was my bat mitzvah haftarah in 1969. And I took ownership of it back then, sensing that this poetic text was destined to help me in the future.

In the text, God speaks to a woman who has no children. “More numerous are the children of the desolate one than the children of when she was united with her husband, saith God.”

I did not know then, when I was 13 years old, that I would reach my present age with no family of my own. To find the right man and to have children with him was my ultimate goal in life. For some, this is not a goal at all. I respect the choices of others. But for me, to be without my own family is a painful experience. It is a situation with which I am learning to live, while I still hope my dreams may be fulfilled one day.

No, it is not my choice to have no children. Not directly, at any rate. I am one of those who came of age in a time of conflicting messages. I believed (and still do) in romance and in independence. My ideal husband would be a friend and a lover and a partner in life. I believed in being sexual and sensual but not a sex-object. I believed in being Jewish and at the same time having no boundaries (I no longer see the boundaries as discriminatory). I wanted to have four children -- two older, two younger, and two in the middle. And I did not think about the clock.

Who knew that the modern goals of being a career woman, developing one’s God-given capabilities and insuring financial independence would take so much time from the pursuit of relationships? Who knew that so many young men would still be seeking traditional wives? Who knew that the mixed message of our liberal milieu - love thy neighbor but marry a Jew - would prove so challenging? And who knew that the ultimate warning, blasted from the synagogue pulpit - “Don’t finish Hitler’s job! You must have Jewish children!” - would prove so paralyzing?

When I look back today, I see that our generation stood on a newly built bridge. We were the post-Holocaust generation and the message was clear. We had to rebuild the decimated Jewish nation, child by child.

But for those of us not encompassed in the shtetl-like cuccoon of ultra-Orthodoxy, where “matches made in Heaven” were arranged by parents here on earth, there remained the enormous challenge of finding our way to both family and career, in a society where new possibilities and responsibilities abounded but where there were not enough role models to lead the way.

The freedoms we inherited are liberating and challenging. They require discipline against overindulgence. Our society indirectly encourages us to think of ourselves as immortal, through the distractions of material comfort, physical appearance and entertainment – all of which money can buy. And meanwhile, we grow older.

I say “we” because I see you all around me, both in Germany and in the USA: heterosexual women in their late 30s to 50s who are still looking for a man with whom to share life and create a family. I do not know as many men in the same situation.

Let us also not postpone our goals any longer. And, if we cannot physically bring children into the world ourselves, let us look for new ways to fulfill those dreams, to be fruitful if we wish to be and to help achieve “Jewish continuity” but not in order to avoid being labeled an accomplice to Hitler.

The very poetic text of Ki Tetze contains some possible answers for men and women who have not yet found the partner they seek, who are looking for ways to fulfill their creative role. Ki Tetze implies that a forsaken bride will be “gathered up again” and that God’s love “will not move from thee, and the bond of My peace not vacillate.” The text sounds loving and tender, despite the implication that the woman depends on her husband or on God for her fulfillment.

One common interpretation of the text is that the woman represents the people Israel and that God is promising to bring them back to full bloom. But it also can be seen as a representation of creative fulfillment for those without children. It still involves nurturing a new generation, the kind of renewal and inspiration that children bring. It involves the need that many of us feel, to help, protect and guide those in need. It also involves the desire to express our spirituality through music, art, writing, through the creation of medicines and machines that improve human life.

So the haftarah Ki Tetze is about creation. But it is not about one kind of creation. To say we were created in God’s image is to say we are creative beings. We do not look like God but have the capacity to act like God. Not by ruling over others, not by making something from nothing, but by making something of ourselves that goes beyond ourselves to affect others positively.  An inherently Godlike quality of creation is that, once made, it takes on a life of its own. Each of our creations has the capacity to create.

I can still chant the first few lines of my Ki Tetze without checking the text. My bat mitzvah was the first in our family, which at least on my father’s side had very traditional roots. There was never any question that I would have a bat mitzvah, and my paternal grandfather, an orthodox rabbi, came to the service and even got up on the bimah and spoke – about the traditional  role of Jewish women.

You might think I had paid attention, but I was too focused on my feet, which were painfully jammed into tiny white high-heeled shoes. Instead, my mind wandered to my grandfather’s little shul [synagogue], where men and women sat separately but children roamed free, free to open the secret door where the Shofar was hidden, free to feel the velvet of the Torah curtain. It must be written somewhere that children should be unfettered in the synagogue. They are a reminder of that most important word at the beginning of Ki Tetze: Jubilate! And they are reminders of the joyous unruliness of creation.

When I look at the words of my old haftarah, I see many images of fruitfulness. The days of harvest come shortly after the days of atonement. If we are ready for them, there are many fruits of which we can partake, and many ways in which the fruits of our labor can fulfill others. As it says in Ki Tetze, God is “the God of love of all the hosts of His creations.”

Toby Axelrod is the Germany correspondent for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. She has been based in Berlin since October 1997, when she began a year-long Fulbright journalism grant. She recently also held the position of assistant director of the Berlin office of the American Jewish Committee. For more than nine years, from 1988 to 1997, she was a staff writer at the New York Jewish Week, an English language weekly with a circulation of about 90,000, writing feature stories, covering news and editing the Long Island regional edition. At the same time, she wrote a weekly column on grass-roots Manhattan politics for the weekly New York Observer.

Ms. Axelrod was born in 1956 and grew up on Long Island, in New York. Her mother is a native New Yorker, and her father came to America with his parents from Poland in 1927.  She has a younger sister and brother. Ms. Axelrod has won numerous awards for her work, and is currently working on a book about how Germans confront their its Nazi past. Her books for teenagers on the rescue of Jews in Nazi Europe, the experiences of youths who survived the Nazi concentration camps, and the White Rose German student anti-Nazi resistance group were published by the Rosen Publishing Group in New York.