A quick note about Pesicha

I want to take a minute here and talk about pesicha.[fn1] And when I say "talk about," I really mean, "complain."

[fn1:] Without going into too much detail, this is the process of opening the Ark and removing the Torah for the public readings that happen (at least) three times a week. See this entry in the Jewish Virtual Library for more information.

Listen -- I know, it's a big honor, and I know it's an important job. And I know that the tradition is that the husband of an expectant mother is given pesicha quite often, as a segulah [fn2] for an easy childbirth. But here's the thing... Pesicha makes me nervous.

[fn2:] Plural, segulot; The word translates roughly as precious/secret, and in this usage means a sort of 'charm,' which is probably the worst and most controversial and offensive translation I could use, but the only one I can think of right now. The good news is that according to the stats, no one but me has read this blog, so I don't have to worry. I'll get back to the whole segulah thing below.

First of all, and this is just my inexperience, I never finish the bits I'm supposed to read in time. So I end up either standing there while the whole tzibbur (congregation) waits or I end up skipping huge swaths of the text. While I usually consider personal moral decisions -- and make no mistake, I consider it a moral decision -- somewhat removed from the concerns of the group's inconvenience, in this case it's actually the group's inconvenience that brings up the question in the first place. Setting aside that there's a halachic weight to tircha d'tzibur, [fn3] there's the fact that a big part of pesicha is itself simply serving as a facilitator; allowing the group access to the Torah. I feel like it's somewhat hypocritical to simultaneously facilitate and impede access.

[fn3:] In making Torah-law decisions (halacha),there is some consideration given to tircha d'tzibura, which is the burden on the congregation. I can not emphasize enough that the consideration given is severely limited, and no one should take it on themselves to make some ridiculous excuse for what they want to do based on this concern.

I've sort of asked about this, and I've gotten better at speeding through the readings. (Which is a problem of itself, because if you really read that stuff, it's pretty beautiful and seems awfully deep, but speeding through it forces me to miss a lot of that beauty and depth.) That isn't the problem that really bothers me, though.

It's the whole segulah thing. You have to start by understanding what, exactly, is going on with segulot in the first place. We can't be dealing with any kind of magic or hocus-pocus. Judaism certainly countenances mysticism, and more than countenances but propounds an understanding that, to steal a fabulous line, "there are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," but at the same time it (and I) reject, categorically and necessarily, an assertion that there is more in Heaven or Earth than is under the hand of Hashem.

What's going on with segulot is basically an idea of reflection -- of midda-keneged-midda (measure for measure). The idea seems to me to be that the way you deal with the world will be reflected in the way Hashem directs the world to deal with you; the energies you send out will affect the shape of the energy He sends down.

So, when an oni (poor person) asks you for tzedakka (charity), and you make it your business to give them money without making them wait, and with a smile, and with ease... then Hashem, in providing your needs, will do so in as quick and easy a way as possible. (Obviously, there is a more complex system at work, but a fuller investigation will have to wait.)

Given that, the segulah parallels with opening the ark and taking out the Torah are pretty obvious, and I find myself thinking about them a lot when I'm called for pesicha. I want G's labor to go quickly, but not so quickly that I can't get us to the hospital in time, so when I walk up to the ark I am quick, but deliberate. I want her to efface and dialate quickly and painlessly, so I am careful to quickly and smoothly open the ark. I want the baby to be born quickly and painlessly for all involved, so I try to quickly and carefully and smoothly get the Torah out of the Ark. Finally, I look forward to holding the baby myself, so I try to get the Torah as quickly as possible into the hands of the person who's going to take it through the next steps of the ritual.

I'll be honest; I've taken it so far as to be extra-careful not to bump into anyone or anything on my way up there, because I don't want to get into any fender-benders on the way to the hospital.

And to be quite honest, that scares me a bit. Because I gotta tell you, I daven shacharis [fn4] during the week at a place where the ark is a little small, and the Torah is a little big, and not a few times have I knocked the top of the Torah on the top of the ark while taking it out. The doors stick a little, too, and a few times I've had to sort of yank 'em open pretty hard. None of this bodes tremendously well for G, and I'm feeling the pressure.

[fn4:] daven: lit, "of the fathers," meaning the scheduled and structured prayer set out for us, in its basic form, by the Forefathers Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov (a/k/a Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob). The three basic mandated prayers are morning, afternoon, and evening, called shacharis, mincha and maariv, respectively.

Now, fine, I'm being preyy tongue-in-cheek here, and at the end of the day of course I'm not really compaining about pesicha, nor am I really worried that a sloppy pesicha on my part will somehow lead to a difficult birth and troubles for G. and the baby. But as a good friend of mine has said often enough, "we laugh because it's funny; we laugh because it's true." Of course I'm not really worried.

Except maybe a little.

--FD

So, here it is...

So, here it is. I'm at work and should be working... And instead I'm thinking about my incipient fatherhood. There are miracles hidden everywhere if you search for them, and then there are the miracles that are so obvious you'd have to be blind to miss them.

I'm trying to decide how "frum" to make the blog. I'm not going to publicize this in any significant way, so I've no reason to assume anyone's playing along at home, but in the same way that I will go exploring on the web sometimes and come up with treasures it's possible that someone might stumble into my little briar patch and enjoy it enough to tell their friends. And of course, I've got this ego thing, so that if I do keep this up I'm sure I'll eventually let it slip to someone. I'm trying to decide on the level of universality I want this text to have, and how welcoming I want it to be to those who aren't frum or aren't yeshivish or even maybe aren't Jewish.

Of course, I've titled it "FrumDad," so at some level I've made this decision already, desu-ka? Probably. What I'll do is write the way I speak and think, and then throw in translations, footnotes, and parentheticals to help along those whose schema don't overlap sufficiently with mine. Which means I have to redo the first paragraph....

So, here it is. I'm at work and should be working... and instead I'm thinking about my incipient fatherhood. There are miracles hidden everywhere if you look closely enough, and then sometimes the miracles are so clear that they threaten bechira (free will).

Right now, in my holy wife's belly, she's making a baby. Creation ex nihilo -- something from nothing. From a "putrid drop" [fn1] and a magical half-cell, a whole (please G'd), living (please G'd), breathing (please G'd), healthy (please G'd) human. G. [fn2] is eight months along, and she's getting big. I like to say she has her own gravity, but she fails to find this amusing. But the amazing thing is that the baby's already got parts. As much as the sonograms are amazing, the truly amazing thing is seeing an elbow poke out of your wife's belly, or getting --as I have a few times already -- whacked in the head when I put my face up to G's belly and sing. The baby likes to hear me sing. Or the baby's trying to shut me up. We don't know yet. But I like to think the former.

[fn1:] Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) 3:1

[fn2:] This being a kind-of anonymous blog, I'm using the initial "G" for my wife's name. Actually, it's not even really her initial, but it's relevant.

I can't get over this. And I can't understand how anyone could ever get over it. You want to think this is a fortuitous confluence of time and protein? Some sort of primordial soup gets hit by lightning and a jillion years later I'm singing to a late-model monkey in a bag of saltwater? Go ahead, beleive that. You're an idiot.

There's a thing, in the baby's heart; a hole, effectively. While the fetus is in utero, it doesn't really need its lungs, and in fact if it pumps a lot of blood to the lungs the lungs could get damaged. More importantly, the fetus is getting all this great oxygenated blood from the umbilical cord that should get to the fetus' body ASAP. So there's an opening between the Right Atrium (which is getting that great blood by the short route from the umbilical cord) to the Left Atrium (which would normally be getting the fresh-from-the-lungs blood) and out it goes again (via the Left Ventricle) to the fetus' body. It's called the "Foramen Ovale" (the "FO"). Now here's the cool bit. At birth, if the FO doesn't close, and I mean pretty much all the way, and pretty much right away, the baby can't breathe, because blood's not getting to the lungs. So (hold onto your seats here, kids) as soon as the baby takes its first breath the FO "[c]loses at birth due to decreased flow from placenta and IVC to hold open foramen, and more importantly because of increased pulmonary blood flow and pulmonary venous return to left heart causing the pressure in the left atrium to be higher than in the right atrium. The increased left atrial pressure then closes the foramen ovale against the septum segundum. The output from the right ventricle now flows entirely into the pulmonary circulation." (from http://mcb.berkeley.edu/courses/mcb135e/fetal.html)

If that's too complicated, let me simplify: There's a little gateway in the fetal heart that the fetus needs to be healthy, but that will kill the baby if it doesn't close within minutes (seconds) of birth. So it stays open during gestation and closes, tightly and completely, within moments of birth.

What I can't figure is how anyone could ignore the hand of Hashem [fn3] in this? But then of course, I'm a Chozer B'Tshuva [fn4] myself, and I understand very well how someone could look at the miracle and see accident. Beautiful accident, true, but still accident. The watchmaker argument [fn5] is not and has never been compelling, because it is defeated by the posit of an infinite number of broken watches, and in fact an infinite number of beaches. The answer isn't in pointing to how improbably lucky we are to be asking the questions. The answer is asking, "why not even luckier? Why not with a watchmaker, too?"

[fn3:] lit. "The Name"; God, especially in the aspect of relating to humans.

[fn4:] lit. "Returnee in Repentance"; an individual who chooses to become an religious Jew after a period of time during which he or she was not observant. Usually implicit is that the person was not raised orthodox, but the term can be applied to someone who was raised orthodox and then went "off the derech (path)."

[fn5:] An argument for the existence of God from design, first presented by William Paley in 1802 or so. The argument is, roughly, that the order apparent in the universe implies an order-or much as a watch found on the road would imply a watch-maker.

The answer is faith. Which I always had, in one form or another. Faith and serious thought about the implications of that faith, which is what it took me a while to get to.

Okay; Wow. This has gone pretty far afield. And it's taken a lot more time out of my workday than I had planned. So I'm going to end it now. I probably won't post again until after Shavuot. [fn6] If anyone reads this before then, have a good holiday or weekend or whatever.

[fn6:] lit. "Weeks"; a really excellent holiday. See the OU site or the Aish site for more info.

--FD