Between Chaos & Light

Rosh Hashana is coming.

My water broke in the Italian Market,

two days before my due date, in the June heat of Philadelphia. It wasn’t until ten hours later, at 1am, that I felt the pangs of early labor. I woke my mother—a retired labor and delivery nurse—and the first thing she did was smell me. “Amniotic fluid,” she said. “You’re in labor.” We drove to the birth center, and climbing the steps to the birthing suite felt like getting on a theme park rollercoaster ride. It was a scary one, but the one everyone talks about. We had been waiting hours in line and were ready for our turn.

Each of us has our own birth story – whether we've carried a child, adopted, brought a new project into the world, or birthed new versions of ourselves. We all know what it means to be split open, to be remade by love and challenge.

The Days of Awe are on their way and soon we will all be called to reckon with our own terror as well as what we hope to birth this year. Soon we enter a cosmic birth experience that brings a new year into being, ready or not. 

It’s like this: Rosh Hashana, also called Hayom Harat Olam, or “the day the world is conceived,” is the conception. The Days of Awe that follow are the labor, where we engage in teshuva, a process of return and repentance; like returning to the breath between contractions, we repeatedly turn inward, focusing on what is essential. Finally, we arrive at Yom Kippur when, fasting and exhausted, we teeter between life and death, wondering if and how we’ll be written in the Book of Life, if and how we will make it through.

It is fitting, then, that after the labor, on Simchat Torah, we tell God’s birth story.

This, of course, is the story of creation, which begins the Torah. The Mei HaShiloach—a Hasidic master—makes the birth metaphor explicit, mapping the first few lines of Genesis directly onto the rhythms of childbirth: The "chaos and void" of the universe mirrors the moment of conception through the embryo’s mysterious growth; the "darkness over the surface of the deep" is linked to the nine months of pregnancy, deep with hope and uncertainty; and when "the spirit of God hover[s] over the water," we hover closer to death than to life in a harrowing labor. The baby finally exits the darkness of the womb into the light of life when God says, "Let there be light."^[1] It seems that this tumultuous cycle of creation plays out on the macro and the micro, from the galactic to the deeply personal.

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In the final weeks of my pregnancy, every day my husband Jesse and I would take a quiet morning walk around the neighborhood.

With motions slow and intentional, as if on a meditation retreat, I would coach myself vertical each morning, rolling out of bed gingerly so as not to tug at jostled nerves, narrating the careful choreography that sharing one’s own body with a tiny roommate requires. I was outrageously big then—he was a large baby, though we didn’t know it yet—and my stomach skin had stretched taut, bellybutton forming a knob that poked out of my t-shirt. Walking around that pregnant felt like shouting the secrets of my heart to everyone we passed on the street. Strangers would call out from their porches, “Any day now!” or simply “Good luck!” or tell unsolicited stories about labors gone wrong or right. Some pregnant people, quite understandably, meet comments like these with reticence. But for me, they seemed to cut through the usual separation between us, revealing a world pulsing with shared stories. I had never felt more attuned to the quiet hum of our collective becoming.

When we arrived at the birth center, there were too many babies being born in the proper rooms, so we camped out in the living room. I tossed and turned on a pull out couch, cramping and aching my way through the night, trying to fidget myself into a fix for the unfamiliar pain. The first big contraction shocked and seized me, shook my insides like an earthquake rattles the earth, each rush a seismic wave. It felt like I was splitting, spasming, flooded with sensation. “Look into my eyes,” my mom coached, and I gripped her gaze like a lifeboat. “You’re going fast now,” she said, and I believed her. We were galloping into something.

The forward motion made it possible, somehow, to relax into the tumult. It became immediately clear that it simply did not matter what I thought about what was happening, or my projections of what would happen. The process was going to unfold, for the good or for the bad, for life or for death, and I was not in control. With the singular focus of now, though, I found a flow. I knew the feeling well, from wild sits on meditation retreat, from the time-bending first days of grieving my dad’s death, from scary nights alone on wilderness solo. Nothing to do but ride out the trip.

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Like any good narrative, there are many ways to tell God’s birth story.

In a midrash in Bereshit Rabba, we learn that the world we live in was not the first that God created. Instead, we get a prequel to the creation story as we know it: God created and destroyed multiple worlds before fashioning ours.^[2] In this telling, destruction is woven into the fabric of creation.

In childbirth too, each contraction is a cycle of creation and destruction. As the uterine muscles contract, they move through cycles of electrical depolarization and repolarization, creating and destroying cellular states with each wave. Hormones surge and dissipate, tissues break down and reform, and even the baby moves in a dance of constant repositioning. Birth is iterative, and it requires making and unmaking, building up and breaking down, formation and dissolution. It contains both life and death.

The Days of Awe invite us to engage in our own cycles of creation and destruction. We confront both our potential and our limitations. We let go of parts of ourselves to make way for new ones to emerge. In doing so, together we remake the world, and renew creation. And throughout the journey, the shofar’s moans inspire us to stay with the contractions, to submit to the process of becoming.

In the throes of my own labor, I became a universe in flux. I felt a world being created and destroyed with each contraction. But they weren’t coming fast enough it seemed, weren’t big enough to push the baby down. So came the inversions. The midwives laid me on my side, flipped me over the bed, jiggled my hips, rubbed my belly. They sent me to the garden to power walk and lunge while my husband trailed me, IV in hand.

But finally, thirty-six hours in, I was spent, and wanted off the ride. The exhaustion wasn’t just physical, though I hadn’t slept. The spiritual work of sitting in the in-between, on the threshold of life and death, was so awe-some, so dread-full, so much. Eventually my midwife got an obstetrician, who explained that I needed a C-section. “Do you have any questions?” she asked. “Yes,” I said, completely unfiltered, having been cracked open by hours of unrelenting presence. “What is your advice for navigating this experience spiritually?” She laughed nervously and looked around for help, spooked. “Um…I don’t know. Do you have any other questions?”

This time of year is terrifying, messy, gritty.

It opens us up, and it can hurt. How do we stay with it so that we might birth something new? My mom, who has seen over 10,000 births, has a saying: “Let it hurt.” In other words, get brave and willing to be present to the moment—untamed, treacherous, and holy. This is good advice for being deep in any process, for welcoming anything real and new.

There is a Karliner Hasidic story about this. A misnagid—a skeptic of Hasidism’s emotional intensity—asks the Karliner Rebbe, "Why do you scream when you pray?" In response, the Rebbe takes a pen and jabs it into the misnagid's hand. The misnagid lets out a scream. "When you are in pain, you scream," says the Rebbe.^[3] While his method is odd and cruel, I hear the Karliner Rebbe offering up the same wisdom as the midwife and the machzor: Let it hurt. Live fully in the mess.

This, of course, is not only sound spiritual training for the birth or for the chaggim. It is spiritual training for what comes next.

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After God’s labor, God got the world: awesome and messy and out of control.

After my birth, I got a baby, much the same. They lifted him out of my belly and put his sticky cheek to mine, and in that moment I felt connected to every person who had ever stood on the cliff of profound change and gazed into the rocky ravine below.

Louise Erdrich writes that labor is "an experience in which we are bound up in the circular drama of human fate." It is "intensely spiritual and physical all at once... There is no giving up this physical prayer."^[4] Just like the physical prayer of birth, in the High Holiday season we pray with our whole bodies. We rock back and forth in our tallitot as if soothing ourselves through contractions on hands and knees. The shofar’s cries echo our own, and in the last tekiah gedolah we give it all up. We emerge, shaky and new, scarred and torn, blinking in the light of a new reality.

The world that emerges from creation—whether cosmic or personal—is fundamentally uncertain. In our own time, as we navigate global tragedy, political instability, and rapid change, this uncertainty is laid bare. Every moment is Ne’ila because every moment is unpredictable. The gates are always opening and the gates are always closing. As we sing in the liturgy, we are “clay in the potter's hands,”^[5] our lives shaped by forces beyond our control. Birth is a stark reminder of this precariousness, a moment where life and death sit in uncomfortably close proximity. Every contraction carries the weight of possibility: the potential for new life, but also the shadow of things gone wrong. Yet, bound up in this uncertainty is life and its miracle.

These holy days are initiations into a way of being that is open to this instability, that can relax into the tumult.

And there is a lot of tumult right now. There is a lot of pain to “let hurt.” In this space of uncertainty we are called to be present to the unfolding of creation in all its forms. “Who is wise?” the Talmud asks. “One who sees what is being born.”^[6] May we have the wisdom to see what is being born, and to embrace each other and the world as it is: chaos, void, and light.

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^[1] Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izhbitz, Mei HaShiloach, vol. 1, "Bereshit." Thank you to R. Jonah Winer for pointing me to this Torah.

^[2] Bereshit Rabba 3:7

^[3] Elie Kaunfer, "Non-Cognitive Approaches to Prayer," source sheet, Mechon Hadar, accessed August 15, 2024, https://mechonhadar.s3.amazonaws.com/mh_torah_source_sheets/KaunferNonCognitivePrayer1-26-15.pdf.

^[4] Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 44-46. Thanks to Anna Morrison for giving me this book, the best postpartum gift ever.

^[5] "Ki Hinei KaChomer," in Koren Yom Kippur Machzor, trans. Jonathan Sacks (Jerusalem: Koren Publishers, 2012), 762-764.

^[6] Tamid 32a. Thanks to Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld for this translation of the text in her Commencement Address at Hebrew College in 2022.

Thanks for reading this!

Hi friends! You were added to this list because at some point you signed up to receive updates from me on my life and work. Feel free to bail at any time. I started this Substack because I wanted to share these particular reflections on birth, pain, and Rosh Hashana that have been rolling around my head — and to tell you the truth I’m not sure how often I’ll write on this thing! But if you want to stay posted, great, and if not, no worries.

If you think of someone who might like this Substack or this post, let ‘em know?!

New with me:

I just started my last year (!) of rabbinical school and I’ll be hard at work: I’m serving as the Director of Community Learning at Eden Village Camp, the Sabbatical Rabbi at Congregation Kehilat Shalom in Belle Mead, NJ, and as an educator with the Jewish Learning Collaborative. You can always check my website for what I’m up to.

I would love to see you in person or online in the next couple of months.

You can join me for guided meditations with the Institute for Jewish Spirituality on Mondays, September 30th and & October 14th. I’ll be co-leading Yom Kippur at Temple Hillel B’nai Torah in Boston with the wildly wonderful Rabbi Aliza Schwartz. And my final Avodat Lev services with Urban Adamah — after almost five years running — are November 1st and December 6th. Join us so we can go out in style!

And finally…

…if you’re up for more reading (and are a theology/theodicy nerd), check out my new piece on Evolve, Nothing So Whole as a Broken God.

We’re still selling our Being with Grief creative workbooks, a 60+ page ritual guide, journal, and coloring book for people who’ve lost people.

All of these projects are close to my heart. Thanks for being on my team. And shana tova, a sweet and healing new year to all.

Love,
Chloe

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