Is reading Hannah’s story on Rosh Hashanah good for feminism?

Published: 16 September 2017

Last updated: 5 March 2024

I was nine weeks pregnant on the first day of Rosh Hashanah last year. Becoming pregnant had not been easy for me. But by that ninth week of my pregnancy, my memories of the treatments and yearning of all that came before were eclipsed by the discomfort of early pregnancy: nausea, exhaustion, irritability, sore breasts… you know the drill.

I spent most of the Shul service supervising my busy toddler. But I did catch a small portion of the story of Hannah, the Haftorah that is read on the first day of Rosh Hashanah.

If you’re drawing a blank on the story of Hannah, let me refresh your memory: Hannah was one of the two women married to a man named Elkanah. His other wife, Penina, had given birth to many children. But Hannah couldn’t even have one. She went to the Temple to pray to God to give her a child. The High Priest, Eli, happened to be present and witnessed Hannah moving her lips without making a sound. Eli watched Hannah’s strange mutterings and concluded that she must be drunk. He told her off. Hannah defended herself. She was not drunk, she explained. Rather she was praying to God for a child. Eli had a change of heart and blessed her. Bam! She fell pregnant. She had a baby. That baby was Samuel, eventual prophet of the Israelites. And, Hannah’s “strange mutterings” would ultimately serve as the template for personal Jewish prayer in Jewish tradition.

I cringed as I read the story last year. It bothered me that we learn about Hannah, like most women in the Torah, through her reproductive status. So often in the Torah, a woman’s capacity to be a mother is the chief marker of her identity. Sarah laughs when she is told she will have a child in her nineties. Leah is celebrated for her fecundity. And everyone remembers Hannah as the woman who can’t have kids (and then invents prayer).

In case there was any doubt, the Talmud brings this message home when it offers us a description of the content of Hannah’s prayer at the Temple. According to the Talmud, Hannah had asked God why God had bothered to give her breasts if she couldn’t use them for suckling a child (Berachot, 31B):

“Sovereign of the Universe, among all the things that You created in a woman, You have not created one without a purpose, eyes to see, ears to hear, a nose to smell, a mouth to speak, hands to do work, legs to walk with, breasts to give suck. These breasts that You have put on my heart, are they not to give suck? Give me a son, so that I may suckle with them.”

Ouch! A nose for breathing, legs to walk, and breasts to feed our babies. There I was, in all my pregnancy discomfort, on one of the most important days of the Jewish calendar, being reminded that this was my main function: child-bearer and child-rearer.

Surely, by reading and re-reading these sorts of stories, we are reinforcing a deeply disempowering vision of what it is to be a woman in Judaism. Were there no other narratives about women to read on Rosh Hashanah? To this young Jewish feminist, reading Hannah’s story as part of this central holiday service felt decidedly unfeminist.

That’s what I thought last Rosh Hashanah. Enough with women and babies. There is more to us than that. The story of Hannah, I concluded last year, was not good for the feminists.

But this coming Rosh Hashanah, I will read the story of Hannah with different eyes. Because that pregnancy I described above ended at twenty-seven weeks when I delivered a stillborn baby. This year, as I read of Hannah’s grief during the Rosh Hashanah service, I will also be grieving for what would have been my daughter. And I will probably find comfort in the fact that one of the most significant services in the Jewish calendar is partly devoted to recounting this universal narrative: the story of a woman yearning for a child. An experience that feels so invisible and lonely will be recounted to an audience of millions of people around the world.

I am not looking to obscure the sexism of the text. It is still true that the text of the Torah reflects a time in which a woman was valued mainly for her reproductive capabilities. This is still a view that feminists are fighting today both inside and outside of the Jewish community.

But the Torah is also filled with stories about people. And as we move in and out of the different stages of our lives, as readers of the text we will sometimes identify strongly with those people. At other times, we will feel challenged and perhaps indignant. But therein lies the power of reading and re-reading the same ancient text every year: it angers and it comforts. It alienates and it provides solace. We see how vastly different we are from societies that have come before us, and how similar we are to the individuals who lived in those societies.

So now I am a little bit grateful that the story of infertility and pregnancy loss features so frequently in the Torah. I feel that my story – and the story of so many women before and after me – is strongly reflected in our cultural mythology. I am grateful that this unique, yet painful, story – so familiar to so many people – occupies prime “real estate” in the Rosh Hashanah service. Hannah sheds light on the silent pain of struggling with fertility. The rabbis articulate the tragic quality of not having a child almost perfectly. By placing a uniquely female story at the centre of the service, the Talmud is doing something positively feminist, albeit unintentionally.