The experience of birth has functioned through the ages as a vital metaphor foundational to all fields of art, philosophy, religion and literature. This book highlights the significance of birth in Jewish culture, as a challenge to existential philosophy and the centrality of death in Western culture.
On 10 September 2022, the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis held an evening to discuss Kara's enchanting new book Birth Kabbala and Psychoanalysis. The event was a round-table conversation between three women (who are scholars, psychoanalysts, writers and a Rabbi) on the different threads connecting and disconnecting Jewish thinking and psychoanalysis around the topic of birth. Below are some of the thoughts and presentations from the speakers: Dr Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel, Dr Yael Pilowsky Bankirer and Rabbi Dr Tali Artman Partock
I want to start with a few personal words: this book wrote me, more than I wrote it. It insisted on revealing itself, in spite of all the obstacles and complications that surfaced during this long process. For ten years I have struggled to find words for the indescribable soul's journey during its descent into this world and the maternal unspeakable experience. In the course of the book, I claim that greater than the fear of death, which is at the heart of existential philosophy in Western culture, all of us know from the inside the ‘fear of not being born’ in the full sense of this term, namely being physically born but not spiritually or psychologically. We must recognise ourselves as ‘being born’ creatures – with all the fear and pain this encompasses; we must recognise the beauty and depth of this impossible gift which we received here: our body, our soul, our life.
The book is weaving together two diverse and dissimilar worlds: Kabbalah, which flourished in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries in Provence and Spain; and psychoanalysis, founded by Freud in Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. Despite the anachronism, both these worlds flourished in Europe, and I believe both highlight the beauty and grace of humanistic thought and the choice of love, creativity and inner life.
The profound questions addressed by Kabbalah and by psychoanalytic theory intersect at critical points. Those two bodies of knowledge are concerned with the striking idea that all of us have an ‘inner world’, a soul, which continually develops throughout our life. The spirit is linked to the body and its hidden aspects influence our breath. Both fields concentrate on the poetic realm, mythical symbolism, and the effort to decipher the language of dreams. They are both similar in the weight attributed to the erotic experience, and in the presence of sexuality in the theosophical system and interpersonal relations.
The healing and creative power of speech finds expression both in Kabbalah and in psychoanalysis, and at the same time one can recognise the difficulty of describing the fullness of emotional and mystical experience using language, with its partial and limited nature. Another important point of similarity between the two fields is the centrality of the body. In Kabbalah, it is reminiscent of the semiotic concept of memory and the sense of skin and envelopment, and in psychoanalysis it comes up often in the discussion of psychosomatic phenomena. In the world of Kabbalah, the body constitutes an instrument of tikkun (‘repair’, ‘restoration‘) and the point of connection between the human and the divine, which is similar to the world of therapy, in which the body constitutes a key to the psyche and its secrets.
What is Kabblah? The meaning of this word in Hebrew is ‘receiving’, and perhaps can also be understood as returning, teshuva, shiva, coming back to the inner source of our life and to the upper womb from which we were all born. Sometimes, receiving is harder than giving, because it requires acceptance and recognition of imperfection, defect and absence (in man or in God). Unlike in philosophy, the God of the kabbalists is
not perfect and He and She (his consort, the Schekhinah) need humanity in order to develop and be reborn.
In Kabbalah, just like in psychoanalysis, the soul must go through a long and painful journey until it achieves maturity and is able to heal its inner cracks or at least enjoy the light that goes through them (as Leonard Cohen says, ‘There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in‘).
The soul doesn't start with the meeting of sperm and egg. And it never dies, even when the body lies buried in the grave. In the main kabbalistic composition written in Castile in the thirteenth century, the Zohar, the divine emanations – sefirot – continue to give birth to each other eternally, thereby creating the worlds and reality, as well as our bodies and souls. Everything in the divine realm takes part in the process of intercourse, fertilisation, conception, regeneration, birth – all of reality starts with the erotic movement, from the desire to solve the mystery of soul and birth, and experience the places in which we are ‘other to ourselves’.
Gershom Scholem, founder of the research into Kabbalah, wrote in his diary on July 1918 that ‘psychoanalysis is a dreadful thing. [It's pointless to contradict theoretically because its results are correct, and then you'll have to look for a better foundation].’ It might be that Scholem, like Freud, was afraid of the ‘return of the repressed’. Freud himself was ambivalent regarding the ‘too muchness’ of the feminine oceanic feeling that is involved in the discourse of birth. Thus, he turned to the Oedipal conflict of the child's later ages. Yet we are all indebted to Freud for mentioning the impressive caesura of birth which paved the way for his followers.
When reflecting on motherhood, pregnancy and birth, I also include the field of gender theory in the encounter between Kabbalah and psychoanalysis. Maternal subjectivity is a complicated subject, especially when we try to combine mythical ancient thought with modern awareness. We pay a price in the deletion of femininity and in particular, the erasure of the importance of ‘mother’. In this book I aimed to deal with birth not as an ‘unthought known’ (to use Bollas' terminology) which is not yet thought, but rather as an idea which can be carried inside and we can ‘think about’. Thus I discuss different perspectives of the ‘third‘
which emerge from the fusion of Jewish mysticism with contemporary psychoanalytical and gender theories.
The wonder of one body that bursts out, emerges from and ‘transits’ through another body emphasises the centrality of the mother in the miracle of birth. The mythical thought (midrash and Kabbalah) sometimes sees God in the role of Mother, yet in other cases it presents the two of them – God and Mother – as a contradiction. For example, in one of the sources from Genesis Rabba (a midrash from the fifth century), the sages compare the womb to a tomb and a grave, to boiling guts, to a jail or to an inside-out open purse from which the coins (and thus baby) fall out. Suddenly the mother is seen as the enemy, not only objectified but also demonised.
During the process of writing, I have tried to reflect on the hidden voices and multiple attitudes towards the Mother/God as the source of being, and to include the range of emotions such as dread, rage and despair as well as hope and desire. These beautiful yet exasperating texts invite us to go on a journey to the depths of our soul in order to meet the colourfulness of inner life.
Birth is a paradoxical ‘site’: it is a continuous phenomenon and a unique, one-time event; it is a symbolic occurrence and an exclusively female and motherly act. Birth is the ‘excess’, the place in which the human ‘overflows’ beyond the borders of its being, and deviates from its finality. Birth is much more than the birth of an individual, as it partakes in the most universal phenomenon we can imagine. At the same time it is the most private and personal experience, for the birth of one person is unlike the birth of any other.
The book quotes a midrash that describes the embryo's sleep in the mother's womb as the sleep of one who enjoys great happiness, knowing ‘all the Torah from beginning to end’.1 A light burns above its head, and it sees from one end of the world to the other. Paradoxically, in the crammed space inside the womb everything is possible. In the fluids of the womb
– fluids of compassion in Hebrew – almost all can be contained, and the body dreams itself into infinity. It is curled up in the narrow womb but stretches beyond all borders. Then, when birth comes, in one moment everything changes, ‘the closed organ opens and the open one closes‘, as the midrash says. The maternal–embryonic relationship disappears, the subject emerges and, as it describes, everything turns inside out and upside down.
Through the kabbalistic writings, Kara envisions a caesura of birth as a breaking point, a transition from the infinity of the divine to the physical life with its material limits. The mother stands on the border of this emergence, holding the gate between these realms, knowing that body and mind, physical and psychical, the material and the divine are deeply connected. ‘The maternal body is always there, a witness’, she writes, a witness ‘for the breaking line between the finite and the infinite’.
But as many have pointed out, although two subjects are born in this transition – the mother and the baby – one is often neglected. This split that happens with birth is also one that incarcerates the maternal outside the borders of culture, of subjectivity, of language. Within the domain of language, the name of the mother is written in white ink – to use Hélène Cixous' term. Outside her bodily existence the mother disappears or remains only as a stem from which culture grows and language originates; the maternal is a necessary dimension in the subject's movement into the world, language and culture, but at the same time an aspect that will forever stay on the border of language, and thus the mother will never have words for herself. Even in psychoanalysis, which is devoted to the search for subjectivities, thinking about the maternal follows the prevailing cultural views, and more often than not the mother is portrayed through the child's or the baby's eyes as an object for the subject: She is the first object of attachment for the baby, she is the object of first desire, she is the means of nourishment, the good breast, the bad breast, the alpha function, the holding container, the frustrating function, the admiring gaze. She is the safe base from which the child can walk away, and the substrate through which the subject is created. In all these, the maternal is reduced to material
object, bodily parts, a function – devoid of spirit, devoid of life, devoid of subjectivity.
The Hebrew word for motherhood, imahut, holds this complexity and similarly echoes this process of abjection that occurs with the birth of the subject. The word motherhood – imahut contains within it the process of giving birth to the subject while detaching and rejecting the maternal, abjecting the mother's body, or perceiving the mother as body. The ‘non’ (i) is the removal, the rejection, the renunciation of what is not the essence, of the maternal (essence can be translated as mahut). The subject, and the essence (mahut) is reborn each time out of the negation of what it is not -(imahut), the mother.
Indeed, under the Oedipal pattern in which subjectivity means the negation of motherhood, the mother is imprisoned as a radical otherness who sits on the rim of language and is always without words. She is the absolute otherness, an immaterial matter, the marking of absence, and nothingness. However, as Bion writes, the no-thing, which interestingly can also be translated to Hebrew as i-mahut (motherhood) – is not nothingness but an essential element in psychic life that can give birth to things and create new meanings. Meaning itself is not a thing but a no-thing, he writes, and when the no-thing is denied – when ‘no-things’ are treated as objects or as nothingness, the creative space inherent to it collapses, and in the case of the maternal and birth, we lose the ability to think, to imagine, to understand its various aspects beyond the mother's corporality.
Not to say that this process of maternal negation is not present in some of the kabbalist thinking as well, but what I discovered in this reading is that in the Kabbalah the physical body, our corporality and the divine are always connected. Kara is presenting kabbalistic thinking in which the body and the divine are intertwined, they give birth to one another or are connected in conflict, like the two primordial twins that have been sawed apart and rejoined together back to back. Not only does the divine give birth to matter but also the material, the body, gives birth to the divine in an ongoing circular flow that perhaps alleviates the question of who was there first and allows a thinking beyond this familiar binary separation
between physical and psychical/the body and the divine (which of course rests on the gendered separation of male and female).
Holding these two parts – the body and the divine – together within the maternal, Kara is able to free the mother from the prisons of her corporality. Acknowledging the impossibility of the task at hand and the ‘inability of language to describe and interpret’ the dramatic event of birth, Kara courageously embarks on a journey into this unknown realm. Without aiming to cut the umbilical cord of maternal bodily experience but through it, the mother is granted the breath of life – maternal subjectivity. Carefully weaving strings of thoughts between Kabbalah and psychoanalysis, she lays out a delicate Möbius movement between different elements, untying the chains of motherhood, and bringing back the maternal and birth out of her nothingness, and into the realm of the Bionian no-thing as a space through which new bodily-thoughts and corporal-meanings can begin to evolve.
In two short remarks I would like to address two often overlooked experiences of pregnancy and birth. One has to do with the way the rabbinic literature of late antiquity intercepts linear theological narratives, and the other with showing how the reality of the caesura of birth and death is actually a psychological relief from the hold of fantasy, and an opportunity to overcome it through the real.
The ancient mystery of the complete and utter connectedness between the act of sexual intercourse and the appearance, nine month later, of a new human being is so great, that both ancient lore and modern thought seem to neglect what happens in those nine months in favour of thinking of what comes (and even who comes) before and after.
The existential, psychological reality of pregnancy, with its uncanny mix of the strange and the familiar, the new that is old and the old that is new, the body within body, does not appear in any of the ‘what to expect when you are expecting’ books. The literature on the trauma of birth is all about the baby and often fails to mention the mother. Even Irigaray,
who can see a woman as two, does not think of the reality of a woman as three. Who talks, even in philosophy and psychoanalysis, on pregnancy itself from the perspective of a woman?
Midrash, Kabbalah and other Jewish sources, tend, as most texts written by men, to focus on the man's experience, be it before, during or after birth. What the rabbis know of women's bodies they often know through their own experience, i.e. through the encounter with the female body in times of intercourse, and through the accepted medical knowledge of their time. They do not tend to ask women about what they know, but nevertheless they try to decipher the most mysterious process the female body is capable of. When they think of women they are not always kind. Yet, every once in a while, in a moment of life and grace, a woman's body, as well as a woman's experience, enters the discourse.
Ruth's book and the layer that it adds through thinking with Kabbalah and its unique texts – is creating a crack through which the reality of pregnancy and birth can appear, and from a woman's perspective. In one of its chapters she discusses a piece of rabbinic lore which I wish to read anew. The Babylonian Talmud tells us that women die while giving birth for three transgression: not lighting Shabbat candles, not observing the rules of menstrual purity and not leaving out a piece of the Challah dough (Mishnah Shabbat 2:6). All these three precepts are linked to Eve who ‘turned off the light of Adam, spilled the life of Adam, and brought the end of Adam’. This text, while it blames all women for the sin of Eve, actually gives every individual woman a way not to carry it. I cannot go here into the meaning of the life-giving and life-taking power to which women are ascribed here, but rather wish to focus on the idea of birth as a moment of divine judgement and how the reading of ancient texts by real women changes them. In the text, surviving childbirth or dying during it are seen as results of a secret, invisible reality in which the woman is judged for her actions by God. If she manages to hold on to masculinity and femininity in a way the rabbis see as correct, she will not only give life but also stay alive. If she fails, like Eve, she will bring death into the world both for her and for her baby. It is not the details that I wish to take from this text but I would like to draw from it the idea that women
have a somewhat different relationship with divine judgement than men. Their day of judgement does not only arrive just once, at the end of days, but is rather lived through, and possibly more repeatedly.
Both religion and psychanalysis were so focused on the baby, the real child, that they thought much less about the mother and her experience. A child is only born once; however, a mother may give birth more than once. For her, unlike for the baby, birth is a repeating experience. She was born herself, and may die giving birth, or think she is dying, yet rise and give birth again and be born again as a different mother, going through an experience that very much resembles, as Ruth has pointed out, death and resurrection. Once the religious framework is brought into the discussion, new questions get asked: How can one human body contain and hold not only two bodies but two souls? Different souls with each different baby? What are the structural similarities between the day of birth and the day of death, and the Day of Judgement? All of these questions still need answering. I shall attempt but one. If women, according to this text, stand in front of the seat of judgement when they give birth, what happens when they give birth multiple times? Do they answer each time for less and less? Just for what has happened between births? Or for their whole life? How many lives does a mother have? Does she get to live her afterlife while she is still on this earth as she has been judged and received life once more?
What kind of unknown becomes known to women, and what kind of known becomes obscure? I argue that through this text, through the repetition of the judgement and coming back to life, a caesura of death is born. A mother, a woman's death, becomes just another point, even if a meaningful and powerful one, yet just a point in the continuum of her cycle of births, standing before the judgement seat, and either passing the test and going back to life, or failing it and dying. The horror of judgement, the horror of death, once it has been experienced(/s) cyclically somehow diminishes. The mother, unlike the baby, emerges from birth alive again. She creates a loophole in the arc that leads from birth to death. When death arrives, standing in judgement one more time does not seem so daunting.
Jewish texts do not break the phallic linear logic in this way alone. It is not only the mother, but also the baby which gets a new caesura, this time before birth and with conception. The birth of a child, as many psychoanalysts have taught us, does not begin as he/she emerges from his/her mother's womb. The parents' and often the whole family's fantasies and traumas affect every stage of pre-birth: from conception, to pregnancy, birth and the early years. We are born, to speak psychoanalysis in classic Jewish language, not only with the soul that was put in us by God, but with multiple soul fractions which somehow infiltrated the womb, the birth canal, and nursing. The idea of the pre-life of the baby is thought through in a religious context, not as intergenerational trauma or projections, but as the journey of the soul.
In an anonymous mystical text called ‘The Tractate of the Formation of the Baby’, the soul, summoned by God, refuses to enter into the smelly drop of semen (the text's words, not mine). It has to be forced into it by God, after the persuasive campaign of an angel. The soul is happy and comfortable where it is, and the new adventure does not seem all that tempting. It is not only the anxiety of being incarnated that is manifested there, but also the gamble both mother and baby take on each other, and on life. Once the soul enters the body within a body, there is no going back. Is this the baby I was hoping for? Is this the mother I was hoping for? The life I was hoping for? It is not only the mother who does not know what the baby will be like, or will bring with him/her, but also the soul of the baby that wonders the same about the mother. Giving room to this space of pre-birth fantasy in this religious text, focusses us on how the moment of birth, like death, brings comfort in the loosening of the grip of fantasy and in making room for reality. Yet the mystery does not end. How much does a mother know about what goes on in her baby's mind, and how much does the baby know about the mother? However, once born, some things become known. The baby is hungry, the baby is dirty, the mother is hungry, the mother is dirty, and actions fill in the spaces. In death, like in birth, the body needs washing, the body needs tucking in, a ritual has to be planned. Actions build steps out of the void. Pregnancy is an experience of loss of control. First, little by little, as the
body changes, and then in the climax of birth there is again a profound experience of both agency and loss of control.
In one of the most beautiful and moving parts of the book, sadly omitted in the English translation, Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel sets two columns running in parallel – one which describes the physical process of birth, which includes the death of consciousness, i.e. the temporary silence of the pre-frontal lobe and giving over to the more ancient parts of the brain; and some reflection, the curses of Eve and a myth that she is herself creating. It is an example of the unique way in which she binds together biography, myth, scholarship of Judaism and of psychoanalysis, and also of the way that a birthing woman's body can bring back its experiences into the world and enrich our understanding of it, of us. In her book, the miracle not only of the body but of the psyche's strength is ever present. Not only in the psyche's ability to stand pain, or keep hope alive, or give up, but also in surrendering or not surrendering to the process, to the reality of our animal instincts and of our cultural narratives.
If the soul is good enough, the Talmud taught us, the body will eventually triumph and the baby will be born. The soul of the birthing woman, even if she rejects the texts that speak of her, nevertheless learns something: the exact depth of pain she can endure without dying, the exact depth of the abyss into which she can stare without losing herself. That she can die and will live again. And if she is anything like Ruth, and we are afforded another fortunate opportunity, she too will come and tell us about it.
Birth in Kabbalah and Psychoanalysis, volume 18 in the series Perspectives on Jewish Texts and Contexts, by Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel, is published by De Gruyter (Berlin, 2022),
We would like to thank Shireen Noor and Luisa Bloom at the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis for organising the event.
‘What does an embryo resemble when it is in the bowels of its mother? Folded writing tablets […] Its head lies between its knees, its mouth is closed, and its navel is open. It eats what its mother eats and drinks what its mother drinks, but it produces no excrement because otherwise it might kill its mother. As soon, however, as it sees the light, the closed organ opens and the open one closes, for if that had not happened the embryo could not live even one single hour. A light burns above its head, and it looks and sees from one end of the world to the other […] And do not be astonished by this, for a person sleeping here might see a dream in Spain. And there is no time in which a man enjoys greater happiness than in those days [i.e. in utero] […] It is also taught all the Torah from beginning to end […] As soon as it sees the light an angel approaches, slaps it on its mouth, and causes it to forget all the Torah completely’ (BT Niddah 20b).