The
Rachel Sabbath
Aiken
UU Church
May
13 2012
What
is the Rachel Sabbath?
As you have been hearing, through the opening words,
the meditation and the readings, this service has something to do with maternal
mortality.
Maybe not the cheeriest approach to Mother’s Day,
you’re saying to yourself!
But here’s why it’s an important topic for today:
The Religious Institute tells us that “every minute of every day, somewhere in the world a woman dies in
childbirth or from pregnancy-related complications – at least half a million
women worldwide every year” (www.religiousinstitute.org).
According to the International Rescue
Committee, maternal mortality is the
largest health inequity in the world. It is particularly acute in developing
nations, where 99% of all maternal deaths occur.
More than half of maternal deaths occur in
sub-Saharan Africa, and one-third in South Asia. Most take place during labor,
delivery or in the immediate post-partum period. And that is because sometimes
fewer than one in ten births are attended by a skilled health worker or
midwife…often women are on their own or delivering with the help of a relative
or neighbor.
Maternal
mortality also has a devastating effect on children: “More than one
million children are left motherless every year due to maternal deaths. Children are three to 10 times more likely to die within two years of
the mother’s death.” (Religious Institute Sample Newsletter Article)
There’s been a lot in the news this
spring about other aspects of women’s health care – specifically reproductive
rights – but today I would like to spend a little bit of time drawing our
attention to a problem that has been with us for millennia. Why is maternal
mortality something we still tolerate in our world today? Does it say something
about the value we place – or don’t place – on the literally life-giving work
of women?
And why do we have a hard time talking
about this – could it be that there is a taboo that still exists about openly
discussing and acknowledging the health needs of women, traceable back through
thousands of years to the impurity of blood and also to the subordinate
position of women in society, culture, and religion?
The Rachel Sabbath Initiative:
Saving Women's Lives is a program from the Religious
Institute, a multifaith organization based in Westport, CT, that is dedicated
to sexual health, education and justice. The Rachel
Sabbath Initiative supports the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal 5,
which focuses on improving maternal health.
This is the third year that the
Religious Institute is calling on congregations across the country to raise
awareness and support for the UN’s targets of reducing maternal mortality
worldwide and achieving universal access to reproductive health care by 2015.
Why
is this initiative called the Rachel Sabbath?
The simple answer is because, as you heard in the
first reading, Rachel is a matriarch in the Hebrew scriptures who died in
childbirth. But there is much more to it than that connection…and I want to
spend a few minutes opening up those two readings from Genesis and the Gospel
of Mark in order to look again at how ancient the reality of health inequity is
for women. For those who know the Bible, these stories about Rachel and the
woman who touched Jesus tell us much about Judeo-Christian history, but they
also demonstrate the disregard that persists to this day as a near-universal
attitude toward women’s health.
Women’s
health inequity in the Bible
The story of Rachel in the book of Genesis is
interesting on several levels; one of the themes of the book is trickery or deception
in reference to the families of Rachel and her husband Jacob. The young Jacob,
along with his mother Rebecca, trick his father Isaac into giving Jacob the
family birthright over Esau the elder brother. After this deceptive act Jacob
flees east from Canaan, and one day he sees and falls in love with Rachel. He
in turn is tricked by Rachel’s father Laban, who demands that he work for 7
years to earn Rachel’s hand in marriage; but instead, Jacob is married to her
older sister Leah instead. It’s only after seven more years of work that Jacob
is allowed to marry Rachel. The two women – and their handmaids – between them then
give birth to twelve sons and one daughter. But Rachel first suffers barrenness
for many years before giving birth to Joseph: she begs Jacob, “Give me children
or I shall die”. The author of Genesis says that this is when God remembers
Rachel and opens her womb so that she can conceive. The Five Books of Miriam, which is a woman’s commentary on the
Torah written by Ellen Frankel (Harper, 1996), features an imaginary dialogue
between Jewish scholars and rabbis with the major characters of the Torah,
which is the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures. Although Genesis does
not tell us how Rachel felt when God intervenes to enable her to conceive,
Frankel imagines Rachel’s reaction in these words:
“After being concealed from my husband by my
father’s deceit…and eclipsed so long by Leah’s teeming brood of sons, I was
finally remembered, as a distressed ewe is heard by the caring Shepherd. No
wonder infertile women have always appealed to me to speak to God on their
behalf; in their isolation and grief, they feel invisible and mute. What they
want more than anything is to be remembered and listened to” (Frankel, 59).
But there is one more trick in the story of Rachel
that, in the opinion of some scholars, proves deadly to her: after many years Jacob,
with all his wives, children, servants, sheep and goats, decides to leave to go
back home to Canaan, and for some reason as she leaves Rachel steals her
father’s household gods. Laban chases after the group once he discovers them
missing, and Jacob allows him to search their belongings, and even says to
Laban “Anyone with whom you find your gods shall not remain alive” (31:32).
Rachel sits on her camel saddle in which she has hidden the idols and tells her
father that she is in the way of women – in other words menstruation – and so
Laban does not touch her or her belongings because of the taboo that would make
him impure. Frankel makes the observation that “unlike the men in her family
who can negotiate power directly, through physical struggle, bargaining, or
covenant, Rachel as a woman can only resort to indirect means…she relies on the
camouflage of menstrual taboo and in doing so escapes the harness of social
control” (Frankel, 63).
So her days are numbered, maybe as an
indirect result of Jacob’s words to Laban; Rachel’s fate is to die at the age
of 36 after becoming pregnant again; she experiences
difficulty in childbirth and the midwife tells her: “Have no fear, for it is
another boy for you.” Before her death, Rachel names the newborn. In Gen. 35:18
it says: “But as she breathed her last—for she was dying—she named him Ben-oni;
but his father called him Benjamin.” The Rabbis explain that Rachel called the
child “the son of my suffering” [in Aramaic], while his father gave him the
Hebrew name “Benjamin.” (Jewish Women’s Archive
Encyclopedia, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/rachel-midrash-and-aggadah).
It’s
said that Jacob buried Rachel on the road to a place that became the town of Bethlehem
because he foresaw that when the Israelites would set out on their journey of
exile, they would pass through Bethlehem on that road, and so he buried Rachel
there, so that she would pray for the exiles.
His
prophecy was fulfilled, as we can read in Jeremiah 31:14–16: “A cry is heard in
Ramah—wailing, bitter weeping—Rachel weeping for her children, she refuses to
be comforted for her children, who are gone. Thus said the Lord: Restrain your
voice from weeping, your eyes from shedding tears; for there is a reward for
your labor—declares the Lord: They shall return from the enemy’s land. And
there is hope for your future—declares the Lord: Your children shall return to
their country”. You might recognize the first part of that reading, it was used
in the gospel of Matthew to describe the scene of King Herod’s massacre of all
male children under the age of two, the result of being outwitted by the Magi
when Herod tried to find the Christ child.
Rachel's life was so full of sorrows that, down
through the centuries, women who need comfort because of their troubles have felt
that they can relate to her. What should have been her joyous wedding after a
seven year wait was actually her sister’s wedding, Leah’s veiled deception of
Jacob; Rachel had to wait 7 more years to be married and then she was childless
for years. She watched Leah give birth to son after son, and the two
handmaids give birth to sons as well before she finally had a child. She died
giving birth to her second, and did not live to raise her sons.
It is true that at her grave the Jews wept
when forced into the Babylonian exile after the destruction of the first Holy
Temple.
And from then on, her grave has been a place for
constant prayers, the place where women, especially, come for comfort. (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/149557#.T6vjWxzEVkU) …just as Ellen Frankel imagined Rachel
claiming that women who feel invisible and mute want more than anything to be
remembered and listened to.
Rachel’s story is tragic, but we can have other
glimpses into the state of women’s health in the Bible. Other Old Testament
women die in childbirth, including the daughter of King Saul, so it is evident
that the dangers of childbirth for women are spread across the ages of kings
and prophets. They were probably women who were loved as much as Jacob loved
Rachel.
Where we see a startling and hopeful change in the biblical
treatment of women is in the New Testament stories of Jesus. The second reading
you heard earlier from Mark’s Gospel joins together two females who symbolize
the cycle of female fertility: one about to enter puberty, the other probably
in the menopause. The love that the father Jairus had for his daughter made him
plead with Jesus to come to heal her – but the woman with the flow or
hemorrhage of blood had no one. In fact, think for a minute about the audacity
of this woman in the context of the times: she seems to have been a woman who
had money, but had spent it all on being treated without success. The perpetual
hemorrhage made her ritually unclean – for anyone to touch her, or her to touch
anyone, would make them unclean as well. Menstruating women in parts of the
world, even today, are secluded in another part of the home because no one
would risk contamination by laying on a bed on which she had slept, or sitting
in a chair where she had sat. Would the woman with the flow of blood have been
able to cook for her family? Would she even have been allowed to eat with them?
What was she doing out on her own without a male relative? As an unclean woman
she would not have been allowed to participate in any religious rituals.
Yet, according to the Women’s Bible Commentary (Carol Newsom and Sharon Ringe, eds, SPCK,
1992) , “that a woman…should be in such a public place evidently unaccompanied
by protectors and that she should dare to touch a strange man without his
consent are extraordinary events in an ancient cultural context” (267). She
must have been so desperate that it didn’t matter to her that she was breaking
taboos. Her medical condition placed her outside of the religious community and
isolated her from the human community. When she touched the hem of Jesus’
garment, she violated not just the ritual purity law of religion, but also of
the social code for women’s proper behavior with men. She passed on her
impurity to Jesus, who immediately knew something in his being had been
changed; through this touch the woman was healed and she felt whole. An
interesting observation by the Women’s
Bible Commentary is that, in the original Aramaic language, Jesus says, “Daughter,
your faith has made you well” – through his declaration of kinship (“Daughter”)
Jesus is giving her legitimacy to be in society again, under the protection of
a male. She avoids the social stigma and shame of a woman stepping outside the
bounds of custom. The Commentary concludes that the woman’s 12-year illness
“constituted a social death in which she was barred from community and kin, a
situation not all that removed from the actual death of the twelve-year-old daughter
of Jairus, whom Jesus was able to revive and reincorporate into the human and
family circle” (268). In the face of social and physical death, two women are
deemed by Jesus to be worthy of life. When I reflect on this story, I am blown
away by the revolutionary act of love we see in the healing touch of Jesus upon
these women.
It is a dramatic, stunning story – and because of
its embarrassing and intimate nature, all the more likely to be true. If you
were a loyal disciple working on a hagiography of Jesus, why would you make up
a story that veers uncomfortably close to the blood taboo when there are plenty
of other less messy miracles and wonders, like the loaves and fishes.
Whatever you believe about Jesus, in this reading we
feel the tragedy of the subordination of women, the depths of love and the
desperate drive for survival, for life. How can we imagine that women who are
dealing treatable conditions, such as the dangers of childbirth today, this
hour, this minute, feel any less passionately about wanting to live, to care
for and see their children live and grow up?
Women’s
health inequity in the developing world
Two thousand years on, with today’s medical
knowledge it is not rocket science to find a solution to the problem of
maternal mortality – we have the technology! According to the UN Population
Fund, if current global investments in family planning and pregnancy-related
health care were doubled – in 2009, doubled to just under 25 billion dollars –
it would save the lives of 400 thousand women and 1.6 million infants every
year.
Women’s
health inequity in the US: Pregnant Workers Fairness Act
And it’s not just in the developing world – we need
to see a solution applied a little closer to home: how about a modification by
Congress to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, that was made law over 30 years
ago, that helps women to continue to work while pregnant without risk to
themselves or their pregnancies? The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is a
proposal that will help pregnant women to modify physical activity, like
lifting ,standing, repetitive motion - that might endanger their health. Half
the U.S. workforce is female; between 2006-2008 two-thirds of women who had
their first child worked during pregnancy – of that number, 88% worked into
their third trimester. Women can’t afford to take time off before or after
their pregnancies for any length of time, especially not in this time of
economic uncertainty.
Yet we hear of stories like this one: Amber
Wallace, the only female truck driver for a beer distributor. When she asked
during the later months of her pregnancy if she could get help with heavy
lifting or be reassigned to a different position, her employer refused, even
though previously truck drivers with injuries had been given assistance - and
even drivers who lost their licenses for drunk driving had been allowed to
apply for new positions in sales. Amber was forced into unpaid leave, which was
exhausted 6 days after the birth of her baby. When she did not return to work one
week after giving birth she was terminated.
A Wal-Mart floor associate named Heather Wiseman
became pregnant and began to suffer from bladder and urinary infections. On
doctor’s orders she began carrying a water bottle to work to keep hydrated, but
because of a rule that only cashiers could have water bottles at work, Heather
was terminated.
These cases have been compiled by the National
Women’s Law Center, which is advocating for passage of the Pregnant Workers’’
Fairness Act. The Act would prevent employer discrimination against pregnant
workers because they need reasonable accommodation, with modifications to
things like food or drink policies, but also would prohibit an employer from
requiring a pregnant employee to accept changes to her work when she doesn’t
want any modification, including being forced to take paid or unpaid leave.
Employers already accustomed to accommodation for disabilities would have to go
no further in ensuring that pregnant workers are treated as well in the
workplace.
Our first UU principle of affirming the worth and
dignity of every human person, and the second – justice, equity and compassion
in human relations – might already have sprung into your mind when reflecting
on the inequities of healthcare that exist today for women all over the world.
What you do next is up to you. What gift can you give on Mother’s Day?
When you leave this sanctuary you can read about
what the International Rescue Committee is doing to combat the frightening
statistics about maternal mortality that I gave you at the beginning of this
message; on the bulletin board in the hall I’ve pinned up the IRC update on
training midwives and health workers in places like eastern Congo and a camp
for Burmese refugees in Thailand. I’ve also put there the fact sheet about the
Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Now that you’ve been informed about the needs of
women across the world and here at home, you can decide the best way that you
can help.
But, as my message today comes to a close, one way
we can all help - right this minute - is to spare a thought and a prayer on
behalf of women and their health care needs.
