Trying to be fruitful

I do a double-take. The mastabatorium has a mezuzah.

It is Rosh Hashanah, the start of the Jewish year 5774, and there are just three items on my to-do list.The first was praying. The second was hearing a hundred notes tooted on a ram’s horn. This is number three.

And it turns out that the doorway to self pleasure is lined with scriptural verses. The religious injunction to place a parchment inscribed by quill with Biblical passages – a mezuzah – on doorways, has been interpreted around here to extend even to the “private room.”

Inside, I find a small sofa, plenty of tissues, and a television screen showing pornography. Awkward. You see, in case you hadn’t guessed from the praying and ram’s horn recital, I am an observant Jew. This means that on festival days like this one, I’m prohibited from operating electronic devices. Oh, and all year round from watching porn.

Thankfully, Tel Aviv is pretty multicultural, and there are plenty of non-Jews around. Admittedly, my great grandparents probably saw the Shabbos Goy’s job more as lighting the fire to protect them from the cold of Manchester than facilitating peaceful masturbation, but times change. I am rehearsing the conversation – and the possible responses.

According to religious law, when wanting a gentile to do some activity prohibited on Sabbath or festivals you have to hint, not ask. “I’m not really in to pornography,” is my first script, but I realise that it could seem I’m trying to start a two-way conversation on the floating of boats. I could try: “I would rather not have this pornography playing,” but because of the peculiarities of the Hebrew language it it likely to sound like I’m asking for different pornography.

In the end, I take the coward’s route. I leave, loiter outside the other mastabatorium, and wait it out until its occupant finishes – hoping that he either a) did not use the television or b) is thoughtful or environmentally-minded enough to switch it off. He took forever. In fact, so long that I wondered if he may have fallen asleep.

But eventually, he emerged. We observed an internationally-known unspoken men’s code and averted our eyes lest our gaze meet, and the place was mine, and blissfully silent. Once inside, I tried to clear my mind of what Suzy and the Delivery Boy were getting up to in the next room, of my hygiene compunctions in light of the fact that the room was so recently in use, and the web of rabbinic sources that I had used to think through the pornography problem.

A hundred years ago when the Jews in this part of the world were a motley crew living under British rule, early Zionists dreamed of them building a country with all the features of a normal state – and using them to drive forward Jewish life. The poet Hayyim Nachman Bialik famously said that the Jewish state would become a normal country when the first Jewish policeman arrested a Jewish prostitute. What would he have thought, I wonder, if he could see this room? Its sole function is to host male citizens of the Jewish State to do the necessary so that modern IVF technology can make more citizens of the Jewish State.

And the whole IVF scene here is more generously funded by the state than, I believe, anywhere in the world, with treatment costing a fraction of the cost compared to other Western states. Anybody who hasn’t been through fertility problems can’t imagine what it is like. And anybody who isn’t both Jewish and battling with fertility problems can’t imagine the double-whammy experience. For us Jews, almost everything is about raising another generation. The first of the 613 commandments by which we live our lives is to “be fruitful and multiply.” Even the mezuzah on the door to this “private room” is caught up with the theme of kids.

The text on its parchment commands us to teach Torah “diligently unto thy children.” Synagogue is not a solemn affair, but rather a big social where the kids have a whale of a time running riot. Couples who are childless can feel alienated; some find the whole thing is such a family affair that they don’t have a place. The mainstay of Judaism is family activities in the home – teaching children, celebrating festivals with them, enjoying Sabbath meals with them. In short, the religious and cultural value on having children means that difficulty doing so can mean not only personal hardship, but also a hardship regarding their place in the community.

I grew up in the UK, at a time when the Jewish community was hypnotised by the big question of then-Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. “Will We Have Jewish Grandchildren?” he titled his 1994 book. My teenage years were dominated by the message of his task force bent on heightening Jewish identity, “Jewish Continuity.” It basically encouraged us to care about our faith and find a nice Jewish partner – the rest would fall in to place. It came as rather a shock when I did this, and found that it was the “continuity” that was the challenge – not the “Jewish.” It’s not just me. My generation is involved in a largely-silent struggle against fertility problems.

When my wife and I sit down with our friends for a beer – or more likely a lemongrass and chia seed smoothie as prescribed by their fertility-dietician-acupuncturist – we find ourselves asking what has happened to make getting pregnant such a challenge for so many of us.

We confront this challenge again and again, riding the rocky road not only to have a first child, but, where possible, others too. Many people misunderstand what it means to struggle with fertility – they think that all the pain goes away when you become a parent. It doesn’t – and regrettably, we get judged for this, and judged for wanting to grow our families like those around us. My wife and I embark on this IVF cycle with two long-awaited children at home, and yet the will for this to work is very deep and stronger than anyone can imagine. While fertility problems are on the rise, they are nothing new.

As I sit through the Rosh Hashanah synagogue service before the hospital visit, I wonder how it all came as such a shock to us. We Jews are all fertility-treatment babies – kind of. The first reading of the day is the account of the Biblical matriarch Sarah who battled with infertility for decades. In the Book of Genesis, three angels appeared to her husband Abraham, saying that she would bear a child, and she laughed in incredulity. She conceived, and bore Isaac. We learned this story in school and synagogue Hebrew classes, but it was all about God’s power, not about Sarah herself. The story seemed no more relevant to our human condition today than the episode of the burning bush or the splitting of the Red Sea.

Yet when I hear it read this time in synagogue, the penny drops – the entire Jewish People was born out of the trauma of childlessness and, according to traditional belief, a pregnancy that resulted from personal fertility treatment by the Lord himself. It didn’t stop there. Abraham and Sarah’s son Isaac married Rebecca, and they suffered a long stretch of infertility.

Then, their daughter-in-law Rachel endured similar hardships. “Give me children, or else I will die,” she said to her husband Jacob, hauntingly capturing the utter misery of the woman who wants to conceive but cannot. The Book of Genesis is almost as much about the struggle for a genesis as the genesis that emerged. Out of the Jewish People’s four “mothers,” three confronted infertility.

How are we a People so in touch with our past, yet so bad at joining up the dots and recognising the tribulations of our ancestors in modern form? How does much of our education system fail to explore the powerful human side of the Genesis narrative – when it is even there in quotes like that of Rachel? And how are we so tactless? Parents still apply pressure to become grandparents. Strangers still ask questions. A young woman told me recently that with two years passed since her wedding, her parents are getting earache from their friends. They told them to talk to their daughter, and suggested that the time has arrived to make them grandparents.

Originally, when I heard that our IVF cycle threw out today, Rosh Hashanah, as the date that my wife’s eggs would be harvested, I would provide my sperm, and the two would meet in the lab, I thought it would be the strangest of days. For starters, I had never travelled by car on a Sabbath or festival day, yet today was doing so with the blessing of a rabbi due to a medical dispensation enshrined in Talmudic law. And the holy day is normally spent with family and community. But in the end, there never felt like a more apt way to spend the festival.

Just before reading the Sarah story, the Rosh Hashanah service features a prayer urging God to seal us in the “book of life,” and here I am, trying to create a new life. Then, the second reading in synagogue was about Hannah, who, in her desperation to become a mother, invented the idea of silent prayer – quietly pouring her heart out to God. And today, for the first time,

I truly understood her husband’s conduct towards her. When Hannah was weeping, her husband asked her why and said: “Am I not better to you than ten sons?” I had always read these as the words of a naive and self-centred husband. But today I understood what it is like to be the husband who has his own pain at fertility problems but knows that his wife’s pain is many times greater.

You would give anything to conceive, but sometimes the torment of watching your wife’s pain is too much, and a small part of you wishes that the urge to have children could disappear, that we could convince ourselves that we’re happy with what we have. Hannah’s husband tries in desperation.

It was never going to work, Elkanah, but I can understand what made him want to give it a try. It’s a thought that entered my mind numerous times in the last few days, as my wife’s body was pumped with the harsh IVF drugs. People have no idea how taxing on the body preparation for IVF can be, with the injections of substances which generate a bumper harvest of eggs but do so by putting the ovaries in to overdrive and causing just about every side effect imaginable. At various points, as I saw her in the kitchen, needle in hand, administering her cocktail of liquids, all I could do was put the kettle on and make her some English tea, I wanted to take the Elkanah Approach, to convince her that we don’t need this. The helpless feeling isn’t reduced much today. Okay, at least I have a part, but it’s hardly taxing.

It’s something that most 14-year-old boys could do with their eyes closed – and indeed do with their eyes closed on a regular basis. She, on the other hand, undergoes a general anaesthetic, has two-dozen eggs removed, and comes round with a big smile on her face. I am left thinking about the New Year, about new beginnings, and about hopes and prayers.

And I am also left thinking about how what we want as humans has largely stayed the same since the days of Abraham and Sarah, yet, how much the world has changed in just a few decades. Handing in my envelope containing a cup of semen I smile, looking forward to what I hope will be the birth of the baby being made today. In my father’s generation, the men were present at the conception but absent from the birth (my father missed three of his four).

I wouldn’t miss the birth for anything, but now it’s time for the conception, I make my exit. Or rather, realising that I can’t operate the electric door on the festival, wait patiently for a gentile to walk through it so that I can make my exit. Postscript: I wrote this as an article about the issues of fertility problems and IVF narrated through a single day, Rosh Hashanah 5774, because of the connections between the date in the Jewish calendar and the themes I discuss.

It was never intended as a story about outcomes. However, I am happy to provide an update. This was not to be the IVF cycle that resulted in a baby – but a subsequent cycle did, and four weeks ago my wife gave birth to a healthy girl, which is what prompted me to finally release this article for publication.

NATHAN JEFFAY

Nathan Jeffay is The AJN’s Israel correspondent.