From Genesis to Jerusalem: The Motherhood of Rachel Imeinu and Rachel Goldberg-Polin

• In Event: Kinship and Networks in Antiquity

Abstract

Since October 7, 2023, there has been an outpouring of literary production in the Jewish world about mothers and motherhood. The mothers at the center of this discourse include mothers both imaginary and real; mothers as victims and perpetrators; and mothers on both sides of the Gaza border. This paper focuses on one contemporary mother at the center of this discourse, Rachel Goldberg-Polin, and considers her connection to the mythological biblical matriarch, Rachel Imeinu. Using a framework of biblical reception history and a feminist theoretical lens, I examine English-language literary production in popular media including poetry, blogs, and social media posts about Rachel Goldberg-Polin in the rhetorical context of October 7 and the ensuing violence and hostage crisis.

Contemporary descriptions of Rachel Goldberg-Polin in popular discourse both explicitly and implicitly draw on the portrait of Rachel Imeinu from biblical and rabbinic literature. The biblical Rachel appears first in the book of Genesis. Beloved by her husband Jacob, she nevertheless struggles with infertility and bears just two children, dying in childbirth with her second. Within the biblical corpus she becomes a model of bereaved motherhood, described in Jeremiah 31:15 as “weeping for her children,” because “they are no more.” Later Jewish tradition (Lamentations Rabbah petichta 24) recounts how Rachel confronted God God’s-self, demanding that God return “her children” to their land.

Today’s literary production about Rachel Goldberg-Polin centers upon two defining features of Rachel Imeuinu: her maternal grief (her only son Hersch, was kidnapped on October 7 and murdered in captivity), and the strength of her conviction against figures of authority. At the same time, Rachel leverages her own lived experiences as a mother to express solidarity with the grieving and angry mothers across the divide, the mothers of Gaza, for example in her original poem “One Tiny Seed.” Given the connections between Rachel Imeinu and Rachel Goldberg Polin, Goldberg-Polin’s expressions of agency and deployment of her own voice enriches our understanding of the biblical matriarch Rachel and her experiences as a mother, and more broadly of motherhood in the Jewish communal imagination.

Author

• Sari Fein, Smith College