The most important child I will ever give birth to is myself, and raising me is a mission that encompasses every second of my life

Six babies at once. Children think the idea of giving birth like the women in Mitzrayim is wildly exciting. Mothers secretly wonder why this was considered a brachah.

Torah Jews have always valued large families, but if a woman is not the kindergarten- teacher type, the thought of spending years (and years) sweeping up Cheerios and resolving conflicts over Legos sounds daunting. Is her Jewish identity really tied up with having children, and if it is, where does that leave other aspects of herself?

Parents and Penguins

Even if the Torah hadn’t been given, the Gemara tells us, there is a lot we could have learned from the animal world (Eiruvin 100b). We could have learned propriety from the cat and self-sufficiency from the ant, chastity from the dove and decency from the hen.

A great contemporary thinker points out that we might expect the Gemara to add parenting to the list of what we can learn from the animals. Anyone who has watched the beautiful documentary The March of the Penguins, can’t help but be moved by the incredible devotion of penguins to their offspring. The long, dangerous journey through icy tundra in order to lay the egg, the months spent huddled together for warmth just to protect those young — talk about sacrifice!

And there are other examples: The locust that lives underground for 17 years and only surfaces to lay her eggs and then dies, and the example given to me by a (gleeful feminist) student of the mother spider who consumes the father in order to nourish her young. It definitely puts a new spin on “alles far der kinder!”

Wouldn’t learning parenting from the animal kingdom bring us to new levels of sacrifice and giving? But yet, though we may learn propriety from the cat, we don’t learn parenting from the penguins.

Animals bear offspring for only one reason — to propagate their species. They are driven by a primordial drive for self-perpetuation and they are willing to live and die and suffer in between just in order to bring the next generation into the world.

While we may share that primordial drive with the animals we have children for another reason, too. Our children are our partners in a mission.

Some of my secular students tell me that they don’t plan to have children. And from their perspective, that makes sense. People without a connection to a past are not interested in a future. When your entire world is the present, children can be a royal pain in the neck — a definite deterrent to eating, drinking, and being merry.

People have children when they see life as something bigger than their slice of the pie. When a person has a desire for a child to carry on the business or to continue the family name, it’s not because the parent thinks it would be nice for there to be furniture stores in the future or because they like the sound of their last name. Underlying those wishes is the parent’s desire for a continuation of his lifework — of his essence. The desire for children is the passion burning my innards pouring forth into to the next generation.

Hashem promises progeny to Avraham “Because I know that he will command his children and his household after him to guard the way of Hashem” (Bereishis 18:19). It is the overwhelming desire to touch the future that makes the clearest statement about the present. Children are a spillover of our current relationship with Hashem into the next generation.