When I was pregnant with our first child, I found myself hungry for Jewish resources to turn to for spiritual sustenance. Pregnancy felt to me like an undeniably spiritual time: I was up close and personal with the unfathomable mystery of creating new life. (I am making a body with my body?!) And at the same time, all the usual tools I had at my disposal for dealing with uncertainty (to-do lists, scheduling, looking to experts) were almost entirely useless when it came to knowing how the pregnancy would unfold. As our childbirth teacher would later say, birth, and taking care of a newborn, occurs in agricultural time, not industrial time; it’s more like growing a tomato plant than arriving on time to an appointment. I wanted spiritual resources to support me through the uncertainties of pregnancy and birth and to connect me to the wondrous process unfolding at its own pace.

The Jewish resources I found about pregnancy would often start out, discouragingly, by saying that our rabbis did not address pregnancy or birth very much at all. However, one frequently cited source was the following from the Rabbis of the Talmud: They believed that the creation of a person involves three partners — G-d, the baby’s father, and the baby’s mother.¹ On the one hand, I found it moving to think of pregnancy as an active partnership with G-d, of physically embodying G-d’s process of creation. On the other hand, as a queer person whose baby would have two mothers and who got pregnant through alternative insemination, the “three partners in creation” idea did not reflect my reality. There were many more than three partners in the creation of our baby: me and my partner (the baby’s moms), the sperm donor, our friend who introduced us to the sperm donor, our other friends who coached us through at-home insemination…it was more complicated. And it didn’t sit right with me that in the Talmudic reference, the pregnant person was last in the list of partners in creation. 

About a year after the birth of our child, I turned back to the question of Jewish resources for spiritual sustenance in pregnancy, figuring that there must be more I hadn’t been able to uncover. I was pleased to find there was a lot more: I read about amulets from the Middle Ages for protection throughout pregnancy, Renaissance-era prayers for conception, all the way through modern Jewish prayers covering everything from prenatal screenings to c-sections. Amidst all of these sources, one midrash stood out to me as incredibly meaningful and relevant to my life as a queer Jewish parent. The midrash, which was likely written somewhere between 400 CE and 1200 CE, is as follows.² (I’m going to summarize it faithfully, with the exception of subbing out “wife” or “mother” as “pregnant person” and “man” as “person with sperm.”)³

I love this midrash.

Firstly, for anyone whose child has arrived through alternative reproduction, the small cup of sperm and the angel’s role of conveying the sperm to the uterus have a particular poignancy. Malach, the Hebrew for angel, means messenger, as in messenger of G-d.  It is so powerful to understand the people conveying the gametes to the right place to create an embryo as angels—messengers involved in the divine task of creation. Rabbi Sharon Brous teaches about angels not as beings from on-high but as a state of being that we each are sometimes called to occupy.⁵ The angels of alternative reproduction are perhaps the staff of a fertility clinic, a gestational carrier, a midwife, or a partner, all engaged in the sacred work of creating new life. 

It’s also noteworthy that this midrash includes a large cast of characters. Unlike the Talmudic story of the three partners in creation, this midrash involves not only G-d, the person with sperm, and the pregnant person, but also the soul of the child and no fewer than four angels.  In the midrash, each of these characters has an essential role in creation. To me, this speaks to the chosen web of kinship that, for many queer people, makes up their families and reproductive lives.⁶

Another compelling element of the midrash is the relationship between the soul and the gametes. In the midrash, as soon as the angel in charge of pregnancy brings G-d the soul, G-d requests that the Angel in Charge of Souls bring a specific soul to G-d. In one version, G-d says “Bring me the soul of poloni,” poloni being the Talmudic term for “so-and-so.” The other version, midrash tanhuma, explains it a little more. It says that on the sixth day of creation, all the souls that will ever be are created and stored in the Garden of Eden. When the Angel in Charge of Pregnancy brings a drop to G-d, a specific soul is chosen from the Garden of Eden for the drop. In both versions, the soul doesn’t reside with the gamete—it exists separately, and then by divine provenance, is united with the gamete. For people whose children are conceived through alternative reproduction, the idea that a holy process unites the right soul with the right gametes is a powerful one. One could understand that the intended soul will be selected and united with the right group of cells that will become a child, whatever the origin of those cells is. 

I returned to this midrash several years later as my partner and I were in the process of conceiving our second child, who my partner carried. The path to bring that child into being was less straightforward and longer than the first time around. As the months of trying to conceive went on, I reflected on how unfathomably intricate the process of creating human life is: so many biological processes need to unfold in precise succession for an embryo to be created and then become a fetus. With the midrash in mind, I imagined an additional host of angels supporting conception. Through the months of waiting, I got in the habit of appealing to a novel group of angels as I walked endless loops around our neighborhood: the Angel in Charge of Ovulation, the Angel in Charge of Implantation, and my very favorite, the Angel in Charge of Cervical Mucus. 

I learned that I was in good company by appealing to angels to protect a pregnancy: a remedy book from 19^th century Yemen instructed a scribe to write the names of the angels Michael, Gabriel, Shamriel, and Raphael in an amulet to be worn by a pregnant person, along with a prayer of protection: “By the power of the angels, by their strength, their holiness, and their purity, may they guard, protect, help and cause to fructify the fetus…”⁷ Further, there is a midrash which imagines that even every blade of grass has a guardian angel whose job is to smack it and tell it to grow.⁸ Angels, it seems, do a lot of smacking—the same word, macah, is used for the smack the angel gives the blade of grass and the smack the angel gives the baby under the nose to make the baby forget all the wisdom they learned in the womb. Perhaps the authors of these midrashim were getting at the truth that growth can be a painful phenomenon, up to and including the pain of childbirth and of being born.

Midrashim, after all, seek to explain phenomena through the wisdom of stories. In the midrash at the center of this essay, I love the idea that the soul is so resistant to enter the “stinking drop” of semen and then so resistant to leave the womb. It’s a story that so well explains the phenomenon that many pregnant people (myself included) feel at the very end of pregnancy—“I guess this baby is comfortable in there!” There’s a lived sense that the baby is in no rush to emerge into the world, and the midrash makes up a narrative to make sense of that phenomenon.

And what to do with the fact that the midrash of the angel that conveys the cup of sperm into the uterus so closely resembles the modern-day phenomenon of those of us who have done, well, exactly that? The Rabbis of 2,000 years ago were likely not familiar with the details of alternative insemination. In his introduction to A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969, Dr. Noam Sienna writes, “It is irresponsible to project our identities and understandings onto people in the past; at the same time, it is also irresponsible to ignore the shared practices, behaviors, and experiences that link these stories to other places and times, and that offer clear resonances to our lives today.”⁹  While I would not argue that the authors of these midrashim would call the cast of characters involved in the creation of the embryo “chosen family,” I want to follow Dr. Sienna’s call to not ignore the “resonance” this story has to alternative reproduction through chosen family today. Across time, from 1,000 years ago to today, there is a story that teaches that it takes a lot of energy harnessed, a lot of spirit pulling in the same direction, to make possible the most mundane and the most holy miracle of new life. 

Aliza Levine lives in Worcester with her partner and two children. She is a proud member of the Worcester Havurah. She is slowly working on a compendium of Jewish resources for conception, pregnancy, birth, and beyond, and welcomes anyone interested in collaborating to get in touch.

1.  Niddah 31a: “The Sages taught: There are three partners in the creation of a person: The Holy One, Blessed be He, and his father, and his mother.” Kiddushin 30b, “As the Sages taught: There are three partners in the forming of a person: The Holy One, Blessed be He, who provides the soul, and his father and his mother.”
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2.  I looked at two of the oldest versions of the midrash: The first is in a collection of midrashim called Otzar Hamidrashim, in a chapter called Yetizrat Havaled (the formation of the embryo). Otzar hamidrashim, according to Sefaria, was assembled in 1916, but contains midrashim from c.400 – c.1200 CE. The second source is Midrash Tanhuma (in Pekudei 3) which was composed c.500 – c.800 CE, also according to Sefaria. There are small variations between these two versions.  Later versions of the midrash appear in the Zohar, in Hasidic tales, in an Italian woman’s prayer book, and more (Klein, M. (2000). A Time to Be Born. Jewish Publication Society, pages 89-90
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3.  Thank you to Rabbi Mimi Micner, for help with translation
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4. At this point in the midrash, there is an interlude where an angel takes the soul first to heaven, to show them righteous people sitting in glory, and then to hell, to show people who have sinned who are suffering. The angel admonishes the soul to be righteous so they will end up in the world-to-come.
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5.  “The Angels Among Us,” Sermon Kol Nidre 5782
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6.  With thanks to Liora O’Donnell Goldensher for this insight
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7.  Klein, Michele. A Time to Be Born: Customs and Folklore of Jewish Birth. 1st ed., JEWISH PUBLICATON SOCIETY, 1998, page 112 ↩︎
8.  Breishit Rabbah, 10:6 ↩︎
9.  Sienna, N., & Plaskow, J. (2019). A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969. Print-O-Craft Press, 8 ↩︎