Must We Have Children?

Laynie Soloman: What’s bringing you to this conversation about remaking kinship relationships today?

Sophie Lewis: The question I was interested in posing to you is essentially, “Why should we make new human life?” I know the biblical injunction is to “be fruitful and multiply.” Is there a way to do this without necessarily procreating? I’m quite attached to the political and ethical importance of celebrating so-called childless or child-free lives. And there’s stigma and a sense of failure that is unjustly put on people who, for whatever reason, don’t or can’t procreate. I’m curious what the Torah has to say about this.

What brings you here, Laynie?

Laynie: I spend my days teaching Talmud at SVARA, a yeshiva for queer and trans folks. I find that in our community I am able at times to tap into modes of relationships that touch the utopic models of care imagined by family abolitionists. And I’m moved by the opportunities that we might find in our tradition to interrogate and explode notions of kinship that are hegemonic right now.

The text that I brought for us goes right into the belly of the beast, so to speak, and I’m excited about what we will make of it. But first, are there any assumptions that you’re bringing to the text before we get to meet it on its own terms?

Sophie: I suppose I have a sense that procreation is a mandated practice in Jewish tradition, as it is in most traditions I’m aware of. And a vague expectation that blood will hold a lot of importance.

Laynie: So the text I’ve brought is from the Talmud.^[1] And it’s a text that, when I learned it, felt extremely queer to me. But it’s not generally read that way, which is how it got to stay in the tradition. So I’m excited to see where, if at all, you find those resonances.

Sophie reads.

Laynie: So we’re already in the world of blood, as you predicted, Sophie. What’s your sense of this first paragraph?

Sophie: On its face, it’s very startling. It seems to be saying that a failure to make babies is tantamount to murder. I guess I’m not entirely convinced by Rabbi Eliezer’s logic here, that we can take something particular from the fact that a statement about murder being punished with execution is right next to an injunction to be fruitful.

In my work, you’ll see that I’m really interested in the idea of a sort of “fruiting,” a multiplication of relations. There’s something interesting about this phrase—it’s a literary chiasmus—“whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed.” It may be as simple as what I said: “If you commit a murder, you’ll be executed by your fellow man.” But reading it a bit aslant, you might say, actually, is this a line from Beyoncé? Like, “If you hurt me, you hurt yourself”?^[5] On one level, it seems to be saying that if you shed humanity’s blood, you’re shedding your own blood.

Laynie: Part of what you’re saying is that Rabbi Eliezer is not wrong. He’s stating something true: Without structures of care, people die.

Sophie: Yeah, absolutely. My first book was called Full Surrogacy Now and is often still, unfortunately, misunderstood—especially by people who haven’t read it—as being some kind of call to expand the practice of gestational surrogacy, in which “commissioning parents” hire a “third party” to do the work of pregnancy. Interestingly, surrogacy has a lot of biblical and Talmudic precedent: In Genesis, for example, the slave Hagar bears a baby, by Avram, on Sarai’s behalf.^[6] But my book is very critical of the whole edifice of kinship-as-private-property, and while I’m critical of the surrogacy industry as it currently operates, I’m also arguing that “unassisted,” non-surrogate kinship doesn’t exist. I invite everyone to recognize surrogacy relationships everywhere, to make them explicit, and to multiply them, even knowing that it might be somewhat scary if we got to a point where we aren’t able to tell anymore who the “proper” parent of anything even is. That’s what “full surrogacy” would be: a situation in which the more broadly collective nature of mothering has dissolved the patriarchal institution of motherhood.

I’ve always thought [feminist theorist] Donna Haraway’s slogan, “Make kin, not babies” would be better phrased, “make kin, and maybe babies.” She’s actually quite against human procreation right now, and I’ve wrestled with this publicly because I think that political line isn’t very promising—the sheer number of human beings is much less of a factor in the ecological crisis than our capitalist mode of production, and as far as I can tell, whenever it’s been tried in the past, the politics of anti-natalism have always been racist, colonial, classist, and matrophobic. But I’m indebted to Haraway’s insistence on kin-making and on a practice of comradeliness, a knitting together of ourselves and others across boundaries, including potentially species boundaries. That’s what I mean when I speak of “fruiting and multiplying.”

Laynie: I love that. I learned this text with the patriarchal sense of ownership attached to it, in the way that Rabbi Eliezer might be saying, “If you don’t have children, you will cut off your biological and patriarchal bloodline, and therefore you will die.” I’m curious if there’s a way to read Rabbi Eliezer with this expanded read of being fruitful and multiplying in mind.

Sophie: I actually think it’s always a bit impossible to practice blood-based inheritance through the construct of the family. That in itself is a bit fictive. There’s this classic observation in feminist philosophy that until recently with DNA testing, you could not be sure of paternity, which is a driving factor in some of the anxieties to ensure that blood continuity can even be held or enforced.

Laynie: The anxiety and the emphasis feel like they go hand in hand.

Sophie: It’s interesting to think about how the ethical prescription here could also be interpreted as non-biological: If you aren’t kin-making in some way, if you aren’t multiplying relations, if you aren’t tending to fellow humans, you’re shedding blood. You could perhaps see it that way.

Shall I read the second part?

Sophie reads.

Laynie: So we have a sort of similar mode of thought here to Rabbi Eliezer, taking two verses that are near each other and deriving meaning from their juxtaposition. Whereas Rabbi Eliezer hooked the emphasis of being fruitful and multiplying on “shedding blood,” Rabbi Ya’akov is hooking it on the statement, “for in the image of God He made man.” So there’s something about being fruitful and multiplying that’s about the magnification of God; while refraining from being fruitful and multiplying undermines or diminishes God’s image. What do you think?

Sophie: I suppose it’s interesting—I mean, talking about God, how did He procreate?

Laynie: Aha! God’s “procreation” was creation.

Sophie: Still, it’s a lot, isn’t it, this idea that you’re insulting God’s image because you’re not making a baby? Give me a break.

Laynie: I noticed that this statement from Rabbi Ya’akov did land harsher with me than Rabbi Eliezer’s, which surprised me considering that in the latter, the nonreproductive adult is like a murderer.

Sophie: Because Rabbi Eliezer leaves it on a mortal plane.

Laynie: Yeah. With Rabbi Ya’akov, it’s cosmic and mythical and transcendent.

Sophie: There is a sense of thwarted potential that people sometimes feel if they haven’t been able to have children. I think this hangs over the culture in some sense: That if you don’t have children, you’re insulting some cosmic principle. You’re thwarting your purpose.

Laynie: Personally, I feel this internalized transphobia where I’m like, “I’m not doing what I was put on Earth to do with my reproductive capacities.” Is that what Rabbi Ya’akov is saying? Or is Rabbi Ya’akov more like, “No, the babies that would have emerged! That’s the divine image that’s being undermined”? Both feel really stressful to me.

Sophie: So far we’re doing great. No pressure on anybody.

Laynie: Should we bring ben Azzai into the room?

Sophie reads.

Sophie: So I guess we’ve got both now.

Laynie: That’s right. Why choose when you can have both?

Sophie: But wait!

Sophie reads.

Laynie: Harsh.

Sophie: Sick burn. Who is the “they” here, Laynie? Just general members of the community?

Laynie: Yes, it’s like a community of scholars. They’re saying, essentially: “Nice story, but where are your kids?”

Sophie: Shall I read his response?

Sophie reads.

Laynie: I’m always struck by this moment. I just so appreciate that the illusion of perfection is nowhere to be found here. Ben Azzai is grappling with his misalignment with the tradition—struggling with what we might understand as a nuclear family structure, and perhaps yearning for connection beyond that structure. And the Talmud talks about it. It’s not a secret. It’s public. We get to learn from his grappling.

Sophie: Very interesting. You know, I am so steeped in these sorts of “repro” radical artists, thinkers, and utopians from the ’60s and ’70s, including Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Ukeles was an artist in New York City who managed to invent the role of artist-in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation, where she sought to make art out of the practices of garbage disposal that keep New York City functioning every day. She wrote a “Manifesto for Maintenance Art,” which was a sort of feminist critique of the idea of art and maintenance being completely irreconcilable, that you can’t maintain and create at the same time.

And because ben Azzai used the word “maintain,” I couldn’t help but make the connection. I mean, sure: “It is possible for the world to be maintained by others.” That is, unfortunately, how it is. There are those who are enabled to be in public by all of those who are relegated to the spheres of the noncreative. This gendered division of labor operates on a planetary scale as well, in a neocolonial script: who gets to be “creative” versus who is merely lifemaking, and so on. Kalindi Vora and Neda Atanasoski call the technologically mediated concealment of the global north’s planetary support systems “surrogate humanity.”

Yet even as I know that the division between art and maintenance has to be overcome—that we have to come up with a just way to distribute the prerogative to do both—I can’t help but laugh reading ben Azzai. It’s very relatable for someone like me, who is also a scholar, whose soul yearns for books. I’m literally on a writing retreat right now, where other people are maintaining me, preparing meals for me while I get to hole up with a stack of books in a cabin, working on a manuscript. I love the privilege and pleasure of this. So I can totally hear myself being like, “Ah, what can I do? My soul yearns for Torah.” To say, “Listen, it is okay for other people to do that, to maintain all of us, to hold down the propagation of the species.”

Laynie: So in this read, mothering is maintenance work.

Sophie: Yes. Though I should specify that the traditions of thought, practice, and struggle that I’m interested in—for example, queer Black survival histories—would argue that mothering in certain moments or in certain conditions can go beyond maintenance and cross over into the realm of collective self-creation. This is the tradition that gives rise to the radical feminist Audre Lorde’s observation that Black women “can learn to mother ourselves.” That observation is tied to the practice of learning how not to dominate children: You learn to undo domination in yourself through extending a different form of mothering to those for whom you are duty-bound or ethically compelled to care. So things can change through mothering—they don’t have to be simply maintained.

Laynie: When we started with Rabbi Eliezer, I was thinking of “priya u’reviya”—this fruitfulness and multiplication—as a creative project, especially in the broadened sense of multiplicity of relationships that we’ve been discussing. It’s interesting now to see how ben Azzai thinks of that as a world-maintaining project as opposed to a world-building project. I wonder if it’s a misreading on his part.

Sophie: When I talk about fruiting and multiplying as creative, that does go against the general sense. I mean, the very word “reproduction”—it sort of says on the tin that it’s not adding anything, it’s “doing over.” I don’t know if you’re a botanist—I am not—but my understanding of the general imaginary around fruit-bearing organisms is that if they don’t fruit, they die. A fruit tree is not recognized as something that labors creatively. It’s doing its thing, fruiting—just doing nature. That binary between nature and culture has been epically formative within patriarchy. So right at the top of this conversation, when I said “fruiting” in a kind of queerly appreciative sense—that already goes against certain inherited patterns of patriarchal thought that undergird capitalism, where there is a neat binary between production and reproduction.

Laynie: I wonder what ben Azzai’s approach would have been had he had that definition of fruiting and multiplying.

Sophie: But then it does sound like he’s saying, “Oh, I’m just a dusty nerd with my pile of tomes. I’m sorry I can’t contribute to the creation of the world.” “Maintaining” in this reading becomes synonymous with “living.” In his description, it seems that being a Torah scholar could be read as perhaps less creative in Ukeles’s sense, where the substance of sociality and care is clearly creative. He implies his preference for study is self-indulgent, doesn’t he? He’s merely indulging his personal yearning.

Laynie: Right. But it’s interesting: The word for “yearn” that he uses comes from the three-letter Hebrew root חשק (chet, shin, kuf), which signals that this is a kind of yearning that is about love and lust. It’s the kind of love that we might imagine, in some theoretical, mythical world, could lead to procreation. That’s the kind of love ben Azzai has for Torah. It’s the kind of love that I have for what I imagine when he says Torah—meaning not only the practice of learning in isolation, but also of the community of scholars, and the enterprise of Torah community. He’s like, “This is where I feel lust and love and care.

Sophie: Yeah, that’s very relatable to me, because I’ve always felt libidinally magnetized by writing. I think that writing has its own erotics, its own sociality, its own intertextual communion. I’ve just started A.V. Marraccini’s newly published book of criticism, We the Parasites, where she conceptualizes her relationship to texts and criticism as the relation of a wasp to a fig. It’s an inseminating role, as well as a kind of self-abnegating role, because the wasp dies, but fertilizes. I’m thinking about how writing and authorship is fictive too, just like kinship—and how it can be creatively remade in the same ways. And if anyone knows that, it’s Torah scholars, who are constantly speaking with and through and against each other’s words, across time—almost kin-making in that way.

I’m now remembering the passage you pointed me to from the contemporary Jewish practical guidebook Peninei Halacha,^[9] that tries to square this circle that we’ve been tracing about whether you’re allowed to not walk the walk about baby making.

Laynie reads.