Nisan - Birthing the Broken Matzah
I was holding her body, feeling the shifting energy of the room, the heart monitor number steadily dropping, and the new team of nurses coming into the room. I leaned in close and whispered “Honey, you really have to push now. Let’s get this baby out. You can do this.”
We did not plan on having our second child during a global pandemic, and so the last trimester of my wife’s pregnancy was full of unknowns. Sheltering in place had dampened our joy and anticipation, and the opportunities to connect with others about our nervousness, our hopes and plans, to tell the story and to receive others’ blessings, were uncomfortably filtered through a computer screen, or from a great distance. The hospital could not tell us if anyone other than my wife would be able to be present, and what it would mean for a baby to be born in a room with an airborne virus lurking, before vaccines were available.
From constriction I called out to Yah,
Yah answered me from expansion.
One of the most powerful and unexpected moments from my first encounter with psilocybin, just three months after the birth of our first child, was a full-on birthing sequence. My body seized with contractions in my stomach and groin, through my hips, and I could sense my wife pushing out our daughter. I was in awe of her power, her body’s wisdom, doing what it had longed to do for so long, and how perfect it all was. The birthing, the being born, and the birther were all dancing together, in pain and ecstasy and wonder, and I could only call out to all of the mothers and all of the births and all of the midwifes who made all this possible throughout the ages.
In his beyond fabulous Haggadah, rabbi and philospher Marc Alain Ouaknin writes regarding Yahatz, splitting the middle matzah during the beginning of the seder:
“The exodus from Egypt is like a birth and the Israelites in the desert are like a young child still tied to its symbolic mother: the land of Egypt…The body of the mother and child, who formed a symbiotic unity, opens up to duality. This is also one of the important meanings of the breaking and covering of Yahatz, of the large and small piece of matzah, the mother and the child. Thus the act of hiding the large piece of matzah is equivalent to making the mother’s body disappear, and to showing mastery of the possibility of her return.”
Through my expanded state of consciousness, and with such a powerfully embodied encounter, I had come to sense something deeper about a biological process that I can never have and never truly know, both for my wife and for the birth of our nation—the tightening and the fear and the confusion giving way to release and faith. My psilocybin experience had taught me a way of knowing and being, about being born, that was probably inaccessible to me otherwise.
Back in that delivery room, with that knowledge in my body and at a time of great need, I became an momentary midwife, holding space for my wife’s incredible strength and bravery, gently encouraging her through breath and sweat and exhaustion. At the right moment, out emerged perfection into a broken world, hope in confusion.
