Even If the Child Is Blind

The Hook

A divorced woman does not want to nurse her baby. The Rambam's first answer is clear: she cannot be compelled. If she will not nurse, she hands the child to his father, and the father arranges his care. Then the ruling turns. All of that applies only if she has not nursed him long enough for him to recognize her. Once the child knows his mother, he is not taken from her, because of the danger the separation would cause him, and she is compelled to nurse him, for a wage, until he is twenty four months old.

And then the Rambam adds three words that stop the reader. Even if the child is blind.

A blind infant has never seen his mother's face. Whatever he recognizes, it is not a picture. It is a voice, a smell, a way of being held, the rhythm of one particular heartbeat against his cheek. The law does not ask how the recognition happened. It asks only whether it has happened, and once it has, the legal freedom of a divorced woman bends around a baby's knowing. A chapter that begins with spinning wool and pouring drinks ends by ruling that recognition creates an obligation no contract could.

This chapter falls on the sixth of Tishrei, in the days when an entire people comes before its Father asking to be recognized. It is also the yahrzeit of Rebbetzin Chana Schneerson, the mother of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. A chapter about what a mother gives that nobody else can give could hardly have landed on a better day.

The Work of a House, and the Danger of an Empty Hand

The chapter opens with a list that feels, at first, like pure economics. A husband is entitled to what his wife finds and to the proceeds of her labor. What labor? Everything follows the custom of the country. Where women weave, she weaves; where they embroider, she embroiders; where they spin wool or flax, she spins. Where no such custom exists, he may require only that she spin wool, and not flax, because flax damages the mouth and the lips of the one who spins it. The Rambam grounds the task in the verse about the skilled women who spun for the Sanctuary.

If she works harder and produces more than expected, the surplus is his. And then comes a sentence that changes the tone of the whole list. Even if her husband is very wealthy, and even if she has several maids, she may not sit idle, because idleness leads to lewdness. The work is not only about his income. It is about her. The law is worried about an empty hand. Yet he may not compel her to work the whole day, and the wealthier he is, the smaller her obligation becomes. A man who vows that his wife may do no work at all must divorce her and pay her ketubah, for the same reason. To remove all purpose from a person is treated as grounds for ending a marriage.

Then the Rambam separates two kinds of labor. There are five things every wife does, whatever her wealth: she spins, she washes his face, hands and feet, she pours his drink, she makes his bed, and she attends to what he asks, bringing water or a utensil or clearing something away. And there are six things that depend on the household: grinding, baking, cooking, laundry, nursing, and putting straw before his riding animal, though not before his cattle. The Rambam notes that the baking rests on an ordinance of Ezra, who instituted that women rise early and bake so that bread would be ready to give to the poor. The first bread of the day was meant for someone at the door.

A wife who brings one maid into the marriage, or money enough to buy one, or a husband who already has one, is freed from grinding, baking, laundry and the straw. Two maids free her from cooking and from nursing, and she gives the child to a maid. The household tasks can be handed off. The five personal ones cannot. Even if she has several maids, the Rambam writes, these tasks are performed for a man only by his wife.

What Cannot Be Handed to Another

That line is the key to the chapter. Washing a face, pouring a cup, making a bed: none of these is hard, and any servant could do them. The law insists that no servant does. They are not labor. They are the small daily gestures that say a marriage is a closeness and not an arrangement, and the Rambam makes them non-transferable precisely because they are easy.

The same logic explains the exceptions during the time she is a niddah. She still performs every other task, but she does not pour his drink, make his bed, or wash his face, hands and feet, lest the intimacy of those gestures lead them to relations. She makes his bed when he is not there. She does not place the cup in his hand as she usually would; she sets it down on the ground or a table, and he takes it. The law does not cancel the gesture. It moves it half a step away. Even the distance is choreographed with care.

Then comes a ruling that is openly not about strict law. A wife who breaks dishes while doing her household tasks is not liable. The Rambam says plainly that this does not follow from the letter of the law. It is an enactment of the Sages, because otherwise there would never be peace in a home. A woman afraid of every broken plate would hold back from her work, and the holding back would breed strife. The Sages chose a cracked bowl over a cold kitchen.

The chapter also records that a woman who refuses her obligations may be compelled, and here the Raavad objects sharply in his gloss, writing that he never heard of disciplining women that way and that the proper response is to reduce what she is given until she relents. The disagreement is worth noticing, because it shows the tradition arguing with itself about force inside a home. Where husband and wife dispute whether she is doing her part, a neutral woman may live with them for a time, or the neighbors are asked, and the judges clarify it as best they can.

And when she is nursing, the demands on her shrink and her food is enriched with wine and whatever helps her nurse. If she craves more or different food, she may eat it at her own expense, and her husband may not stop her by warning that she might overeat and harm the child. The reason is given in a single phrase: her physical pain takes priority. The law hears a craving as a form of suffering.

The Child Who Knows His Mother

The last third of the chapter belongs to the children. A woman who bears twins cannot be forced to nurse both; she nurses one, and her husband hires a nurse for the other. If she wants to nurse another woman's baby along with her own, her husband may object. A woman who vowed not to nurse may still be compelled until the child is twenty four months old. And if she wants to nurse and her husband objects that it will mar her beauty, her wish prevails, even if she has maids, because it is painful for her to part from her child.

A woman who was poor and married a rich man is not bound by her past. If his standing is such that his wife would not nurse, and she does not wish to, he must hire a nurse or buy a maid, even if he owned none before. A woman's standing rises with her husband's, the Rambam says, and does not descend with it. If they dispute what his standing requires, the burden of proof is on her, and he takes no oath.

Then the divorced mother, and the baby who knows her, even blind. The husband does not support his former wife, even while she nurses his child, but beyond her wage he must supply everything the child needs: clothing, food, drink, salves. A divorced woman who is pregnant receives nothing at all from him. After weaning, a son may remain with his mother until he completes his sixth year, and his father must support him there. After six, the father may say that he will support the boy in his own house and not in hers. A daughter, the Rambam rules, stays with her mother forever. If the father is wealthy enough to be obligated in charity, her support is taken from him while she lives with her mother, even if her mother remarries, and after his death she is supported from his estate as a condition of her mother's ketubah. And if a mother does not want custody after weaning, she may give the children to their father, or, if there is none, to the community, which must care for them.

The Unifying Principle

Read quickly, this is a chapter about who owes what. Read slowly, it is a chapter about what cannot be substituted. Money can buy a maid to grind the flour and a nurse to feed a second twin. Money cannot buy the five personal gestures, and it cannot buy the thing a baby has once he knows whose arms he is in. At every point where the ledger would treat people as interchangeable, the Rambam stops it: the wife's own hand pours the cup, the mother's own pain outranks the husband's worry, the bride's standing rises and does not fall, and the child who recognizes is not handed over.

The Alter Rebbe opens the second chapter of the Tanya with the verse calling Israel children of G-d, and he explains that a child is drawn from the very mind of the father. The bond is not a contract that could be reassigned. It is a matter of source. That is the kind of bond this chapter protects when it keeps a recognizing child with his mother.

The Baal Shem Tov told a parable that belongs beside the blind infant. A prince wandered so far from his father's palace that he forgot his father's language. When at last he returned and stood outside the gate, he could not say who he was. All he could do was cry out, and the king recognized his son's voice. The Baal Shem Tov applied it to the shofar, the wordless cry with which we stood in front of the King only a few days ago. Recognition, in that parable and in this chapter, does not need sight. It needs a voice that the Father has heard before.

Modern Application

Most of the language of this chapter belongs to an economy and a household structure that few people live in today, and some of it is hard to read. What survives, and what is urgent, is the distinction between the tasks that can be outsourced and the gestures that cannot. A great deal of modern family life has been handed to services, apps and schedules, and much of that is a genuine blessing. The chapter asks what is left that only you can do, and it answers that the smallest things may be exactly those: the cup placed in a hand, the face washed, the bed made, the voice a child knows in the dark.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe spoke often of the Jewish woman as the akeret habayit, the foundation of the home, and he meant it as a description of influence rather than a list of chores. Rebbetzin Chana, whose yahrzeit is today, lived that description in exile. When her husband, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, was banished to a remote village in Kazakhstan, she followed him, and when he had no ink to write his Torah insights, she gathered herbs and made ink for him by hand. No maid could have done it. Nobody else knew what those pages meant to him.

The breaking of dishes offers a second lesson for any home. The Sages preferred a household where someone might break a plate to a household where everyone was too careful to touch one. Peace, they ruled, is worth more than the crockery. Plenty of families could use that ruling posted on the refrigerator.

The Closing

The Aseret Yemei Teshuvah are built on the claim that we are children, not employees. An employee is judged by output, and a poor record means replacement. A child is judged by recognition, and a child who has been known cannot be handed away. The Rambam's blind infant has never seen his mother, and the law still says that separating them is a danger it will not allow.

Four days before Yom Kippur, many people feel that they have forgotten the language of the palace. The words of the prayers feel foreign, and the year's record does not bear close review. The chapter and the parable offer the same answer. The question is not whether you can see Him clearly. It is whether He knows your voice.

A divorced woman was told she could walk away from nursing, until the court discovered that her baby, who could not see, already knew her, and then the law would not let the two of them be parted. Somewhere in these ten days there is a moment for the cry without words. When you let it out this year, whose arms will you be reaching for?