BABY THERAPY
Dr. Jonathan Weinkle
It’ s possible I attended the birth of Mashiach …
For my first fifteen years as an attending primary care physician, I regularly rounded in the newborn nursery. I also regularly forgot to plan for the days when I would have preferred not to be rounding, which is how I found myself needing to see newborns one Tisha B’ Av. Woozy from hunger and dehydration, and scruffy from not shaving or showering, I slouched my way into the post-partum room of a frum woman and her still-damp newborn.
We exchanged a knowing glance, thinking of an old tradition that Mashiach was born, or perhaps will one day be born, at the moment of the destruction of Beit HaMikdash, or at least on the day of Tisha B’ Av. 23 That look we shared meant,“ Perhaps today’ s the day.”
At his Bar Mitzvah, my son Akiva read from Yirmiyahu,“ Houses, fields, and vineyards will again be purchased in this land.” The prophet of doom, in that moment, was a prophet of hope. And in the modern, urban world I work in, the most hopeful thing a person can do is not to buy a vineyard( although I do have a grapevine growing next to my porch) – it is to bring a child into the world. I care for many young adults who are determined never to bear children.“ How could I raise a child in such a world?” they ask me rhetorically. I’ d like to answer them,“ Because the only hope for such a world is a new generation of souls to make change.”
23
See the parallel stories in Eichah Rabbah 1:51 and Talmud Yerushalmi Berachot 2:4:12.
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