Woman's World - 05 How A Mother Prepares For Rosh Hashanah

Men serve Hashem through their Thoughts, Women serve Hashem through Actions

A man uses his faculty of thought to serve Hashem, such as by learning Torah. What is the Avodah of a woman?

A woman doesn’t use the power of thought to serve Hashem – she mainly uses her actions.  A woman mainly is involved in her home, with her husband and children. She nourishes them and provides them with their physical needs. In addition to this, a woman also is involved in chessed; we will soon explain what this means.

These are the two main aspects of a woman’s Avodas Hashem: her home, and her chessed.

The home comes first; it is more important than any chessed. But, although running the home is her first priority, it is not good either if a woman is only focused on nourishing her family with their physical needs. A woman who wants to improve herself needs to do chessed as well with her family; we will explain what we mean.

Part One: Why We Must Do Chessed

Rav Chaim Volozhiner zt”l wrote in his introduction to sefer Nefesh HaChaim, “A person was only created in order to help others.” There are people who do a lot of chessed, but only because “it’s a mitzvah.” But this is not the purpose of why we do chessed. We need to do chessed because we were created to help people!

There are many ways to do chessed, but the main thing is that we must have a general attitude of always doing chessed in our life. When we do chessed, are we realizing that we are fulfilling our purpose on this world? It’s not mainly about how much chessed we do; that is one thing. It is more about what our attitude toward chessed is.

A Mother’s Role

A Jewish mother is doing chessed all day; all day, all she is concerned about is her family’s needs. This indeed is her main Avodas Hashem. But she must realize that she is doing all this because of chessed, not because she was thrown into these responsibilities. She didn’t “happen” to fall into this role.

A woman doesn’t learn Torah; her whole life is chessed. So chessed has to be her whole attitude on life! She does chessed, and in this she doesn’t need to improve, because it is all she does all day. But she must do it with an awareness. A woman doesn’t do chessed because she “happens” to fall into this role of being a housewife; it is part of the way Hashem designed creation, and this has to be her attitude on life: My whole Avodas Hashem on this world is to do chessed.

That is one part of her Avodah: knowing why she takes care of her family. She must realize that this is her whole life’s mission, not something she “happens” to do due to life circumstances.

Part Two: Giving Over Proper Values

The second part of a woman’s Avodas Hashem is the actual chessed she does. This is not the same thing as before; we will explain what this is.

It is written, “Do not forsake the Torah of your mother.” What Torah do we learn from our mothers, if our mothers did not learn Torah? A woman is exempt from learning Torah; what Torah does she give over to her children? Does she learn Mishnayos and Gemara with her children?

The “Torah of a mother” is that she gives over to her children the values of life. She doesn’t teach her children what to do and what not to do; that is the father’s job in chinuch. Her job in chinuch is to give her how the Torah “smells” – the beautiful fragrance of a Torah lifestyle. She gives over the attitude we must have toward life.

The husband learns Torah, and his role as a father is to teach them right from wrong. But his learning doesn’t necessarily give over the proper values to the children; it is the mother who accomplishes this. Why?

When the father goes back to the Beis Midrash to learn, it is the mother who remains in the house with the children. They are around her much more than they are around their father. It is she who is giving over the proper values to her children when their father isn’t around. She shows her children how to live the Torah lifestyle.

How The Mother Teaches Her Children

In order for a mother to accomplish this, she must practice what she preaches. If she tells her children to live a Torah kind of lifestyle but she herself doesn’t keep to her own words, her words will be ineffective on her children. Her words can only penetrate the hearts of her children when they are truthful and come from her heart, when she is an example to them. This is only when she herself lives by the words she says.

This is a woman’s role in the home: she brings up her children.  This is the real chessed that she does in the home. It is not simply that she provides them with their physical needs and nourishes them; her role is to bring them up with the proper values in life, to show them the how fragrant and sweet a Torah lifestyle is.

She teaches them the proper aspirations to have in life. She teaches them to be happy with life, happiness when doing the mitzvos, and what to want in life.

In this way, she does chessed her whole life, not just by rote, but as something which personifies her very life.

In Conclusion

If Avraham Avinu would have done chessed his whole life because simply “it’s a mitzvah” to do chessed, he wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. It was only because he viewed chessed as his whole purpose in life. Chessed personified him; it was his whole attitude about life.

 This is the kind of Chessed we need to have: not that we should do Chessed because we have to, but because it should be how we live our life.