II. Work/Life Nexus Plaskow/Cohler-Esses

Writing Exercise: Creating a Personal Mezuzah

• What is at the heart of your vision for life? Can you find a few words or sentences that express a vision that carries through your personal and work life?
• In other words, what words would you like, ideally, to (using the words of the shema) wear on your heart at all times-- on your way, when you awaken and when you lie down? teach to your children.......or when you go on a hike or sit at your desk at the office? What purpose might spans the different activities of your life?

1. Bonnie Miller-McLemore, Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma

Erikson first proposed the term generativity as a central task for the next to last stage of life. While this concept is neither familiar nor easy to grasp, it remains an apt one for our consideration. In this single word, we find embodied the human aspiration for a fulfilling adulthood which includes at least two aspects of human life that various theological traditions have long honored: meaningful vocation ; and 2) fruitful procreation. In a nutshell, generativity means an encompassing orientation to a life of productivity, creativity, and procreativity. Although Erikson understood the term strictly psychologically and discussed it primarily as one particular life stage in the eight phases of the human life cycle, the term has important kinship with theological doctrines of creation, procreation, vocation, and redemption.

….I use this term specifically to underscore my contention that beneath the middle-class scuffle over gender roles and child care lies an essential religious crisis of work and love, or generativity and care. Although it might be simpler to ponder “work” or “love,” or even “family” in isolation, as sometimes has been the case in theology, these three arenas are integrally related. Right next to the question, “A good mother who can find?” stands the question, “A good job who can find?”; “A good family who can find?”; “A good community who can find?”

2. From Grace Paley, “Midrash on Happiness”

What she meant by happiness, she said, was the following: she meant having (or having had) (or continuing to have) everything. By everything, she meant, first the children, then a dear person to live with, preferably a man (by live with, she meant for a long time but not necessarily). Along with that and not in preferential order, she required three or four best women friends to whom she could tell every personal fact and then discuss on the widest and deepest and most hopeless level, the economy, the constant, unbeatable, cruel war economy, the slavery of the American worker to the idea of that economy….

For happiness, she also required work to do in this world and bread on the table. By work to do she included the important work of raising children righteously up. By righteously she meant that along with being useful and speaking truth to the community, they must do no harm. By harm she meant not only personal injury to the friend the lover the coworker the parent (the city the nation) but also the stranger, she meant particularly the stranger in all her or his difference, who, because we were strangers in Egypt, deserves special goodness for life or at least until the end of strangeness. By bread on the table, she meant no metaphor but truly bread as her father had ended every single meal with a hunk of bread. By hunk, she was describing one of the attributes of good bread.