אמ׳ ר' חנינא, בדבר הזה ניחמה דעתו וישבה דעתו,
לכך אמ׳ אש׳ חי׳ מי ימצא (משלי לא:י).
Rabbi Hanina said, In this matter she comforted him and his mind was settled, which is why it said, What a rare find is an ‘Eshet Ḥayil” (Prov. 31:10).1
Midrash Mishle 31.10
In its praises, ‘Eshet Ḥayil, the Hebrew acrostic poem which ends the book of Proverbs, expresses a conception of the perfect wife who does it all, with particular emphasis on material concerns. She is an expert weaver, hard-working, savvy in business, provides for her family, and gives charity. In essence, it is a recitation of her resume, the job description of a wife who, as the Resh verse notes, surpasses all other women. This text has functioned for centuries as a weekly recitation of husband to wife at the Shabbat table, a way for the head of the household to express his deep appreciation for his partner. This ritual still resonates for many Jewish families – sometimes despite its patriarchal roots, sometimes subverting them, and sometimes reinforcing them. As such, and like all of our living texts, it invites continued engagement and meaning-making. In this piece, I wish to reflect on how the emotional expectations of the ‘Eshet Ḥayil, as expressed in the Biblical poem, find parallels in some subsequent Rabbinic interpretations.
The epigraph above draws my attention to a different facet of ‘Eshet Ḥayil. By recognizing that the wife described in the poem provides emotional support in addition to her physical contributions to the household, we can identify casual reference to what we now call “emotional labor.” The Bet and Gimmel verses speak of how she sets her husband’s heart at ease with all the good she does for him in life. The Ayin verse talks of her emotional strength in the face of mortality. And the Peh verse notes that she always communicates with wisdom and kindness. In other words, the ‘Eshet Ḥayil is not just a wife who is capable or valorous, as English translations usually describe her, but she is also a wife who privileges the emotional care of her husband without seeking his support for her own emotional needs, of which the poem makes no mention. She soldiers on, giving her husband’s life an emotionally stable foundation.
In her pioneering 1983 work, The Managed Heart, Arlie Russell Hochschild developed the idea of emotional labor. She noted that, for many jobs, “the emotional style of offering the service is part of the service itself.”2 Among many insights in the book, Hochschild shows again and again that emotional labor is more often expected of women and is more often the province of fields dominated by women. Similarly, the references to emotional support in ‘Eshet Ḥayil expand the wifely job description to include the emotional style by which the wife performs her duties. This emotional labor requirement was recognized by the Sages who collated the midrashim on Proverbs in the Middle Ages.
In Midrash Mishle 31.10, a story is told about Rabbi Meir and his wife,3 in which, following the death of their sons while Rabbi Meir is preaching at the academy on Shabbat afternoon, his wife gently and carefully tells him the news and holds him up through the initial shock of mourning. Her emotional strength is tied to the notion of the ‘Eshet Ḥayil, as articulated in the epigraph above.
Another matter, What a rare find is an ‘Eshet Ḥayil” (Prov. 31:10).
They told a story of Rabbi Meir that while he was sitting and expounding in the academy on Shabbat afternoon, his two sons died.
What did their mother do?
She left both of them on the bed and spread a sheet over them.
At the end of Shabbat, Rabbi Meir came home from the academy.
He said to her, “Where are my two sons?”
She replied, “They went to the academy.”
He said, “I looked at the academy and did not see them.”
She gave him the cup (of wine) for Havdalah, and he did Havdalah.
He asked again, “Where are my two sons?”
She replied, “They went to a place, but they are coming now.”
She placed food before him and he ate.
After he blessed the Grace After Meals,
she said to him, “Rabbi, I have a question to ask you.”
He replied, “Ask your question.”
She said, “Rabbi, someone came and gave me a deposit earlier. But now, he has come to take the deposit back. Should we return it to him or not?”
He said, “My daughter, if someone has a deposit, mustn’t they return it to its owner?”
She replied, “Rabbi, if not for your opinion, I would not have returned it to him.”
What did she do?
She took his hand and led him to that room, brought him to the bed and removed the sheet from over them.
And he saw the two of them, dead and lying on the bed.
He began to cry, saying, “My sons, my sons! My masters, my masters! My sons by nature and my masters who enlightened me with their Torah learning.”
At that moment, she said to Rabbi Meir, “Rabbi, didn’t you tell me that we must return the deposit to its Master?”
And so he said, “God gives and God takes away. May the Name of God be blessed.” (Job 1:21)
Rabbi Hanina said, In this matter she comforted him and his mind was settled, which is why it said, What a rare find is an ‘Eshet Ḥayil” (Prov. 31:10).4
We should understand this story as an intentional, didactic reflection by its Medieval author on the content of the ‘Eshet Ḥayil poem. As Burton Visotzky and Carolyn Braun note in Confronting Death: Four Stories of Consolation, this text is “an extreme fiction” with no antecedent in earlier Rabbinic literature, despite describing a Tannaitic sage.5 Its details are not constrained by historical veracity but only the picture the storyteller wishes to paint.
This story is built on a ratcheting tension. Rabbi Meir is in the academy, expounding on a Shabbat afternoon. The world of the story is then immediately ruptured with an intense dramatic irony. While he is going about his business, Rabbi Meir is ignorant of the terrible loss that he and his wife have suffered, of which both she and we, the audience, are aware. The dramatic question of the story has been established: What will she do?
In Visotzky and Braun’s analysis, they zero in on the emotional care that Rabbi Meir’s wife provides in this story, holding back her own grief while tending to her son’s bodies and her husband’s heart. It is particularly important that she does this on Shabbat, a time when regular mourning practices would be prohibited. She carries her grief alone for the duration of Shabbat so that Rabbi Meir only becomes aware of his loss after Havdalah, when he can fully express it. As in the Bet verse of ‘Eshet Ḥayil, he entrusts his heart to her, and she returns his trust with goodness. She makes sure to tell him in a way that eases him into the shock, a luxury she was not afforded when she discovered them deceased. As in the Ayin verse, she remains strong in the face of mortality. And then, when Rabbi Meir keens for the loss of his children, she provides him with solace he can understand and internalize. As in the Peh verse, she speaks with wisdom and kindness.
Even though the midrash is set on Shabbat, and so we never see Rabbi Meir’s wife engage directly in labor, the story still contains subtle references to the physical labor described in the ‘Eshet Ḥayil poem. As in the Tzadi verse, she looks to the requirements of her household, ensuring that Rabbi Meir is fed and that the cup of wine for Havdalah is filled (should we assume this came from the vineyard described in the Zayin verse?). The Samekh verse begins with reference to the cloth she has woven, and the same word, sadin, is chosen by our storyteller to describe the cloth Rabbi Meir’s wife places over her sons. And, as in the Nun verse, because she has maintained the home, her husband can sit “among the elders of the land.” Rabbi Meir’s wife fulfills both the emotional and physical requirements of this job.
Visotzky and Braun describe the emotional support relationship of Rabbi Meir and his wife, in which the devoted father laments while the stoic wife does what the situation requires, as a “role reversal.”6 But should we understand the weeping husband and composed wife as such? Perhaps this dynamic is better understood as a reification of gender norms already present in both Biblical and Rabbinic literature, in which the wife consistently does emotional labor for her husband as part of being a good wife.
Aggadic literature is full of stories of crying men and the women who provide them with emotional support. For example, Midrash Eishet ‘Ḥayil, a later addition to Midrash Mishle which attributes each verse to a biblical heroine, assigns the Gimmel verse to Rebecca, “who showed kindness to Jacob when Sarah, his mother, died.” And Charlotte Fonrobert has shown that despite the Bavli’s instinct towards the cliché that women cry more than men, it leverages that cliché to make analogies about Rabbinic behavior in the Beit Midrash more than to make arguments about life in the marital home.7 When discussing the story of Rabbi Meir and his wife, Fonrobert acknowledges the role emotional labor plays in their relationship: “the mother’s task is to manage her husband’s emotional reaction.”8 However, Fonrobert suggests that the story views Meir’s relationship to his sons as closer than his wife’s, diminishing the amount of emotional labor our storyteller expects from Meir’s wife.
On the contrary, I would argue that our storyteller is seeking to maximize the emotional labor Rabbi Meir’s wife is asked to perform. I agree with Visotzky and Braun when they describe the “staggering weight” of what Meir’s wife does, carrying her own grief over the loss of two sons while also providing high quality pastoral care to her husband. Not only that, but both of her sons die at once, an even larger tragedy than what is usually expressed in other midrashim about the loss of children.9 It seems to me that the severe nature of this story in Midrash Mishle is different from other narratives in which a rabbi cries or a woman is emotionally resilient. This storyteller is suggesting that extreme emotional labor is part of the job for an ideal wife.
Since Hochschild coined the term, the usage of “emotional labor” has spread to include all kinds of unpaid, invisible emotional work that women do to maintain the household.10 In an interview in The Atlantic, Hochschild rejected the expansion of the concept, insisting that her idea refers only to occupational labor that has an emotional component.11 Her argument stems from the importance of acknowledging the expectation in some jobs that not only will the (usually female) laborer set aside their own emotional life, but that they will serve the emotional life of the (usually male) customer, while also producing the expected goods and services. However, it is precisely this kind of labor that is described in the ‘Eshet Ḥayil poem, even as it is assigned to a wife in the domestic sphere. Meanwhile, in the Midrash Mishle narrative, the emotional requirements of that job are pushed to their extremes. The author appears to take for granted the physical labor of the 'Eshet Ḥayil and expands her emotional labor, displaying little interest in her emotional life, which remains absent from the text, and assuming greater emotional strength and resilience of the wife than her husband.12 In this way, perhaps ‘Eshet Ḥayil is a bridge concept which recognizes both Hochschild’s intended labor scope and the expanded usage of “emotional labor,” as it includes both the physical and emotional labor of the occupation of "wife." And so, if we are to fully understand the challenge that the ‘Eshet Ḥayil model poses to our own, more egalitarian communities, then it is incumbent upon us to think carefully about both the emotional and physical components of the domestic expectations it communicates when recited at the Shabbat table.
[1] This piece would not have been possible without the input of my small group from the Gender in Torah and Tradition Fellowship at JTS: Margeaux Dressner-Wolberg, Marjorie Lehman, and Yitz Landes. Thank you to Marjorie Lehman and Stephanie Ruskay for inviting me to participate in this fellowship. In addition, a heartfelt thank you to Burton Visotzky and Meira Soloff for reading early drafts of this piece and providing invaluable feedback.
[2] Arlie R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: UC Press, 1983), 4.
[3] Rabbi Meir's wife is not explicitly named in this story, although she is identified as Beruria elsewhere in Rabbinic literature. However, it is possible that her name here is implied, as the name Beruria is likely a Hebrew pronunciation of the Roman name Valeria, derived from the Latin word valeo, which shares a lexical range with חיל. For more on the namelessness of Rabbi Meir's wife in this narrative, see Burton L. Visotzky, Sage Tales: Wisdom and Wonder from the Rabbis of the Talmud (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Pub, 2011), 50-1.
[4] Burton L. Visotzky, Midrash Mishle: A Critical Edition based on Vatican MS. Ebr. 44, with variant readings from all know Manuscripts and Early Editions, and with an Introduction, References and a short Commentary (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 2002), 190-2; translation into English is my own.
[5] Burton L. Visotzky and Carolyn Braun, Confronting Death: Four Stories of Consolation (New York: The Rabbinical Assembly, 1995), 28.
[6] Visotzky and Braun, 29.
[7] Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, “When the Rabbi Weeps: On Reading Gender in Talmudic Aggadah,” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues, no. 4 (2001): 56-83, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40326535.
[8] Fonrobert 67
[9] Cf., the story about Rabbi Yohanan mourning the loss of his son in ARNa 14. There is also more to say here about the loss of two sons at once. In particular, I suspect our author has in mind the tragic deaths of Aaron and Elisheva’s sons, Nadav and Avihu, but that is a parallel I will explore at another time.
[10] C.f., Gemma Hartley, “Women Aren’t Nags – We’re Just Fed Up,” Harper’s Bazaar, September 27, 2017, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a12063822/emotional-labor-gender-equality/.
[11] Julie Beck, “The Concept Creep of ‘Emotional Labor,’” The Atlantic, November 26, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/arlie-hochschild-housework-isnt-emotional-labor/576637/.
[12] It is worth asking why our midrashist chose to make this point using the marriage of Rabbi Meir and Beruria, but that requires more exploration than I have space to do in this short piece.