Eshet Chayil

Earlier this year, I read Rachel Held Evans’s book A Year of Biblical Womanhood and hosted a Mormon Stories Book Club podcast with Rachel, who is fabulous.   Rachel is an evangelical Christian blogger, author, and speaker whose expansive and inclusive worldview I appreciate immensely–especially as someone who is also a member of a conservative religion.

The whole book is great, but I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Valor and on what it means to be a “valorous” woman.   The notion of being a “valorous” woman comes from Proverbs 31: 10-31 (called  Eisheth Hayil (אשת חיל)) which outlines the “ideal” or “perfect” wife in Judaism.   This passage of scripture has been used (and abused) to define a narrow role for women in their personal and family lives, as well as in their religious lives.  

Rachel describes befriending an Orthodox Jewish woman, Ahava, who explains what the passage means to her.   Ahava says she gets called an “eshet chayil” (a valorous woman) all the time, for doing all sorts of parts of her regular life.   She explains further that Jewish men memorize this passage and recite it to their wives:

Every week at the Shabbat table, my husband sings the Proverbs 31 poem to me.   It’s special because I know that no matter what I do or don’t do, he praises me for blessing the family with my energy and creativity.   All women can do that in their own way.   I bet you do as well (pgs. 87-88).

For Ahava, then, eshet chayil is a blessing, a celebration–something meant to be given to women unconditionally rather than something women have to earn if we somehow manage to check everything off of our neverending to-do lists or if we comply with roles someone else assigns to us.

Rachel latched onto the idea of celebrating women’s everyday acts and started congratulating herself and her friends with exclamations of “Eshet chayil!” when she or they had done something good or awesome or cool.   And maybe even when they hadn’t.  

I’ve thought about that phrase a lot since learning it this spring.   I thought about all the eshet chayils or women of valor in my life:   my mom, my grandmothers, my aunt, my sisters, my sisters-in-law, my friends, my coworkers, my Doves and Serpents co-bloggers, my MoFem internet friends, my nieces, my daughters . . . I have been blessed with an abundance of amazing women in my life.

So this morning, when I woke up to see this amazing mini-documentary of the Ordain Women event on October 5, I whispered to myself–after wiping away the tears that still come quite readily and most often unexpectedly–“Eshet chayils.”    Women of valor.