A Mysterious Source

I was on the couch in the dark watching Total Recall when my phone buzzed and a message popped up. “If you want to know what happened, search for j__curious2011.” It wasn’t from a number I recognized. “Who is this?” I typed. There was no answer, and I didn’t think anything of it. It was either a wrong number or some bullshit marketing gimmick. And then I got distracted by the film. Schwarzenegger was in a grimy hotel, head wrapped in a wet towel, sticking a metallic claw up his nose to retrieve a bug from his brain. Watching Total Recall has been a tradition for me on lockdowns — like how Americans watch It’s A Wonderful Life on Christmas or Soviet people switch on The Irony of Fate on New Year’s Eve. I first got the idea on that first long period of sheltering in my apartment to hide from the fallout — cracks sealed with duct tape to keep the dust out and windows blocked with chunks of plywood, aluminum foil, blankets, anything I could find to try to keep the radiation from penetrating. I sat there in the darkness for a month, eating canned food, rationing water. I found a copy of the film on one of my old hard drives and I watched it over the course of a week — playing it in snatches on my laptop from whatever extra electricity I managed to draw from the little solar panel I had attached to the side of the house. The tradition stuck. And now I turn it on every time I have to sit indoors to ride out a rad storm.

On the screen, Schwarzenegger now had landed on Mars to try to find out his true identity — riding the train, checking into his hotel, going down to the mutant red light district with the psychics and the hooker with three breasts. The movie wasn’t pulling me in today, though, and my thoughts kept drifting. I checked the radiation forecast, looked at the photos I took at the sacrifice altar out in Calistoga, checked the radiation stats again, looked at the feed… There was nothing going on, just the usual lockdown chatter. People were posting pics of their meals, sharing lockdown recipes, showing off their workout routines, bitching about their noisy neighbors, asking for rad shielding repair advice, trading rumors about raiding parties in their neighborhoods. I looked at the text message again. “If you want to know what happened, search for j__curious2011.” The screen glowed white in the darkness of my room. OK, I’ll bite.

I did the search and the results came back — hundreds of hits, all from a single website, a forum of some kind, www.613laws.xyz. I clicked one at random and it took me to a thread started by user j__curious2011. They had asked this question:

Got one for the learned ones on here. I have a friend who is about to have a baby through surrogacy. He and his wife are Jewish, but the surrogate obviously isn’t. She’s Ukrainian, I think. A Christian. They brought her over to California on a temporary visa while she finishes her pregnancy. So what I wonder is this: Will the baby be born Jewish or not? What’s the current consensus? Is there one?

This launched a big discussion — hundreds and hundreds of responses. Scanning through some of them, I saw that opinion was divided. Many were siding with the interpretation that Jewishness was passed down through the egg donor — that is, through the biological Jewish mother. Others were arguing in the opposite direction. To them, it was the womb’s identity that mattered. If the womb was Jewish, then the baby was Jewish. And if the womb wasn’t Jewish, then the baby wasn’t Jewish.

One user, a cohenj420, argued for the womb position:

The Talmud’s very clear on this dude. There’s a passage that directly applies to your question. It says if a non-Jewish woman converts to Judaism while she is pregnant, then her body becomes Jewish, and so the baby comes out of a Jewish schmundie and is thus Jewish itself. And so the opposite is true as well. If a baby pops out of a goy schmundie, then the baby is not Jewish. I don’t remember the exact source. I can look it up though.

A schmundie? I had to look it up. It was Yiddish for vagina.

User notyourgrandmasrabbi82 seconded cohenj420’s stance:

Agreed and there are other ways to think about it too. The Talmud quotes Rabbi Yochanan, sage of sages, who lived in 30 BC. ‘If someone starts to carry out a commandment and afterwards another person comes and finishes it, the commandment will be credited to the person who finishes it.’ That’s how he put it. Different context, but the principle applies to this situation too. Because to give birth and multiply is a holy commandment. In the case of your friend, this commandment was started by this Jewish woman egg donor, his wife. But then she stopped before finishing the Commandment and transferred her egg to a different woman, who is now finishing carrying the baby in her own womb. Thus, this non-Jewish woman, the shiksa surrogate, will complete the commandment. She’s the one who’ll get credit for it. So the baby will not be Jewish.

Another user, kosher_bro_meat, chimed in as well:

Sorry, my man, but your friend def gonna have a non-Jewish baby on his hands. It’ll be a little goy boy or goy girl. Rav Hisda. A fetus is not considered a baby until the 40th day after conception. So the Jewish egg mom’s identity doesn’t matter here — because the fetus becomes a human being inside a goy surrogate womb: ‘until forty days from conception, the fetus is merely water. It is not yet considered a living being.’

I looked up Rav Hisda. He was a big-shot rabbi who lived almost two thousand years ago in what today would be central Iraq and became wealthy as a beer brewer and was so holy that if he prayed for rain, the skies would immediately dump water. Other top-rated rabbis and Jewish sages were quoted by others in other replies. And the discussion progressed in this way for pages and pages. People presented their favorite passages, disagreed on interpretations, offered rebuttals, and rebuttals of rebuttals. Some appealed directly to passages from the Torah. But most seemed to lean on commentaries made by ancient rabbis — men who, like Rav Hisda, had been dead for more than a thousand years, and who themselves had been engaged in bitter arguments with each other rabbis from their time over the correct interpretations of what was and wasn’t allowed by their god. This topic of surrogacy had really set the people on this forum off. They seemed obsessed with it…and clung with aggressive confidence to whatever interpretation seemed right to them.

I guess it made sense if they were true believers. At the root of the issue was whether or not the baby would be Jewish — Jewish not in a material way, but in a spiritual way. The issue that hung in the balance was the nature of the baby’s soul. Doing surrogacy right was important to them because the nature of the womb would determine the kind of soul the kid would have. If the womb was all up to code, the baby would be born with the divine spark unique only to Jews. If not, the baby was liable to be born in a Jewish body but possessing a soul that was not Jewish at all. As kosher_bro_meat explained, “Your friend should really be careful about this. Yes every created thing in this world, including people without Jewish souls, does have the Divine spark. But it is not the same kind of Divine spark that Jewish souls have. Not even close. So G-d forbid they have what they think is a Jewish baby but that Jewish baby is just a hollow shell, possessing no Jewish soul. Imagine the tragedy? Their beautiful baby, a child that they cherish and love and bring up in the world and think is Jewish and yet it is debased like all non-Jews, its soul forever stuck at the level of a wild animal or even a rock.”