I appreciate ritual in my life. As my religious tradition is Judaism, the tradition I seek out is generally from Jewish sources. And sometimes, rituals don’t yet exist for the things I’m doing. Sometimes that’s because I’m doing something that didn’t used to be a thing that happened, and sometimes it’s because I’m doing a thing that the rabbis just never did. This prayer falls into both categories. I wrote it to say when I began pumping for my then-infant. It is both a modern thing – believe it or not breast pumps weren’t invented until the mid-nineteenth century (Patent US11135) – and because the ancient rabbis, as far as they got in thinking about breastfeeding was to agree that children must be fed (Babylonian Talmud Tractate Ketubot, Page 60a) and to tell a tale of a man who miraculously lactated. So I set out to create a prayer of my own.
Traditional Jewish prayers often take the format of a meditation, usually composed of relevant verses from Torah, followed by a blessing using the formula “Blessed are You God, King of the Universe, who …” I used this traditional format, and tweaked the traditional blessing formula to motherhood rather than kingship, as it better suited the situation.
Without further ado, here it is: Bracha for pumping