Clapping for Myself

If you clap for yourself, someone else might join in!

I love watching my 16-month old grandaughter put one block on top of another and clap for herself. Naturally, she then looks at me to make sure I’m clapping for her also. But before she looks at anyone else, she cheers herself on with a big smile. When, I started to wonder, did we stop clapping for ourselves?

Photo by Guillermo Latorre on Unsplash

This made me mindful of an article on women’s leadership in a Harvard business anthology. The essay was written by Anna Fels, a practicing psychiatrist and author of Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives. The essay was adapted from the book and opens with an interview Dr. Fels conducted.

The interviewee said she had a confession to make. She had a notebook when she was seven where she would write poems and doodle. There she revealed the pact she had with herself in four letters: IWBF. She told no one what it stood for except Dr. Fels. I Will Be Famous. She still felt deeply uncomfortable sharing the secret about her own ambition all these years later.

As Dr. Fels continued her research, she discovered that the women who came to her practice could talk about many subjects but shut down when asked about their own ambitions for themselves. They were embarrassed or felt guilty about dreaming big or making a dent in the universe. They tucked away their supposedly childish illusions as they aged. They were embarrassed by them.

What Fels discovered in her research was not that women lacked skill, competence, or expertise but that they were less recognized and praised for them throughout their childhoods to the point that as successsful adults, they were more likely to attribute their positions to luck, chance, or the encourgament of others. “Women too frequently seek to deflect attention from themselves. They refuse to claim a central, purposeful place in their own stories, eagerly shifting the credit elsewhere and shunning recognition.”

And this made me aware of something quite remarkable in the Passover story that Jews around the globe will retell in a few days. In chapters one and two of Exodus, there are some remarkable women who acted subversively when Pharaoh decreed that all male infants be tossed in the Nile. The midwives, the women who kept on birthing children, and even Pharaoh’s own daughter did not listen to him.

Most significantly, little Miriam placed herself at the edge of a powerful river in the reeds to see what would befall her three-month old brother Moses: “And his sister stationed herself at a distance, to learn what would befall him” (Ex. 2:4). Not only that, but after Pharaoh’s daughter saw the baby and took him as her own, Miriam had the gumption as a young slave girl to approach a princess with an idea: “Shall I go and get you a Hebrew nurse to nurse the child for you?”(Ex. 2:7). If the princess was surprised, she did not show it. She answered in the affirmative, and Miriam made sure that her own mother nursed the boy and maintained a connection with his family and his people.

Miriam changed the course of Jewish history through a small act of confidence. What a hutzpa girl! Now that is a child who knew how to clap for herself. And maybe had she been older, she would have held back, questioned herself, or hid herself deeper in the reeds - the same way that women so often shrink themselves to fit the needs and perceptions of others. I never understood until I read this research why it took a little girl rather than a full-grown woman to have this kind of nerve to do good and to take responsibility for the life of another.

Later, in Exodus 15, when Miriam took a timbrel and led the women in dance, she was, of course, celebrating God’s deliverance and maybe, just maybe, she was acknowledging her own role in the redemption through her outbreak of joyous song. Think of the hand that beat the timbrel as her private way of clapping for herself.

One Step to Stamina: Think of one very special thing you have done in this world and clap for yourself.