From the recovery of women’s Torah and the reconstruction of Jewish community, we move to the subject of God. The location of this topic as the last of the three central concepts of Judaism requires some explanation. Ontologically, and in traditional Jewish thought, God is first. Torah is God’s gift, incomprehensible without God; Israel is God’s chosen, formed and sustained through the choosing. Jewish thinking traditionally begins with God because God is the beginning, the sine qua non of Jewish existence and experience.
My postponement of the subject of God to this point in the book is not meant to deny the centrality of God in Jewish thought and experience or to demote God for some feminist motive. Rather, I have placed God third in the triad Torah/Israel/God because of the intended parameters and focus of my discussion. It is not my purpose to produce a full-scale philosophical reconceptualization of God, nor any account of God’s nature that could anchor an understanding of Torah and Israel in some noncircular way. I am interested instead in exploring and transforming the metaphors for God that have formed the Jewish imagination and shaped Jewish self-understanding and behavior. These metaphors are not reducible to Torah or Israel, but neither do they exist without them. Torah provides us with our images and conception of God, and Israel is the locus for the experiences of God that find expression in the images of Torah. The representation of God as male, for example, is comprehensible only in the context of an androcentric Torah that is elaborated and rendered plausible by a male-defined community. While this does not mean that the Jewish concept of God is simply the projection of a male-dominated society, it does mean that the experience of God is sustained and interpreted in the categories of a patriarchal culture. It makes most sense to analyze the Jewish picture of God from a feminist perspective, then, after having explored the context in which it develops.
If the Jewish understanding of God emerges from Torah and Israel, it is also the case that the concepts Torah, Israel, and God are mutually reinforcing. Since a central part of the Jewish picture of God is that God is the giver of Torah and covenant partner of Israel, images of God ground the notions of Torah and Israel in a distinctly circular fashion. The image of God as male that arises out of a community in which women are Other in turn supports an androcentric understanding of Torah and Israel. Conversely, as new feminist metaphors for God begin to emerge out of a Jewish community already in the process of change, these metaphors support further change in a feminist direction. Thus, while my discussion of God will build on the foundations of Torah and Israel, it will have to look at the interrelation of what are finally mutually supportive concepts and images.
As I see it, the goal of a Jewish feminist approach to God-language is to incorporate women’s Godwrestling into the fullness of Torah by finding images that can communicate and evoke the experience of the presence of God in a diverse, egalitarian, and empowered community of Israel. The experience of God in community is both the measure of the adequacy of traditional language and the norm in terms of which new images must be fashioned and evaluated. It is in light of this norm that images of God as male and as dominating Other have been judged limited and oppressive. And it is in faithfulness to this norm that a range of new metaphors for God have been elaborated, tried on, and discarded or preserved. A consideration of Jewish images of God from a feminist perspective takes us from criticism of established God-language to efforts to open up the metaphors we use, to attempts to reorient the Jewish conception of deity.
Traditional Images of God
The Image of God as Male
A feminist critique of Jewish God-language begins with the unyielding maleness of the dominant Jewish picture of God. If the Jewish understanding of God is in many ways a complex and contradictory weave of biblical and philosophical categories, the maleness of God is a consistent theme in all elements in the fabric. God’s maleness is so deeply and firmly established as part of the Jewish conception of God that it is almost difficult to document: It is simply part of the lenses through which God is seen. Maleness is not a distinct attribute, separable from God’s anger or mercy or justice. Rather, it is expressed through the total picture of God in Jewish texts and liturgy. God in the Jewish tradition is spoken of in male pronouns, and more importantly, in terms of male characteristics and images. In the Bible, God is a man of war (Ex. 15:3), a shepherd (Ps. 23:1), king (for example, 1 Sam. 12:12; Ps. 10:16), and father (for example, Jer. 3:19; 31:9). The rabbis called him “father of mercy,” “father in heaven,” “king of all kings,” and simply “he.”1A. Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God, vol. 1: The Names and Attributes of God (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1927), 56, 90, 84. Every blessing evokes God as lord and king of the universe, and throughout the liturgy, he is father God and God of our fathers, lord of hosts, and king of the earth.
These are not the only epithets applied to God, but neutral and even female images do little to counter this dominant picture. Attributes and actions that are themselves gender-neutral are read through the filter of male language, so that the God who performs these actions is still imagined in male terms. There is nothing intrinsically male, for example, about the action of liberation or about the most mysterious of all names for God: Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh (I am who I am, or I will be who I will be, Ex. 3:14). But when the Exodus narrative is read in the context of the Song at the Sea that celebrates the Lord of war triumphing over his enemies (Ex. 15), and when, in a male-dominated society, it is assumed that power is the prerogative of maleness, God comes to be seen as male throughout. The hand that leads Israel out of Egypt is a male hand, whether or not it is called so explicitly.2Cynthia Ozick, “Notes Toward Finding the Right Question,” On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader, edited by Susannah Heschel (New York: Schocken Books, 1983), 122. Ozick sees this clearly but denies its significance.
Female images that might balance the prevailing male metaphors exist in Judaism, but—except in the marginalized mystical tradition (to be considered below)—they must be ferreted out as a tiny minority strand. Isaiah, for example, is one of several biblical writers who uses images of God as mother (42:14; 66:13), and feminist scholars have been at pains to point out that God appears in the Bible as wet-nurse and midwife, and provider of water and food.3Phyllis Trible, “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 41 (March 1973): 32–35 and God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), chapters 2 and 3. But while these attributes are an important reminder that God is not literally male, and they provide resources for the construction of alternative imagery, they are not picked up in the liturgy and are vastly overshadowed by masculine terminology. Like the mystical notion of the Shekhinah as God’s female presence, they have had virtually no impact on the dominant image of God.
If anything moderates God’s maleness or allows for its obfuscation, it is not so much the existence of female images as the influence of Jewish philosophy. The vivid personality of God found in the Bible and in many midrashim is roundly disclaimed by the Jewish philosophical tradition, which tries to free its idea of God from any anthropomorphisms.4On the tensions in the Jewish conception of God, see Encyclopedia Judaica, s.v. “God”; Louis Jacobs, “God,” Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs, edited by Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), 291–98; A. Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God, vol. 2: Essays in Anthropomorphism (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1937). The composite nature of the conception of God that results from the interweaving of midrash and philosophy allows Jews simultaneously to imagine God as male and to declare “him” incorporeal and therefore ungendered. As one prominent scholar puts it, “The truth is that the God of Israel, though described chiefly by masculine nouns and verbs, is a relatively genderless male deity….”5Arthur Green, “Keeping Feminist Creativity Jewish,” Sh’ma 16/305 (January 10, 1986): 35. The obvious self-contradiction in such a statement is underscored by feminist experiments with liturgical change that substitute female pronouns and imagery for the standard male ones. The disgust and passionate resistance aroused by such efforts reveals clearly that Jews hold a deeply gendered understanding of God—one that is only masked and kept in place by appeals to God’s incorporeality.
While establishing the ubiquity of male images of God is not the same as proving their harmfulness, from a feminist perspective these images are highly problematic.6In discussing feminist criticism of male God-language, I draw on my articles “The Right Question Is Theological,” in Heschel, On Being a Jewish Feminist, 227–28 and “Language, God, and Liturgy: A Feminist Perspective,” Response 44 (Spring 1983): 4–6. Obvious and innocuous as male God-language has come to seem, metaphors matter—on both an individual and social level. Though long usage may inure us to the implications of our imagery, religious symbols are neither arbitrary nor inert. They are significant and powerful communications through which a religious community expresses a sense of itself and its universe. Religious symbols give resonance and authority to a community’s self-understanding and serve to support and sustain its conception of the world. The male images Jews use in speaking to and about God emerge out of and maintain a religious system in which men are normative Jews and women are perceived as Other. Drawing on the experience of only some who stood at Sinai, they validate a community that is hierarchically structured.
One sort of evidence for the political function of male God-language is provided by the circumstances of its emergence. This language was not the natural and spontaneous mode of prayer of a patriarchal society; it had a history, taking hold gradually with the rise and consolidation of patriarchal religious and social institutions in ancient Israel. The Bible provides extensive evidence of a long struggle in Israel over how God/the gods should be envisioned and who should serve in their cult.7See chapter 2, 42–43; Carol P. Christ, Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), chapter 3; Judith Ochshorn, The Female Experience and the Nature of the Divine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). In the polytheistic ancient Near East, gender was not a significant category either in assigning the characteristics of the gods or in deciding who should serve them. In Israel, on the other hand, the rise of the one male God was correlated with a deep concern for gender as a central determinant of appropriate behavior in both cult and society, and with the exclusion of women from public religious life.8Ochshorn, The Female Experience. Although detailed relationships between changes in God-language and social patterns in Israel remain to be traced, Israel’s choice of male language is consistent with the gradual marginalization of women within the religious realm and serves as a partial ideological justification for their subordination.9See T. Drorah Setel, “Prophets and Pornography: Female Sexual Imagery in Hosea,” in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, edited by Letty Russell (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985), 86–95, for a discussion of the relation between God-language and the status of women in a particular historical period.
The ways in which male God-language continues to legitimate male authority are difficult to demonstrate, for this language has become so familiar, it is simply taken for granted. Since we “know” that male language is generic, and we subject God-language to many layers of translation, it is difficult to imagine that the literal level of images has any effect. As Mary Daly argued years ago, however, the symbol of the father God—or the godfather as she calls him—is rendered plausible by patriarchy and, in turn, authorizes male-dominated social structures by making women’s oppression appear right and fitting. “If God in ‘his’ heaven is a father ruling ‘his’ people, then it is in the nature of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male dominated.”10Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 13. As if in confirmation of this view, a student of mine (in an Introduction to Religion class at Wichita State University) reported that when she asked her boss why there were no women executives in the company she worked for, he replied, “Because God is a man”!
A social scientific understanding of the nature of religious symbolism can help elucidate more fully the how and why of this connection, for it shows that a central purpose of symbols is to depict and authenticate the worldview of which they are part. Religious symbols express both the sensibility and moral character of a people and the way in which it understands and structures the world. In Clifford Geertz’s language, our sense of God or the “really real” colors our “sense of the reasonable, the practical, the humane and the moral.” Religious symbols do not simply tell us about God; they are not simply models of a community’s sense of ultimate reality. They also shape the world in which we live, functioning as models for human behavior and the social order. The Sabbath, for example, as a model of God’s action in creating the world, is also a model for the Jewish community which, like God, rests on the seventh day. The double reference of symbols—up and down—enforces a community’s sense of the factuality and appropriateness of those symbols.11Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, edited by William Lessa and Evon Vogt (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 205, 207, 213, 215; quotation 215. See Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 2–3 and Christ, Laughter of Aphrodite, 117–19 for the same use of Geertz. If God rested and enjoined rest on the seventh day, how can we fail to rest also, and how can our rest not bring us closer to God?
When this analysis is applied to male images for God, it is clear that such images also function as models of and models for. They both claim to tell us about the divine nature, and they justify a human community that reserves power and authority to men. Occasional explicit appeals to such language to support male dominance help illuminate a powerful circular argument which is always implicit in its use.12I have in mind remarks like the one reported by my student (see note 10) as well as repeated use of this language to justify the exclusion of women from ordination. For the latter argument in a Jewish context, see Mortimer Ostow, “Women and Change in Jewish Law,” Conservative Judaism 29 (Fall 1974): 5–12. When God is pictured as male in a community that understands “man” to have been created in God’s image, it only makes sense that maleness functions as the norm of Jewish humanity. When maleness becomes normative, women are necessarily Other, excluded from Torah and subordinated in the community of Israel. And when women are Other, it seems only fitting and appropriate to speak of God in language drawn from the male norm.
While the function of the male image of God in an androcentric religious system is the chief focus of the feminist critique, there is another problem with this image that is separable from and yet buttresses its role in supporting patriarchy. When particular symbols for God become deeply established and familiar, they lose their transparency as symbols and come to be seen as descriptions of God that provide unique access to the nature of divine reality. Though this can happen with any much-used symbol, the image of God as male seems especially to function in this unconscious way. God’s maleness has been so completely taken for granted that it is even exempted from the philosophical injunction against ascribing positive attributes to God. Maimonides, for example, considers it illegitimate ever to characterize God in positive terms, for this might imply that God is similar to other existing things. Yet throughout his discussion of negative and positive attributes, Maimonides continually refers to God as He and Him without ever taking note of the fact that maleness is a positive trait or applying to this attribute his doctrine of negation.13Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, 2 vols., translated by Shlomo Pines (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), Part I, chapters 55–59. Elizabeth Johnson makes this point for Christian philosophical theology in “The Incomprehensibility of God and the Image of God Male and Female,” Theological Studies 45 (September 1984): 454. In recent times, the anger and fear awakened by feminist attempts to alter male God-language similarly bespeak a profound, often previously unarticulated, attachment to this image, and a dread of losing along with it the very nature of God.
When a metaphor is assumed and defended on this level, it has ceased to be an image and become an idol. The metaphor is no longer simply a way of pointing to God but is identified with God, so that any change in the image seems to defame or disparage God “himself.” The claim that only male language may be used for God—whether defended explicitly or disguised behind a liberal “what difference does it make, anyway?”—attributes ultimacy to particular male symbols. It then becomes maleness that is worshiped instead of God. While Jews are used to thinking of idols as pillars and stones, verbal idols can be every bit as powerful as sculpted ones—indeed more powerful for being less visible.14Marcia Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings: Toward a Feminist–Jewish Reconstruction of Prayer,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 3 (Spring 1987): 44–45. What will dislodge male idols, however, is not hammers or fire but structural changes in the patriarchal system and the concurrent creation of new metaphors that lead the imagination down untrod paths.
The Image of God as Dominating Other
It is not simply male metaphors for God that need to be broken, however, but also the larger picture of who God is. Were feminist objections to Jewish God-language confined to the issue of gender, the manipulation of pronouns and creation of female imagery would fairly easily resolve the difficulties described. In fact, though, experiments with changing liturgical language by adding female metaphors only call attention to larger problems in the underlying conception of the God who is male. Thus, while feminist criticisms of traditional language begin with gender, they come to focus on the deeper issue of images of God’s power as dominance. Such images are connected to God’s maleness insofar as they mirror male social roles, but the use of gender neutral or even female language does not itself guarantee that images of dominance have been addressed.15See Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 38–46, for an excellent discussion of the connection between male God-language and male ego ideals.
The issue of divine power is complex, for Jewish images of God’s power are more diverse than gender imagery for God. Metaphors of power as dominance predominate in the tradition, but not with the ubiquity of God as male. The central affirmation that God is the God of the covenant immediately places God’s power in the context of a relationship with rights and obligations on both sides. If sometimes Jewish acceptance of the covenant is itself depicted as the result of divine threats and domination, other times it is seen as a free choice. God lifts up Sinai over the heads of Israel to force the people to accept his law, but he also peddles his Torah from nation to nation.16Louis Ginsberg, The Legends of the Jews, 7 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1909–1938), 3 (1911): 81–82, 92. Since, as I have argued, the God of the tradition is thoroughly male, there is little point in not using the male pronoun in referring to traditional conceptions of God. God comes down on Sinai with thunder and fire (Ex. 19:18–19) but is afterward heard in “a still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12). God gives the laws and judges Israel by them, but God must also abide by the same norms and values.17See, for example, Genesis 18: 22–33; Elie Wiesel, Souls on Fire: Portraits and Legends of Hasidic Masters (New York: Random House, 1972), 110–11 and Gates of the Forest (New York: Schocken Books, 1982), 197. Wiesel is the most powerful contemporary exponent of the view that God can be held accountable to the covenant. In confronting the catastrophes that have time and again befallen the Jewish people, certain rabbis dared to depict God as powerless, accompanying his people into exile and weeping over the destruction of the Temple.18Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflections (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 28–29. For a contemporary version of the same response, see Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 61–62.
Despite this diversity of images of divine authority, however, certain images have been more central than others, acting as lenses through which counterimages have been appropriated and interpreted. Of the various sources for a Jewish conception of God’s power, none has been more important than liturgy, for it is above all in the repetition of prayer that a portrait of God is formed. Selecting particular images as fundamental, downplaying others, the liturgy has come to have a formative role in shaping the Jewish picture of deity. Since metaphors of God’s power as dominance are central to the liturgy, these metaphors have profoundly affected the Jewish imagination, building and solidifying a particular understanding of God. The God of Jewish liturgy is a king robed in majesty, a merciful but probing father, and master of the world. His sovereign Otherness is elaborated extensively: his dominion over creation, his control of history past and future, his revenge against his enemies, his power over the human soul. The purpose of prayer is to establish a relationship between the Jew and God, but this relationship is never balanced: The intimacy of the “you” addressed to a listening other is overshadowed by the image of the lord and king of the universe who is absolute ruler on a cosmic plane.19Alan Mintz, in “Prayer and the Prayerbook” (in Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts, edited by Barry Holtz [New York: Summit Books, 1984], 407), implies that the experiences of intimacy and might are balanced. It seems to me this is rather like saying that God’s masculine and feminine qualities are balanced. See Ellen Umansky, “(Re)Imaging the Divine,” Response 41–42 (Fall–Winter 1982): 111. Next to this God, human beings are as nothing, “men of renown as though they never existed, the wise as if they were without knowledge.”20Philip Birnbaum, Daily Prayer Book: Ha-Siddur Ha-Shalem (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1949), 24. The prayerbook as a paean to God’s glory and daily wonders, as a plea for his forgiveness and mercy, presents an image of God’s power as “power over” others, a power that is partly defined through the contrast with human weakness and dependency.21The contrast between “power over” and power from within or empowerment is a common theme in feminist work. See, for example, Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), chapter 4 and Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority, and Mystery (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), chapter 1.
This understanding of divine power as domination, crystalized and promulgated by the liturgy, is also amply attested by other sources, so that it can be specified and elaborated in broader terms. God’s power as dominance means, first of all, that the relation between God and human beings is profoundly assymetrical.22Gordon Kaufman, Theology for a Nuclear Age (Manchester and Philadelphia: Manchester University Press and Westminster Press, 1985), 39. God’s maleness connotes power, and God’s power is an extension of his maleness, but God is not powerful in the same sense as ordinary men. His power is supreme, absolute, infinite, completely Other than human authority. God created the world through his word and continues to rule over it, so that all that happens in the universe is the result of his sovereign will and action.23Ibid., 38. To him, “The nations are but a drop in a bucket” (Isa. 40:15); he brings their counsels to nothing (Ps. 33:10). His glory is like a devouring fire (Ex. 24:16), his presence more than mortals can bear (Ex. 19:12–13; 2 Sam 6:6–7). God sees and rules the earth from his dwelling place in heaven (for example, Ps. 14:2), and he does what he pleases, consulting no other will (Ps. 115:3; 135:6). In the Bible, this wholly Other God is also the God of the covenant, a God who walks on earth and whose word is near. When, however, the biblical picture of a powerful, awe-inspiring deity is combined with the “omni” attributes of the Jewish philosophical tradition—omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence—the result is a picture of a personal God who is unutterably distant, majestic, and exalted.24For discussion of the “omni” attributes of God, see Grace Jantzen, God’s World, God’s Body (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1984).
Second, this utterly Other God is a being outside and over against the world who controls the world “in a way that inhibits human growth and responsibility.”25Sallie McFague, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), 68. Unlike the wise parent who encourages children to develop autonomy and self-reliance, God insists that humans obey him, that they concede their limits and God’s overwhelming superiority. As with authoritarian parents, God enforces obedience through a combination of bribes and punishments, a mixture of “domination and benevolence,” both of which discourage independent activity.26Ibid.; Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: Judaism as Corporeal Election (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), 106. It must be said that the Jewish tradition also contains conflicting images of God’s parenthood. For example, at the end of the midrash cited in chapter 2, 69, God is delighted that his sons have defeated him. God’s interactions with Israel are marked by an alternation of threats and promises designed to secure Israel’s compliance. If Israel obeys God’s commandments, the people will be rewarded with peace and prosperity; God will be with them, and all shall be well. The cost of disobedience, however, is famine, war, and exile, the latter meted out by other nations guided by God’s hand. All the earth is his to be piloted toward his purposes, purposes humans can forward or rebel against but never escape.
The notion of God as dominating Other finds quintessential expression in the image of the holy warrior who punishes the wicked with destruction and death. The God who hears the groaning of his people in Egypt is a fighter more powerful than all the armies of Pharaoh, a God whose arm can destroy the Egyptians, drowning them in the sea (Ex. 15). When Israel enters the promised land, God is present in his ark at the head of its marching armies, giving military victory over city after city (Joshua). Hardening the hearts of the local people, God ensures that they “should receive no mercy” but be “utterly destroyed” (Josh. 11:20). Fire, tumult, slaughter, mass death are the retribution of the wicked, retribution that can be turned against Israel itself (Amos 2,3). Since God’s passion for justice is enforced partly by acts of war, an Israel that “trample[s] the heads of the poor” will find itself trampled by a force no bowman can escape (Amos 2:7,15). Prophetic calls for social justice are juxtaposed with threats of divine punishment, interlacing images of righteousness with metaphors of violent destruction.27Christ, Laughter of Aphrodite, chapter 5.
Unlike images of God as male, which may on the surface appear innocuous, images of God as dominating Other more often evoke a troubled response. In depicting God’s power as domination, the tradition draws on symbols of political authority that are not only foreign to citizens in a democracy but also morally repugnant. Metaphors of sovereignty, lordship, kingship, and judicial and military power evoke images of arbitrary and autocratic rule that have been rejected in the human political sphere at the same time they live on in religious language.28For a discussion of the religious use of political metaphors, see Davis Nicholls, “Images of God and the State: Political Analogy and Religious Discourse,” Theological Studies 42 (June 1981): 195–215, especially sections 2 and 4. If the image of God as male provides religious support for male dominance in society, the image of God as supreme Other would seem to legitimate dominance of any kind. God as ruler and king of the universe is the pinnacle of a vast hierarchy that extends from God “himself” to angels/men/women/children/animals and finally the earth. As hierarchical ruler, God is a model for the many schemes of dominance that human beings create for themselves. As holy king, he chooses the nation Israel as his holy people. As holy warrior, he sanctions the destruction of peoples perceived as Other. As holy lawgiver, he enacts the subordination of women in the Jewish community. This God authorizes the subjection of women, but also, and more specifically, the rape of females taken as spoils of war (Num. 31:17–18, 32–35) and the extermination of Amalek (Deut. 25:19).29Daly, Beyond God the Father, 114–22. In this paragraph, I have again drawn on my article “Language, God and Liturgy.”
Such images of God’s dominance give rise to the terrible irony that the symbols Jews have used to talk about God as ultimate good have helped generate and justify the evils from which we hope God will save us.30Rosemary Ruether, panel discussion on Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age (Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, December 7, 1987). The image of God as dominating Other functions as a fundamental and authorizing symbol in a whole system of hierarchical dualisms that includes, but is by no means limited to, the hierarchical relationship between Israel and other peoples discussed in the last chapter. As traditionally depicted, God incorporates the “higher” qualities in a host of cleavages that correspond to various forms of human domination: He is male rather than female, regal rather than simple and poor, Jewish rather than pagan, spirit rather than flesh. Seen from the side of religious language, such symbols undergird a worldview in which it seems “practical, humane, and moral” for people who identify with the higher side of these dualisms to oppress those they associate with the lower. Seen from a societal perspective, this image of God is the theological projection of a human community bent on denying its own place among a multitude of peoples, all connected to and dependent on the earth.
This conception of God as Other provides a larger framework than the maleness of God for thinking about the interconnections between the Jewish picture of God and the hierarchical, androcentric understanding of Israel. The parallels between Jewish perception of non-Jewish others and Jewish perception of women take on new meaning as aspects of a system in which God represents the superior side of a range of hierarchical differentiations. The image of God as exalted one, compared to whom everything else is of lesser reality and value, both fosters and mirrors the tendency to conceptualize all difference in terms of graded separations. If the God who dwells beyond the earth chooses to ally himself with particular people and particular values, then these take on importance that is also understood in terms of superior and inferior, higher and lower.
Yet while the portrait of God as dominating Other seems to fit well with the traditional understanding of the chosenness of Israel, it also threatens to undermine the relationship between God and Israel. For the Jewish tradition affirms that the God who is Other is nonetheless at the same time the covenant partner of Israel—a partner who enters into an alliance that involves commitments on both sides. The language of domination, however, is in tension with the language of covenant, because it denies the reality of human power and responsibility that the covenant presupposes. God as all-powerful lord and king foresees and controls the outcome of historical and cosmic processes. As the liturgy continually reminds us, he is everything, we are nothing; he is eternal, we are dust. But this juxtaposition of divine might and human frailty is neither appropriate nor conducive to the human accountability and effort that the covenant demands. On the one hand, the notion of divine omnipotence encourages human passivity. On the other, images of human weakness and nothingness foster a self-abnegation that can paralyze the capacity to act. It is not by contemplating our own worthlessness that human beings are encouraged to take responsibility for ourselves and the world. Human accountability stems from our real, if limited, power, and it is out of a realistic sense of that power that we can act most effectively. Thus, while images of God as dominating Other sanction oppression, they also fail to acknowledge or evoke from us the energy and empowerment required to struggle against oppression.
On the Nature of God-Language
These problems with traditional images of God generate a need for new language that can better express the meaning of God for a pluralistic and responsible community. But the move to new images, as well as feminist criticisms of traditional God-language, presuppose an understanding of what images of God are about that needs to be made explicit before we can turn to construction. Criticism of received images of God is not, of course, criticism of God. It is criticism of ways of speaking about a reality that, in its full reality, is finally unknowable. Taking seriously the established Jewish suspicion of anthropomorphisms—without for that reason ceasing to use them—feminists insist that our language about God is constructive and metaphorical. Everything we say about God represents our human efforts to create, recapture, and evoke experiences of God sustained within linguistic and cultural frameworks that already color our experience and interpretation. All our images have an “as if” or “as it were” in front of them that reminds us they are to be taken neither literally nor as final, but as part of an ongoing quest for language that can provide a framework for meaningful living and give expression to our experience.31Rita Gross, “Female God Language in a Jewish Context,” in Christ and Plaskow, Womanspirit Rising, 169. My view of theological language has been influenced by Gordon Kaufman’s methodology as set out in An Essay on Theological Method (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1975) and The Theological Imagination: Constructing the Concept of God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981). Yet I believe that theological construction, unless it is entirely arbitrary, must have a starting point in some commitment or vision that is rooted in a particular community. Thus, while the process of creating new imagery is imaginative and constructive, it is also less entirely rational than Kaufman seems to suppose.
In seeking metaphors to use for God, Jewish feminists never start from zero, but draw on the Jewish concepts and symbols that have come down to us. But these symbols themselves are also human attempts to speak of the experience of God who stands at the center of Jewish life. They emerge out of the Godwrestling of our ancestors and represent their efforts to name and comprehend the God they knew as with them on a long and various journey. These traditional symbols are privileged insofar as they are a formative part of Jewish memory and so shape the ways in which contemporary Jews imagine and experience our relationship with God. They are not privileged, however, in giving us access to the “true” reality of God or a knowledge of God of which we ourselves are incapable. They are arrived at through the same methods of listening, struggling, and constructing meaning in historical context that we go through in trying to make sense of our religious experiences. Traditional symbols for God thus provide resources to be taken seriously in reconstructing Jewish God-language, but they are not binding. Rather, they provide models of a process, which we ourselves continue in seeking images of God that will be adequate for our own time.
Obviously, Jews today respond to traditional God-language in a context very different from that in which it was forged. Coupled with the enormous social and political changes in which the Jewish community has participated, feminist consciousness itself alters the cultural framework and understanding of reality within which God is experienced and named. Metaphors for God that might once have been compelling despite—or because of—their political resonance, not only have lost their immediacy and power but have become morally suspect and disturbing. Especially those images of God drawn from political and family life have changed in their associations and meanings with changes in and new perspectives on the family and political order. Once images become socially, politically, or morally inadequate, however, they are also religiously inadequate. Instead of pointing to and evoking the reality of God, they block the possibility of religious experience. When this happens, it becomes incumbent on those who feel the inadequacy of traditional language both to articulate its deficiencies and to name the aspects of divine reality that have been neglected or deemphasized by traditional Jewish sources.
While continual renewal of God-language is incumbent on all Jews, the fact that traditional images of God are male-defined makes the task of contemporary reconstruction all the more urgent and compelling for women. Jewish feminists seek to open up the range and character of our symbols for God both so that their metaphorical nature becomes experientially clear, and so that they evoke the experience of coming to selfhood in community so central to Judaism and feminism. While we can only speculate as to the hidden Torah of women that has been lost to us—the buried experiences of God that peek out from the interstices of male texts or struggle to define themselves within the constraints of patriarchal forms—we can as women find the images of God that speak to us in the present and in doing so rethink and transform the tradition. In this way, we both bring women’s experience to the naming of God and continue the long process of Jewish Godwrestling that demands of each generation that it search for and speak its own symbols, standing again at Sinai with the consciousness of today.
Jewish Feminist God-Language and Feminist Spirituality
Jewish Feminist God-Language
When Jewish feminists first recognized the problems with traditional God-language, we responded to the hegemony of the omnipresent “he” by using female pronouns and images to refer to God. In what was probably the first article to deal theoretically with the issue of female God-language in a Jewish context, Rita Gross argued that, “If we do not mean that God is male when we use masculine pronouns and imagery,” there should be no objection “to using female imagery and pronouns as well.”32Gross, “Female God Language,” 167–73; quotation, 170f. In her “Steps Toward Feminine Imagery of Deity in Jewish Theology,” in Heschel, On Being a Jewish Feminist, 234–47, Gross develops this argument further using the resources of Hindu Goddess imagery. Exclusively masculine imagery for God, she contended, tells us nothing about the deity, but it does say a great deal about an androcentric Judaism that regards female images as degrading precisely to the extent that it has degraded and marginalized women. Impersonal, neuter language for God is not a solution, Gross reasoned, for it prevents us from speaking to God, and at the same time permits us to hide our sexism behind abstractions. Jews, she said, must begin to address God as “She.” “God-She” is not an addition to Jewish God-language, but applies to every aspect of God within the tradition.
Everything that has ever been said or that we still want to say of ha-kadosh baruch hu [the holy one, blessed be he] can also be said of ha-k’dosha baruch he [sic] [the holy one, blessed be she] and, conversely, ‘God-She’ is appropriately used in every context in which any reference to God occurs.”33Gross, “Female God Language,” 173.
In the same period that Gross offered a theoretical argument for female language, Naomi Janowitz and Maggie Wenig were independently giving liturgical life to her assertions by producing a new feminist version of the Sabbath prayerbook. While some of their prayers simply recast the English translation of the liturgy in female pronouns, others experimented more boldly with new metaphors, reimaging God in feminine form. The God that emerged from Siddur Nashim was partly the traditional deity in feminine garb and partly a more thoroughly transformed divinity. Addressed as the “blessed and glorified, exalted and honored, magnified and praised … Holy One, blessed is She,” she was also a Mother birthing the world and protecting it with her womb:
Blessed is She who spoke and the world came to be….
Blessed is She who in the beginning, gave birth….
Blessed is She whose womb covers the earth.
Blessed is She whose womb protects all creatures.34Naomi Janowitz and Maggie Wenig, Siddur Nashim: A Sabbath Prayer Book for Women (privately circulated for the women’s minyan at Brown University, 1976); selections are reprinted in Christ and Plaskow, Womanspirit Rising, as “Sabbath Prayers for Women,” 175, 176. Since Janowitz and Wenig, there have been numerous attempts to rewrite the liturgy in feminine form, some changing the Hebrew as well as the English. Vetaher Libenu is the only congregational prayerbook I know of that, at least in English, alternates male and female pronouns for God.
Some of Janowitz and Wenig’s liturgy has weathered well the more-than-a-decade since it was written, but ten years have also clarified the incompleteness of its explorations. The very accumulation of female pronouns in certain prayers is a glorious celebration of women’s power that is rare in the culture and rarer still in a religious context. But while female imagery is important for many reasons, of itself it does not address the nature of God as dominating Other. Although changing pronouns and some imagery modifies and softens the traditional picture of God, it does not fundamentally alter the conception of a great potentate fighting for his/her people and ruling over the world. The God of Janowitz and Wenig is still a deity strong of arm, a savior of Israel who rescues her children from slavery and drowns Egyptians in the sea. Gross and Janowitz and Wenig are wrong in assuming that any attribute applied to “God-He” is equally well applied to “God-She.” If the image of God-He as dominating Other is part of a whole system of dualisms that includes the subordination of female to male, then introducing God-She into this system poses a fundamental contradiction that threatens to disrupt the system and throw it into question. Female pronouns and imagery inserted into otherwise traditional forms can only initiate a process of examination and discussion that needs to end in a more radical transformation of religious language.
The same ambiguous or initiatory status that belongs to experimental use of female pronouns and imagery belongs also to the Shekhinah, the female aspect of God in the mystical tradition. It is not surprising that, in seeking female images for God, Jewish feminists turned early on to the one developed image Judaism has to offer—the image of the Shekhinah as the indwelling presence of God. While in the Talmud and midrash the Shekhinah represented the manifest presence of God without any suggestion that this presence was female, in Kabbalism the Shekhinah became a feminine element in God alongside the masculine “Holy One, Blessed be He.” The marriage between God and his bride Israel reflected in biblical sources was transferred to the inner life of God as a sacred union within the Godhead itself. The Shekhinah-bride was described in a host of images—princess, daughter, queen, mother, matron, moon, sea, faith, wisdom, community of Israel, mother Rachel—many, though not all of them, female in fact or association.35Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1941), 229–30; Arthur Green, “Bride, Spouse, Daughter: Images of the Feminine in Classical Jewish Sources,” in Heschel, On Being a Jewish Feminist, 254–57.
While the image of the Shekhinah was an important constituent of Kabbalism that gained widespread popularity, it was never incorporated into the liturgy as an accepted counterweight to the masculinity of God. Feminists have tried to use it precisely in this way, however, invoking the Shekhinah in a variety of liturgical contexts. Lynn Gottlieb, for example, replaces the traditional Bor’khu et Adonai (Blessed are you God [masculine]) with Brukha Yah Shekhinah (Blessed are you Shekhinah), a formula that has been used at many feminist gatherings. She also addresses God as Shekhinah in more fluid ways, naming variously the “the feminine presence/ She-Who-Dwells-Within.”
Shechinah
calling us
from exile
inside us exiled
calling us
home home36Lynn Gottlieb, “Speaking into the Silence,” Response 41–42 (Fall–Winter 1982): 23, 27.
Other feminists have also played with images of the Shekhinah, swearing, in the moving words of Rachel Adler, “I’ll never again/ Pray against my own flesh.”37Rachel Adler, “Second Hymn to the Shekhinah,” Response 41–42 (Fall–Winter 1982): 60. Many feminist uses of Shekhinah either emerge spontaneously or are found in material that circulates privately. For other published uses, see Penina Villenchik [Adelman], “Blessing for Kindling the Sabbath Lights,” Response 41–42 (Fall–Winter 1982): 53; Penina Adelman, Miriam’s Well: Rituals for Jewish Women Around the Year (Fresh Meadows, NY: Biblio Press, 1986), 22. Adelman has also written a beautiful song about the Shekhinah that says, “We have found rest under the wings of the Shekhinah.”
There are obvious advantages to having a feminine element in God that is a firmly established aspect of tradition. Yet when the tradition is a male one—both with regard to Judaism in general and Kabbalism in particular—female images are apt to come with certain limitations. Two of the virtues of the image of Shekhinah from a feminist perspective are that it is an image of divine immanence and an image of God in nonhierarchical relation. It thus deliberately offsets the picture of God as dominating Other and at the same time fits in well with the general emphasis on mutual relation in feminist spirituality. The Shekhinah, as opposed to the totally unknowable Kadosh Barukh Hu (holy one, blessed be he), is precisely that aspect of God with which we can be in relation, and it is experienced in joint study, community gatherings, lovemaking, and other moments of common and intimate human connection.38T. Drorah Setel, “Feminist Reflections on Separation and Unity in Jewish Theology,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2 (Spring 1986): 117.
These positive aspects of the image are tied to its shortcomings, however, for this immanent, relational element in God has never been on an equal footing with the ineffable, masculine Godhead.39Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings,” 42; Gross, “Steps Toward Feminine Imagery,” 242. Just as in the Bible, Israel is the bride of God, so the Shekhinah is the subordinate bride and consort within God. It is the feminine as the male understands that secondary aspect within himself, not as it is seen or experienced by women. And just as the bride Israel can also be whore and adulterous, so the Shekhinah is the ambiguous male projection of what woman can be—nursemaid, mother, bride, wife, but also wanton seductress, devouring monster, and bringer of death.40Raphael Patai, The Hebrew Goddess (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1967), 201, 205. Patai accepts Matronit/Shekhinah as a male projection without reflecting on the implications of this for women. Compare Scholem, Major Trends, 37f. Like the use of female pronouns, then, the image of Shekhinah counterbalances the male nature of God and raises important questions without representing a full solution to the problem of traditional God-language. The Shekhinah is a usable image for feminists only if it is partly wrenched free from its original context, so that the tradition becomes a starting point for an imaginative process that moves beyond and transforms it.
As step three, then, in seeking alternative ways of imaging God, feminists have begun to look for new symbols that resonate with tradition but also come out of and express women’s experiences. While the image of Shekhinah begins to combine female metaphor with an understanding of God’s power as immanent in the world, it leaves intact the traditional image of Ha-Kadosh Borukh Hu (the holy one, blessed be he) in a way other feminist experiments seek to avoid. Attempting to link the reimagining of God to a new vision of community, feminists repeatedly choose metaphors that picture divine power not as something above and over us but in and around. God’s power is not a power that dominates us, but one that elicits our power, meeting us in the shifting and changing forms of our lives. This open-ended quest for new imagery is in its early stages, with experiments taking place in quiet corners, passed on by word of mouth, and circulating privately. Lynn Gottlieb and Marcia Falk, as two Jewish feminists whose very different work on God-language is at least in part publicly available, can represent some of the range of feminist efforts to find new ways of speaking to and about God.
Lynn Gottlieb’s new namings of God are performance pieces, written/spoken in a dramatic, incantatory style, and drawing together the imaginal resources of a number of religious traditions. Her “A Psalm,” for example, moves behind the biblical Psalms to their ancient Near Eastern precursors, drawing on the Babylonian Hymn to Ishtar to sing in praise of God. Images from the original hymn are combined with many names for God from the Jewish tradition, yielding a litany of names and images that evoke the infinite, changing, and flowing depths of God’s nature.
PRAISE HER
MOST AWESOME OF THE MIGHTY
REVERE HER
SHE IS A WOMAN OF THE PEOPLE
* * * *
TEHOMOT · ELAT
ACHOTI CALAH
YAH TZVAOT · EL SHADDAI
EM HAMRACHAMIM
SHABBAT CHAI OLAMIM
PRAISE HER WHEN YOU COME UPON HER NAME
SINGING INSIDE YOU
SHE IS THE BREATH OF ALL LIVING
PRAISE HER….41Lynn Gottlieb, “A Psalm,” Response 41–42, 21f.
Frequently using a series of traditional names for God to break the idolatry of a single image, Gottlieb is very concerned about female metaphors, sometimes elaborating the feminine resonances or associations of particular appellations. What characterizes her God-language above all, however, is not just its femaleness but its sense of fluidity, movement, and multiplicity, its daring interweaving of women’s experiences with Jewish, Native American, and Goddess imagery that leaves the reader/hearer with an expanded sense of what is possible in speaking of/to God.
Marcia Falk, on the other hand, tries to perpetrate a quieter revolution by focusing on the blessing form that plays such an important role in Jewish life. To her mind, the traditional blessing formula—Barukh atah adonay eloheynu melekh ha-olam (Blessed are you, lord our God, king of the world)—is sexist, hierarchical, and idolatrous in its fixedness, requiring dislodging through a series of new metaphors. In choosing new images for her blessings, she tries “to confront the full extent of our liturgical idolatry,” uprooting not simply the male image of God but anthropocentrism generally. Falk thus takes her metaphors from all aspects of creation, trying to connect the origin of blessing with the aspect of reality being blessed. Her blessing over bread, for example, praises the source or wellspring of life that “brings forth bread from the earth.” The image of wellspring or source is nonhierarchical, suggesting an immanent presence that rises from the earth rather than a God who is ruler or lord over it. At the same time, the fact that the word for source is feminine in Hebrew produces a subtle shift in the language of the blessing, displacing the ubiquitous masculine. Moreover, she begins the blessing “Let us bless the source of life,” referring the act of blessing to the community of human beings that blesses at the same time the community acknowledges its connection to a deeper, underground reality. Other blessings are the subject of different sorts of experiments—allowing divinity to appear in unexpected places, connecting prayer to issues of social justice, grappling with the ranked differentiations that characterize many areas of Jewish thinking.42Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings,” 43–53. See also “What About God?” Moment 10 (March 1985): 32–36; response to “Reflections on Separation and Unity in Jewish Theology,” 124f.; “Feminist prayer,” Sh’ma 17/325 (January 9, 1987): 37–38. Her book, The Book of Blessings: A Feminist Jewish Reconstruction of Prayer is forthcoming from Harper & Row.
Let us acknowledge the source of life
for the earth and for nourishment.
May we conserve the earth
that it may sustain us
and let us seek sustenance
for all who inhabit the world.
* * * *
Let us distinguish
parts within the whole
and bless their differences.
Like Sabbath and the six days of creation
may our lives be made whole
through relation.43Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings,” 52–53.
Writing new blessings becomes an expression of commitment to a tradition in the process of becoming, a tradition continually needing to be recreated even as it remembers the past.
The Emerging God of Feminist Spirituality
As Jewish feminists seek to name God out of our own experiences, transforming traditional conceptions of God in a deep and far-reaching way, our efforts become part of a wider movement to rename and reconceptualize God that is taking place among women of different faiths all over the country. Jewish feminist attempts to reimage God, insofar as they reflect an engagement with women’s experience, flow into the broader stream of writing and ritualizing that is the women’s spirituality movement. To be sure, there are significant differences and disagreements between feminists of differing religious commitments. But there is also a commonality of experience and insight that shapes feminist God-language in diverse contexts and that makes the arguments and images of non-Jewish women an important challenge to and resource for Jewish feminists.
For example, the flowing, moving, changing God of Lynn Gottlieb’s incantations is linked to the dynamic “becoming” deity that, from early on, has appeared in much feminist discussion, liturgy, and writing. In 1972, a gathering of—mainly Christian—women met for a week at Grailville in Loveland, Ohio, to explore theology together. In one of the small working groups that was a daily part of the conference, the women realized that traditional names for God no longer adequately reflected their experience. They began to call out words that meant God to them, putting their designations on a large newsprint board. One of the fascinating aspects of the resulting list was its large number of “ing” words—changing, creating, enabling, nurturing, pushing, calling into question, suffering, touching, breaking through. The God of their experience was not an immutable being “out there,” but a process of which they were part. Feeling themselves newly empowered through participation in feminist community, they knew God as the dynamic source and context of that empowerment—a power to be named through rhythm and movement as much as through words.44“Singleness/Community Group,” Women Exploring Theology at Grailville (packet from Church Women United, 1972).
Interestingly, Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father had not yet been published at the time of the Grailville gathering, for the conference anticipated her naming of God as a dynamic verb. Grounding her theology in the experience of women turning away from the “pseudo-reality” of patriarchy, Daly argued that God is not a Being, in fact, not a noun at all. Rather God is Being, the most active of verbs, the reality in which “we participate—live, move, and have our being.” Women newly learning to say “I am” to themselves and each other experience their own unfolding as related to the “endless unfolding of God.”45Daly, Beyond God the Father, 33–36; quotations, 34, 36. This sense of connection to a source of personal/communal/cosmic power is the experiential base for a host of conceptions of a becoming deity that have emerged since Daly’s book. Whether described in the philosophical categories of process thought or enacted in the chants and swirling forms of feminist ritual, God is always moving in and through the shifting web of life, enabling and necessitating continual growth and change.46See Sheila Greeve Davaney, ed., Feminism and Process Thought (Lewiston, NY: The Edward Mellon Press, 1981); Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web, chapter 4.
Another aspect of feminist spirituality related to the conception of a changing God is avowal of the holiness of all that is. If God is not a great king who rules the world, but the power that sustains and moves it, then God is present in the whole of reality—all the processes of development and transformation, growth and decay that make up cosmic existence. Thus Marcia Falk’s attempt to dislodge the anthropocentrism of traditional Jewish language by drawing metaphors for God from the whole of creation is very much part of a wider feminist inclination to turn to nature as a source of religious imagery and to insist on the value of the nonhuman world. For both certain recent literature by women and the women’s spirituality movement, human beings are not the acme and end of creation but participants in a broad and complex web of life all of which is sacred.47In Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest (Boston: Beacon Press, 1980), Carol P. Christ traces this theme in the work of several women writers and connects it to the women’s spirituality movement.
While the sense of spiritual connection to nature could be illustrated from many feminist authors, nowhere is it expressed more clearly and prototypically than in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. In this novel, as if in exemplification of feminist theological arguments, women’s discovery of the sacred in the natural world is linked to the process of self-empowerment through relation and the rejection of the dominating white, male God. For the first two-thirds of Walker’s novel, Celie, the poor, black, molested, and raped heroine, writes letters to God—the only one who hears or cares about her. As, through her relationship with her lover Shug, however, Celie reconnects with her beloved sister Nettie and comes to a sense of her own dignity and worth as a human being, she becomes furious at the God who is as “trifling … and lowdown” as all the other men she knows. True, Shug tells her, the white, male God found in church is just part of the structures of domination that keep black people in their place. But “you have to git man off your eyeball,” Shug says, “before you can see anything a’tall.”
She say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree my arm would bleed….
Later in the novel, Celie herself has the experience that—in Shug’s words—“God is everything … that is or ever was or ever will be.” Sitting and smoking pot with family around the table, she hears an insistent humming coming from the world outside the window. “I think I know what it is, I say. They say, What? I say, everything. Yeah, they say. That make a lots of sense.”48Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1982), 164–68. 187–88; quotations, 164, 168, 167, 188. Terse as this conversation is, it would be difficult to find a more powerful affirmation that God is found within the world and not over and above it.
Images of a God in process and metaphors taken from the natural world cross religious lines. For some feminists, however, this dynamic, immanent deity has a face and name: She is the Goddess. Drawing on widespread traditions of Goddess worship but also freely modifying them, feminist followers of the Goddess find in her both a rich and life-affirming alternative to the (upstart) male God and the point of intersection for all the themes of new naming feminist spirituality involves. The Goddess is, of course, God-She, but in a clearer and more powerful way. Not simply a feminine reworking of the masculine deity but an ancient power in her own right, she gathers to her all the qualities and prerogatives of the goddesses of many names. She is Asherah, Ishtar, Isis, Afrekete, Oyo, Ezuli, Mary, and Shekhinah. She is lover, creator, warrior, grantor of fertility, lawgiver, maiden, mother, and crone. All the images predicated of God-She are found in her in their original female form.
For some followers of the Goddess, this plurality of names and images signifies the plural nature of reality; for others, the many names of the one source of being. In either case, qualities of the Goddess are not to be reified or overinterpreted. They are important as images that make us aware of aspects of reality that might otherwise have escaped attention; yet as images, they can be taken off and put on.49See, for example, Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark, chapter 5; also Nelle Morton, “The Goddess as Metaphoric Image,” in The Journey Is Home (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 147–75; Christine Downing, The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine (New York: Crossroad, 1981). “We know the Goddess is not the moon,” says witch and priestess Starhawk, “but we still thrill to its light glinting through the branches. We know the Goddess is not a woman, but we respond with love as if She were.”50Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979), 81. Compare Christ, Laughter of Aphrodite, 122. Taking symbols seriously but not literally, followers of the Goddess pull together the various themes in feminist spirituality, combining the centrality of female imagery with the evocation of a changing, moving deity and the sense of the sacred as present in and experienced through the natural world.
Issues in Jewish Resistance to Feminist Spirituality
These connections between Jewish feminism and broader trends in feminist spirituality raise a number of troubling questions, for such parallels are exactly what critics of Jewish feminism most fear. Not simply explicit mention of the Goddess, but suspicion she may be lurking somewhere behind any attempt to alter traditional God-language raises charges of “paganism” that are considered themselves sufficient to condemn all feminist work. Direct acknowledgment that there are similarities between Jewish feminist and Goddess spirituality certainly threatens, then, to place Jewish feminism beyond the pale—even when Jewish feminists do not invoke ancient goddesses and have no interest in doing so. In trying to formulate a Jewish feminist conception of God, it is important to sort out the issues that lie behind the “pagan” label and to try to determine when, if ever, they are legitimate and when they reflect either religious prejudice or continuing attachment to patriarchal aspects of Judaism that might better be transformed.
In historical terms, cries of paganism hark back to biblical times, recalling the intense, prolonged physical and spiritual battle between two different modes of religious expression and understanding. As I remarked in discussing the concept of chosenness, Israel, from its beginnings, understood its own distinctiveness partly by defining itself over against the customs and beliefs of surrounding peoples. What made Israel “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” was both obedience to the law and—what was in some ways the same thing—separation from the practices and worship of the Canaanites. Throughout the Bible, the Canaanite cult is repeatedly characterized in terms of idolatry and licentiousness. Canaanites did not simply worship false gods—idols of wood and stone that could neither see nor hear and could do nothing for the worshiper—they “whored” and “played the harlot” after them. To keep pure from such practices, Israel not only had to abjure worship of other gods, but also to follow the stringent sexual regulations laid out in the law to differentiate it from its neighbors. In practicing sexual restraint, moreover, Israel had its God as a model. Unlike the neighboring deities, whose sexual exploits were detailed in myth, Israel’s God had no sexual partner; in biblical Judaism, there is no sacred marriage within the deity.
This struggle between two different religious perspectives was not simply a struggle between Israel and Canaan, however, but also a struggle within Israel. The Bible makes amply clear that there were many in Israel who long continued to worship other gods and goddesses alongside Yahweh. Indeed, the prophetic writings can be read as an account of a prolonged battle between the minority in Israel who advocated exclusive worship of Yahweh and the majority who worshiped Yahweh … and others. Metaphors of whoredom and adultery are applied by the prophets first of all to Israel, because it is Israel who continually abandons and betrays Yahweh to whom she is supposedly married. But while the Bible condemns the worship of all deities other than Yahweh, Ba’al is singled out as the rival of Yahweh far more often than any specific goddess. Though the reason for this may be that Ba’al was most appealing to Israelites, it is also possible that Goddess worship was less threatening to the male Yahweh than was the worship of competing male gods. Certainly, the presence of an Asherah in the Temple for much of its existence suggests that Israelites were hardly indifferent to goddesses. Rather, it seems that, despite prophetic invective and theology, for a good span of Israelite history, Yahweh was popularly regarded as having a consort.51Patai, The Hebrew Goddess, 49f; Saul M. Olyan, Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel, SBL Monograph Series 34 (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988).
Whatever the reality of Israelite practices, however, it is through the eyes of the victorious prophets that Jews see the struggle against “idolatry,” and it is above all this fact that fuels emotions around the issue of paganism. The prophetic caricature of Canaanite religion as the literal and sensuous worship of sticks and stones has become so much a part of Jewish self-understanding that we no longer stop to think about whether it corresponds to anything we know about ancient worship, or the religious use of images in contemporary living traditions. It is forgotten that what the prophets attack is another religious system—not the later Jewish one to be sure, but one that sustained people for millennia, and that many Israelites apparently found nourishing and meaningful. Paganism plays essentially the same role in the Tanakh that the Pharisees play in the New Testament: Each is set up as the despised Other over against which the superior new religion defines itself.52Jon Levenson, “Is There a Counterpart in the Hebrew Bible to New Testament Anti-Semitism,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 22 (Spring 1985): 252–60. The parallels between Christian treatment of Judaism and Jewish treatment of paganism should themselves alert Jews to the danger of unthinking contempt for another tradition and the need to examine the historical reality that underlies prophetic invective. Where it is basically this contempt that feeds condemnations of Jewish feminism as pagan, such condemnations need not be taken seriously.53It must be said that Jewish feminists are by no means free from this contempt at the same time it has been used against us. On this point and on further parallels between Jewish anti-paganism and Christian anti-Judaism, see Lori Krafte-Jacobs, “A Comparison of Christian Anti-Judaism and Jewish Anti-Paganism” (unpublished paper, n.d.).
The substantive issues raised by Jewish fears about paganism are difficult to disentangle from this prejudicial welter of feelings. Anxieties about polytheism, sensuousness, female imagery, and goddesses tend to get lumped together both with each other and the general opprobrium the term paganism arouses. The following passage from an essay by Cynthia Ozick provides a good example of the intellectual muddle the specter of paganism evokes. Discussing the feminist suggestion that Judaism needs female God-language and that for “King of the Universe” we might substitute “Queen of the Universe,” Ozick says:
The answer stuns with its crudity. It is preposterous. What? Millennia after the cleansing purity of Abraham’s vision of the One Creator, a return to Astarte, Hera, Juno, Venus, and all their proliferating sisterhood? Sex goddesses, fertility goddesses, mother goddesses? The sacrifices brought to these were often enough human. This is the vision intended to “restore dignity” to Jewish women? A resurrection of every ancient idolatry the Jewish idea came into the world to drive out, so as to begin again with a purifying clarity? The answer slanders and sullies monotheism.54Ozick, “Notes Toward Finding the Right Question,” 121. Ozick is, of course, a feminist criticizing a particular understanding of Jewish feminism, but her words are echoed by many anti-feminists. For a recent example, see Samuel Dresner, “The Return of Paganism,” Midstream 34 (June–July 1988): 32–38.
Ozick jumps here from the idea of female metaphors for God to the worship of ancient goddesses, from goddesses to sexuality and fertility, from sexuality and fertility to charges of human sacrifice and idolatry, and from here to worry about monotheism. If we sift out the hysterical and historically false implication that Goddess worship usually involved human sacrifice (a charge frequently leveled by competing religious traditions at their rivals), and set aside the vague but threatening images meant to be aroused by “every ancient idolatry,” there seem to be three issues raised by this passage: the relationship between female imagery for God and Goddess worship, the meaning of monotheism, and the relationship between female imagery and nature and sexuality. Since these same issues emerge in many criticisms of Jewish feminism, they require some clarification and response.
First of all, the equation of female God-language with Goddess worship either presupposes that the God of Judaism is so irrevocably male that any broadening of anthropomorphic language must refer to a different deity, or it simply makes no sense at all. The overwhelming majority of Jewish feminists who have experimented with religious language in no way see themselves as imaging or worshiping a Goddess; they are trying to enrich the range of metaphors Jews use in talking about God. Since efforts at new language are experimental, and not everyone who feels the inadequacy of old images has the skill to create alternatives, some new images may be awkward and even faintly ridiculous. “Queen of the Universe” may be such an infelicitous image, for it lacks the familiarity of king and at the same time is equally wanting in contemporary cultural resonance. But the use of this image does not stem from any intention to set up a queen alongside a king; it is simply an unsuccessful attempt to speak of the one God in a new way. Rationally, it seems contradictory to argue that the Jewish God transcends sexuality, that anthropomorphism is not to be taken literally, and at the same time insist that new metaphors slander and sully monotheism.
The second issue, then, that is raised by fears of paganism is the meaning of monotheism itself. Some years ago, there was an extended debate in academic religion circles about whether monotheism or polytheism is more inclusive. Does polytheism embrace monotheism as one of its possibilities, or does the One include the Many?55See, for example, David Miller, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). The debate was not very fruitful because it rested on divergent conceptions of monotheism, the same divergence that surfaces in discussions of Jewish feminism. On one understanding—probably the more popular—monotheism is the worship of one finite God imaged as infinite, as if the chief deity in the ancient pantheon were elevated to the deity, the only deity, the king of all the earth. On the second understanding, the one God incorporates the qualities and characteristics of, so to speak, the whole pantheon, with nothing remaining outside.56I came to see the difference between these two conceptions of monotheism in the course of a conversation with Starhawk at the Women’s Spirit Bonding Conference at Grailville, Loveland, OH, July 1982. Monotheism in this second sense may be thought of in terms of the same part/whole analogy that I used to characterize differences within community. Just as the subgroups within a community are all parts of a larger unity, so any individual image of God is a part of the divine totality that in its totality embraces the diversity of an infinite community. Only when our metaphors for God are sufficiently inclusive that they reflect the multiplicity both of a pluralistic Israel and of a cosmic community will God truly be one—which is to say, all in all.
When monotheism is not understood in this inclusive sense, but is identified with the worship of a single image or picture of God, what passes for monotheism is really monolatry. God’s oneness, instead of being all-embracing, excludes central aspects of reality. The Jewish tradition has been well aware of the dangers of such exclusion, at least in relation to certain areas of existence. Thus it has held God responsible for evil, for example, rather than allowing evil to be seen as an independent power. When Isaiah says, “I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe, I the Lord do all these things” (45:7), he is speaking out of the inclusive understanding of monotheism as embracing the totality of experience. This same insight concerning God’s inclusiveness has not been applied to the issue of gender, however. But it is no less true of gender than of the problem of evil that a God who cannot include all experience is a God over against an Other. Such a god is an idol made in “man’s” image, not the creator, source of maleness and femaleness, relativizer of all gods and goddesses who nonetheless includes them as part of God’s self.
The use of female imagery, then, so far from “sullying” monotheism, becomes a test of whether Jews are able to sustain a genuinely monotheistic framework. Is our God sufficiently God that we are able to incorporate the feminine and women’s experience into our understanding of divinity? It is true that multiple images of God involve certain hazards, but the Jewish tradition has faced these hazards before and has developed ways to deal with them. A wonderful passage in Pesikta Rabbati, discussing the many guises in which God has appeared to the children of Israel, responds to the “whoreson” who insists that the guises are different gods. Say to him, it says, “I am the One of the sea and I am the One of Sinai.”5721.6. Pesikta Rabbati is a ninth-century collection of discourses given centuries earlier in Palestinian synagogues and schools. Extending this reply, feminists need to assert that the full range of images for God we have tested and will test are also different guises of the same One. Indeed, the capacity to see the One in and through the changing forms of the many, to glimpse the whole in and through its infinite images, is finally what monotheism is truly about.
The practice of Jewish feminists who invoke the names of goddesses as part of their worship can be understood in the context of this inclusive monotheism. Aside from the fact that these names may have been called on by our foremothers and thus can connect us in community to them, using the names of goddesses in liturgy is one way of capturing and conveying multiple images of female power—images that have resonance and weight in the midst of a culture that provides almost no positive models of female strength or authority. While the decision to use such names necessarily places those who make it on the boundary of the tradition, its purpose often is not to destroy but to express that inclusive monotheism that is not yet real when God incorporates the characteristics of the male deities of Canaan but excludes the qualities of the goddesses. Only when reciting the names of goddesses is meant to name ultimate reality as plural do feminists surrender the vision of a unity that embraces diversity—a vision I would want to affirm as central to a Jewish feminist understanding of God and community.
There is another aspect of the “purity” of monotheism that is at stake in the dispute over female images, and that is the association of the feminine with sexuality and nature. This is the third issue Ozick raises, for she jumps from the “Queen of the Universe” to sex, fertility, and mother goddesses. On one level, this jump constitutes just one more distortion of historical Goddess worship. Goddesses, while often mothers who ensured fertility of humans and the earth, also regulated and presided over many cultural functions, representing social order and wisdom as well as natural regeneration. But this common enough misrepresentation also signals a deeper problem—the persistent religious and cultural connection of women with body and the earth, qualities that in turn are seen as related to paganism.58See Jo Ann Hackett, “Can a Sexist Model Liberate Us? Ancient Near Eastern ‘Fertility’ Goddesses,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5 (Spring 1989): 65–76 and Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “The Bible, Goddesses, and Sex,” Midstream 34 (October 1988): 20–23. If male/female, culture/nature, spirit/flesh, restraint/sensual indulgence are all dichotomized, and in each case women symbolize the inferior “pagan” side of the dichotomy, then female God-language is bound to arouse deep feelings of discomfort and even revulsion. It threatens to reconsecrate aspects of existence that were once considered holy but were desacralized by Judaism as part of its long battle against paganism.59For an appallingly forthright statement of these issues, see Ostow, “Women and Change in Jewish Law,” 5–12.
From a feminist perspective, however, this threat of reconsecration and the association of women with body and earth from which it arises are arguments in favor of female language rather than motives to reject it. Female language, precisely because it disturbs and offends, throws into question long-established patterns of dualistic thinking. On the one hand, feminists must protest the identification of femaleness with sexuality—as if men were not equally sensual and sexual beings rooted in the natural world. On the other hand, insofar as women continue to be linked with sexuality and nature, the use of female imagery for divinity can help to counter and dispute the disparagement of sexuality and the earth that are unfortunate corollaries of the battle against paganism. The ability to affirm our bodies and their home in the natural world is an important aim of the feminist transformation of tradition. The reexamination of Jewish attitudes toward sexuality and nature—a process catalyzed partly by the use of female imagery—will not “paganize” Judaism so much as restore to it values disparaged and lost in the process of defining itself over against another religion.
Gathering the Strands: Toward a Jewish Feminist Understanding of God
Where does all this leave us in terms of a Jewish feminist understanding of God? It should be clear from all I have said that one aspect of such an understanding would have to be advocacy and appreciation of a plurality of images for God, a plurality that includes some traditional metaphors but that also goes well beyond them in embracing the experience of those who have hitherto been excluded from the process of naming the sacred. Just as the feminist rethinking of Torah involves broadening Jewish memory, and the reconceptualization of Israel involves acknowledging and respecting the diversity of Jewish community, so the feminist reimaging of God entails reclaiming and shaping sufficient metaphors for God that the diversity of Jewish community is reflected in its naming of divinity and the commitment to communal diversity is grounded in an inclusive monotheism. If identifying God with a particular set of metaphors both limits God and supports a community in which some people have more value than others, using a broad and changing variety of metaphors’ brings home on the nonrational level on which images function that God has many guises, no one of which is final. When we feel free to try on and play with a range of images for God, then our speaking and praying becomes explicitly a “naming toward God,”60Daly, Beyond God the Father, 33. and all Jews are challenged to reach into the depths of our experience to speak out the names we find there.
The affirmation of multiple images for God is thus an essential aspect of Jewish feminist spirituality; yet it is not its center. Any particular community, even when it knows its symbols for God are tentative and open, is still likely to express itself through a set of images that reflect its own central experiences, experiences that become normative for sifting and creating imagery. We have seen that at the center of the women’s spirituality movement, for example, is a sense of connection to the natural world that controls the metaphors adopted for the sacred. In dethroning the white male God who is in the “white folks’ white bible,” Shug begins with “trees. Then air. Then birds.” Only “then other people.”61Walker, The Color Purple, 166–67. Goddess spirituality is rooted in the intuition that “the earth is holy,” and that the Goddess is found in the elements that surround us: earth, ocean, stars, air, sky, moon, flowers, trees.62Christ, Laughter of Aphrodite, ix; Starhawk, The Spiral Dance, 77–78. In this spirituality, people are part of the natural world, persons among others without holding a privileged position within the natural order.
This use of natural imagery for God is enormously important in a culture that has trampled on and violated the natural world and that threatens the whole biosphere with ecological and nuclear destruction. The affirmation that the earth is holy and that all parts of creation have intrinsic value provides a powerful corrective to the view that human beings are the measure of all things. Yet to my mind, the rediscovery of human connection with nature and the search for adequate metaphors to express it is just one aspect of a Jewish feminist spirituality. The other aspect—and one feminists have been less successful in translating into imagery—is the presence of God in empowered, egalitarian community. The emphasis on community that Judaism and feminism share means that the God who sustains the world is experienced not only in relation to nature, but also in the coming together of human beings who see their communal purpose as transparent to a larger purpose in which it is grounded. As I argued in discussing the spiritual dimension of community in the last chapter, community “can be the primary vehicle and place of religious experience,” and “the divine presence rests in community in a uniquely powerful way.”63See chapter 3, 85–86.
The centrality of human community to the Jewish religious experience is clear. Jews first found God in the midst of community, and, finding God, were constituted a community. But I would also maintain that insofar as women’s experience of the holiness of nature has been named in a feminist context, in the feminist case too, it is the experience of community that has allowed the articulation and development of a nature spirituality. Feminism created a communal context in which women could identify and claim experiences that they might otherwise never have brought to full consciousness or might have regarded as purely personal. What Carol P. Christ has called “communal mysticism”—a form of mysticism in which “the great powers to which women awaken are experienced through social groups or movements”—would thus accompany and support the “nature mysticism” that is the more prominent theme in feminist spirituality.64Christ, Diving Deep and Surfacing, 23; also passim. My point is not to insist that the one form of spirituality is more fundamental or valid than the other; different emphases often reflect basic individual differences in religious experience. But I would argue that the relatively neglected human communal dimension of feminist spirituality requires far more attention—and that it is precisely in this dimension that Judaism and feminism converge.
From a critical perspective, of course, the centrality of human community in Jewish religious history may be taken simply as a sign of Jewish anthropocentrism. Yet even if we highlight those aspects of Judaism that recognize the intrinsic worth of nonhuman creation and seek to move the tradition further in this direction, I believe there are still aspects of human community that make it a particularly powerful locus for religious experience. Not only is human community the place and prerequisite of our coming to personhood, but also our relationships with other human beings involve the possibility of a reciprocity and mutuality of intention and commitment that is not available in other sorts of connection. Martin Buber, the philosopher of relation, remarks in his classic work I and Thou that there are three arenas of human life in which genuine relationships can arise: life with nature, life with other human beings, and life with “spiritual beings,” by which he means ideas and cultural creations. Yet along with Buber’s—often criticized—insistence that there can be dialogue with nature, he says that it is only in relation to the second sphere that true mutuality is possible. Relationships between human beings need not hover at the “threshold of mutuality” but can express themselves in language, so that acknowledgement of the other as a person can be both given and received.65Martin Buber, I and Thou, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), 56–57, 172–73, 180–81.
This capacity for mutuality in human relations is the foundation for the moral life that also finds expression in human community. Human responsibility for the well-being of the world never can be fulfilled simply through personal action. Human beings come to accountability in the midst of communities that interpret and set out where obligations lie, and community is the context for fulfilling our obligations. Moreover, in coming together with others in mutual commitment to ideas or causes, we ever and again form new communities through which to renew and carry on our purposes. It is as we join with others, in a way that only human beings can, in shared engagement to a common vision, that we find ourselves in the presence of another presence that is the final source of our hopes and intentions, and that undergirds and sustains them. Whether the substance of our cause be our lives as women, the fate of the earth, the pursuit of justice in human community, or some more narrowly religious purpose, it is through the struggle with others to act responsibly in history that we come to know our own actions as encompassed and empowered by a wider universe of action and thus come to know God in a profound and significant way.66H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self: An Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 84–89.
The feminist experience of finding in community both a new sense of personal empowerment and mission and connection with its sustaining source may not be so different from the early Israelite experience of discovering in community both a dawning national identity and a covenant with the God who gave it. In both cases, community is the location and vehicle for the experience of God and for the continuing enactment of its meaning. Nevertheless, neither Jews nor feminists have found a vocabulary for speaking about God that adequately reflects the presence of God in the midst of a responsive and responsible community. Feminist spirituality has developed a fuller range of natural imagery than imagery taken from feminist community. And the predominant Jewish language for speaking about God, while it supposedly elaborates the experience of covenant, in fact draws from community those images of dominance that dominate the liturgy. Images of God as lord and king evoke one who is over against community as its ruler and head, not one who is with it as partner, nourisher, and goad. The Jewish mystical tradition provides important alternative conceptions of God that emphasize human community and responsibility, but without translating these conceptions into a range of new images for Ha-Kadosh Borukh Hu (the holy one, blessed be he).67Lawrence Fine, “The Contemplative Practice of Yihudim in Lurianic Kabbalah” and Louis Jacobs, “The Uplifting of Sparks in Later Jewish Mysticism,” both in Jewish Spirituality from the Sixteenth Century Revival to the Present, edited by Arthur Green (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 65–70, 107–8, 115–25. For a fascinating image of communal spirituality within Hasidism, see J. G. Weiss, “R. Abraham Kalisker’s Concept of Communion with God and Men,” The Journal of Jewish Studies 6 (1955): 87–99. Thanks to Martha Ackelsberg and Gershon Hundert for this last reference. Jewish feminism, in seeking to draw together into a vision of empowered egalitarian community the Jewish and feminist affirmations of community, needs an understanding of God that emerges out of and is faithful to the place where its God is found.
Insofar as God is experienced in community, changes in communal structure and in the shape and forms of worship can of themselves contribute to a new understanding of God even in the absence of changes in metaphor. Women’s religious leadership in many Jewish communities testifies to the presence of God within women. Feminist or havurah-style prayer, which favors small groups whose members face each other during worship and depends on the participation of all present, evokes a sense of God immanent in community. Communities that open themselves to the richness of Jewish diversity gain access to the spiritual resources present in that diversity. One need not explicitly name God for God to be found—a truth Marcia Falk tries to express in her blessings by varying their syntax so that God appears in unexpected or hidden places.68Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings,” 48. Indeed, the experience of God conveyed by the structure of a group can contradict or overpower the messages of a traditional liturgy.
Yet given the power of images and of the traditional liturgy in shaping conceptions of God for the Jewish community as a whole, feminists also cannot avoid the task of suggesting images that express the presence of God in a diverse and egalitarian community. In doing so, we will have to put new emphasis on traditional metaphors forgotten or slighted and bring to birth new metaphors that reflect the experiences of members of the community who heretofore have been subordinated or silenced. Birth is the appropriate image for this process, for naming new metaphors involves not simply invention, but the capacity to listen to what is already happening and to articulate communal experiences as they begin to emerge. It may be that truly satisfying communal images of God await the creation of new communities, for communal structures and communal metaphors are mutually related. One cannot create images in a vacuum; they arise out of new experiences and need time and nurturance to ripen and flower. Feminist images of God name the experience of people on the way, in the process of becoming—as, indeed, do all images of God, though this is often forgotten.
Recognizing, then, that the becoming of new images is in its early stages, I would suggest that there are (at least) two kinds of Jewish feminist God-naming that need to be taken together to produce a picture of God that reflects the experience of egalitarian community. The first kind of God-language is anthropomorphic language. Modern Jewish thinkers who have emphasized the importance of a lived relationship with God have tended to speak about God in philosophical language, avoiding anthropomorphisms that might objectify God and thus undermine the immediacy of relation.69Arthur Green, “The Children in Egypt and the Theophany at the Sea,” Judaism 24 (Fall 1975): 446. Similarly, some feminists have sought to solve the problem of traditional male metaphors by using nonimagistic, or at least nonpersonal language. Some women have preferred to fill in names like “God” or “the Eternal” with new experiences, rather than create new images that would reify certain aspects of experience. Others have avoided personal imagery because it necessarily reinforces traditional anthropocentrism and because it implies that God is separable from the world.70Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings,” 45, and “Toward a Feminist–Jewish Reconstruction of Monotheism,” Tikkun 4 (July/August 1989): 53–54.
But while it is certainly true that anthropomorphic images can be dangerous, supporting patterns of dominance or substituting for the experiences they claim to communicate, such images also appeal to places in our nature that cannot be reached by abstract philosophical discourse or direct designations like “God” and “the Eternal.” Even nonpersonal images, though they are important to feminist God-language, are not themselves sufficient, I would argue, to evoke the God of community. Nonanthropomorphic language threatens to leave intact old anthropomorphic images that can continue to coexist with and subvert neutral language. For the English speaker, it is quite possible to avoid pronouns for God and to refer to God as the Eternal or source of life and still picture that eternal source as male. Only deliberately disruptive—that is, female—metaphors can break the imaginative hold of male metaphors that have been used for millennia. For the Hebrew speaker, who has available nonpersonal female images, it is still difficult to convey the presence of God in community while excluding those images that come most directly from the web of interpersonal relations that constitute community. We are roused to remember the God of community and to value and create certain kinds of communities precisely by those images that most vividly evoke our real experiences of community. Just as feminists are struggling to find communal structures that do not involve hierarchy, so we need to find ways of speaking about God’s presence in community that do not invoke metaphors of domination. Failing to use the images that emerge from our real-life struggles, we banish as a source of religious expression central aspects of our lives.71See McFague, Models of God, 79–84 for a very fine extended argument for personal God-language.
To my mind, then, feminists cannot avoid the use of anthropomorphic imagery. Indeed, incorporating the appreciation of diversity that should characterize all feminist God-language, this kind of imagery would include a wide range of metaphors, from purposely disquieting female images, to female and non-gendered images that express intimacy, partnership, and mutuality between humans and God. It may be important, for example, to use for a time images like Queen of the Universe and Woman of War in order to jar worshipers, precipitate discussion, and raise questions about the meaning and effects of the imagery we use. What is the source of our attachment to male imagery? Is the image of a monarch—male or female—one we want to affirm? Do women need to claim the warrior within ourselves, and are there images of warrior that are not images of violent destruction?72This last question comes out of a conversation with Marcia Falk, May 1988. While metaphors of queen and warrior are problematic and will not constitute the lasting contribution of feminism to Jewish God-language, they have an important bridge role to play in presenting images of female religious power to a community that has denied women this attribute.73See Christ, Laughter of Aphrodite, 121–26. Other, perhaps more enduring, images will try to combine female metaphors with a changed conception of God or use nongendered language drawn from human community. Sallie McFague, in her book Models of God, devotes extensive discussion to images of God as lover and friend.74Chapters 5 and 6. McFague also proposes the image of God as Mother. I do not discuss it here because it is an image drawn from family, and I want to focus on images that come from community. These images, along with companion and cocreator, might well be taken up by Jewish feminists and developed conceptually and liturgically.
Images of God as lover and friend are present in the Jewish tradition, but they are greatly overshadowed by father and king and rarely appear in the liturgy. In midrashic parallels to the passage in Pesikta Rabbati that describes God’s different guises, God as a young warrior at the Red Sea is identified with the lover of the Song of Songs who, at the moment of liberation, comes to Israel as her beautiful bridegroom. Although the image of God as lover-bridegroom later disappears, it and father-judge are the central rabbinic metaphors for the love of God.75Green, “The Children in Egypt,” 453–55. In McFague’s rendering, the image of God as lover validates the erotic element in spirituality and affirms the value of that which is loved. Unlike images of king, judge, and (one side of) father, which promise enduring love despite a community’s sins, the notion of God as lover proclaims that God loves Israel because of who Israel is. The idea that we are loved for what is most valuable in us, that God sees our worth even when we cannot, is far more conducive to human empowerment and accountability than the idea that we are loved despite our worthlessness.76McFague, Models of God, 125–34. McFague talks about God as lover of the world as God’s body; again, I want to focus on community. It may be no coincidence that the image of God as lover is important in the Jewish mystical tradition which also emphasizes human responsibility for the world. In traditional Jewish usage, of course, God as valuing lover is the comely young man wooing (the subordinate) Israel as his bride. Feminist use of the image of God as lover would need to break through this patriarchal model of love relations, envisioning the lover as both female and male. Israel is not “she”; it is a community of women and men, all of whom can be lovers and loved of God. The astonishingly mutual imagery of the Songs of Songs presents both male and female lovers as pursuer and pursued. There is no reason why, with this book as a model, only the male should be identified with God—except, of course, for the androcentric context of the history of its interpretation.
The image of God as friend also appears in rabbinic discussion and finds its way into the Yom Kippur liturgy in the multiple metaphors of Ki Anu Amekhah.77Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God, vol. I, 86. Ki Anu Amekhah is a liturgical poem—my favorite since childhood—repeated many times on Yom Kippur, that provides a long series of metaphors for the relationship between God and Israel. While almost all the metaphors are metaphors of domination, the prayer is an excellent spur to imagistic inventiveness. A striking contrast with symbols of God as Other, this image of free and reciprocal connection is a profound metaphor for the covenantal relation. As McFague sees it, the image of God as friend points to a common vision or commitment that brings friends together and that both unites them and turns them to the world. While friendship often implies an exclusive element, it is also possible for people of different backgrounds and abilities to join in friendship around a common undertaking. Friendship is a human possibility, moreover, irrespective of gender and across gender lines. Indeed, McFague suggests, since all of life is relational, friendship is possible even across ontological boundaries: We can be friends of the earth and friends of God.78McFague, Models of God, 163–64.
Closely related to the image of friend is the image of companion. While both images are ambiguous, and they are often used interchangeably, they can also represent different aspects of the experience of relation. If friendship entails a unique bond between two people that distinguishes their relationship from more casual connections, a companion is simply one who travels on the same way. The image of companion thus lacks the passion and specialness of friendship, but it provides the same sense of equality with a more communal metaphor. One can imagine many companions linked together by some shared task, laboring side by side for the achievement of their ends. Such companionship may be brief or can last throughout a life-time, lightening shared work with the pleasure of human connection. Metaphors of God as friend and companion capture in different ways the closeness of God’s relationship to Israel and the sense of striving toward a common goal. They suggest that God and Israel are mutually related and accountable as they join in the shared project of sanctifying and repairing the world.
Another, somewhat more awkward, image that suggests the shared responsibility of God and Israel has both feminist and Jewish roots. At the Grailville conference at which the participants used many “ing” words for God, they also suggested the term “cocreator” as evoking important aspects of their week together.79“Brainstorm: The Meaning of the Grailville Conference,” in Women Exploring Theology at Grailville. The prefix “co,” which might in fact be used with a range of images, conjures the sense of personal empowerment and mutual responsibility that emerges out of speaking and acting in community with others. The feeling of possibility that comes with seeing the limits placed on women and envisioning a life beyond them fosters a sense of significant participation in the larger project of world-creation, a project that God and human beings share. To name the self and name the world in new ways is to enter with God into the act of creation. Insofar as human beings are cocreators with God, God is also a cocreator. Creation is not a discrete event completed by God in six days but a process that continues in dialogue with human beings who can carry forward or destroy the world that God has brought to be. This image of God as cocreator strongly accords with the sense of the Jewish mystical tradition that human beings are responsible for fulfilling the work of creation, uniting the separated aspects of divinity through the power of the deed.
These images of God—lover, friend, companion, cocreator—are more appropriate metaphors for the God of the covenant than traditional images of lord and king. Defining God’s power not as domination but empowerment, they evoke a God who is with us instead of over us, a partner in dialogue who ever and again summons us to responsible action. Rather than reminding human beings of our frailty and nothingness, they call us to accountability as partners in a solemn compact that makes demands on us to which we can respond. It is not as we are subjugated, as we feel our worthlessness and culpability, that we can act most responsibly and effectively, but as we know our own value, mirrored in the constancy of God as friend and lover who calls us to enter into the task of creation. Responding responsibly,80In The Responsible Self, H. R. Niebuhr takes “responsibility” as the fundamental metaphor for understanding human life before God. we do so not because otherwise we are guilty, but because—as the Kabbalistic tradition reminds us—what we do or leave undone as cocreators makes a difference in the world.
Imagining God as friend and cocreator begins to name aspects of the deity lost in metaphors of domination, but it still provides only one stratum of a feminist understanding of God. Human beings become cocreators with God only after we come into being as part of a much larger web of existence—a web we now have the power to destroy but which we did not conceive or create. Moreover, the images I have suggested are still primarily dyadic; and while they can be applied to community, they do not in the first instance take us beyond the interpersonal plane. Anthropomorphic images must thus be supplemented by a second kind of language that can evoke the creative and sustaining power of God present throughout the world and in ever-widening circles of relation. This stratum of language will encompass an even wider range of images than the first—from natural and impersonal metaphors to conceptual terms that express God’s relation to all being and becoming.
Images of God as fountain, source, wellspring, or ground of life and being remind us that God loves and befriends us as one who brings forth all being and sustains it in existence.81Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings,” 46. “Wellspring” is Falk’s more recent translation of eyn ha-khayyim (conversation, May 1988). As cocreators with God for the brief span of our lives, we are responsible not just to the community of our fellow persons with whom we especially share the sense of God’s presence, but to the larger community of creation that God also loves and befriends. Metaphors of ground and source continue the reconceptualization of God’s power, shifting our sense of direction from a God in the high heavens who creates through the magical word to the very ground beneath our feet that nourishes and sustains us. As a tree draws up sustenance from the soil, so we are rooted in the source of our being that bears and maintains us even as it enables us to respond to it freely. Images of God as rock, tree of life, light, darkness, and myriad other metaphors drawn from nature, teach us the intrinsic value of this wider web of being in which we dwell. The God who is the ground of being is present and imaged forth in all beings, so that every aspect of creation shows us another face of God.
More conceptual images for God also have a role in feminist discourse. The traditional image of God as place (makom) evokes both the presence of the world in God and the extraordinary presence of God in particular places. As Rabbi Jose b. Halafta said, “We do not know whether God is the place of His world, or the world is His place.”82Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God, vol. I, 91, 92–93, 149. Lacking personal communal images to refer to God, we can use this richly ambiguous term to point to community as a special place of God’s self-manifestation. Community is a place we find ourselves in God; God dwells in this place. Also relevant here is the image of Shekhinah, which like the term God itself, cuts across the layers of anthropomorphic and nonpersonal language. Addressed in myriad personal guises, the Shekhinah is also the presence of God in the place called the world and the one who rests in a unique way in the midst of community.
There are, of course, many other metaphors that can be and have been evoked as part of the feminist naming of God. The images I mention here are just some of those that might convey the presence of God in a diverse, egalitarian community, replacing images of domination with a different understanding of the divine/human relation. Moreover, insofar as these images reflect the experience of a distinct community, they comprise only one of many communal namings of the experience and nature of the sacred. The connection between these different namings remains an important question, particularly as it pertains to the continuing place of traditional images of God in a feminist Judaism.
Certainly, the particular metaphors that emerge out of feminist experience are not meant to replace all other metaphors for God. Feminist metaphors call attention to important neglected aspects of the experience of God in community, and in doing so relativize and modify traditional metaphors by placing them in a different and larger context. Many traditional images of God can be altered in connotation or meaning by being seen in conjunction with feminist metaphors and with the changing social context out of which these metaphors arise. The image of God as father, for example, in a transformed social and metaphoric nexus, is potentially simply a parental image, shedding its implications of patriarchal domination and control. The image of God as judge confronts us when we fail to live up to our own ideals of diversity and mutuality, thus remaining an important counterpart to friend and source of being. But while feminist metaphors are nonexclusive, the experience of God in diverse, egalitarian community is also normative from a feminist perspective and as such functions as a criterion for selecting and rejecting images of divinity. Traditional images like lord and king, for example, evoke by definition relations of domination. Since it is difficult to imagine how such images could be transformed by context, they need to be seen as injurious reflections and supports of a hierarchical social system, and excised from our religious vocabularies.83I am aware that the image of God as king has been used to question the authority of any earthly king. (See, for example, 1 Sam. 8:7 and Rosemary Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology [Boston: Beacon Press, 1983], 64.) But the image is still problematic in its hierarchical understanding of the divine/human relation and is too easily reversed politically.
The rejection of all metaphors of domination raises, finally, a question frequently asked of feminists: What becomes of the Otherness or “Godness” of God when the primary feminist metaphors for God are warm and intimate ones? If God is friend and lover—albeit also ground and source of being—does this not somehow make God less God, less utterly more than us in every way? This question can be answered only by distinguishing among very different meanings of the concept of Otherness. The sense of Otherness I have been criticizing throughout this chapter is the notion of God as a dominating sovereign manipulating the world from outside it and above. I have argued that metaphors that depict God as Other in this sense mirror and sustain destructive social relations that ought never to be sanctified by any religious usage. But rejecting such metaphors does not entail abandoning God’s “moreness”; it simply challenges us to imagine that moreness in nonhierarchical terms. Just as a community is more than the sum of its members, for example, without necessarily controlling or dominating them, so God as the ultimate horizon of community and source of unity is more than all things—also without needing to control or dominate them. A second meaning of Otherness found frequently in this book refers to peoples or aspects of reality seen as different from and less than some dominant group, the nonnormative Other in a hierarchical system. Feminist God-language does not simply reject this sense of Otherness, but seeks actively to address and undermine it through finding divinity in what has hitherto been despised. In imaging God as female, as darkness, as nature, and as a myriad of other metaphors taken from realms devalued and spurned, we reexamine and value the many forms of Otherness, claiming their multiform particularity as significant and sacred.
The third meaning of Otherness points to God as mystery and adversary—the presence of God experienced not as friend but as devouring fire, and the relationship of God to the terrible aspects of human existence. Feminists, although we continually confront human evil in the form of patriarchy and other destructive structures of hierarchical relation, have not yet fully addressed the theological question of evil as a feminist issue.84See Catherine Madsen and respondents, “If God Is God She Is Not Nice,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5 (Spring 1989): 103–17. This side of God, which we cannot neglect without introducing a fundamental dualism into our conception of the world, can be expressed through images of waning and death, pain and struggle, all of which are aspects of a complex and changing reality. God as source can also be experienced as abyss; God as friend can also appear as enemy.85H. Richard Niebuhr, Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1970), 122–24; Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951–1963), 1: 110. But while we must speak about God as other in this sense, it is unnecessary to do so using images of hierarchical domination. The hierarchies in our world are human creations. The God who brings to birth and destroys, gives forth and takes away, judges my limitations and calls me to struggle, is terrifying not for God’s distance, but precisely for God’s nearness. That which is awesome, painful, or evil appalls or bewilders me not because it is far away, but because it is all around and as near as my own heart. This otherness is not incompatible with the intimacy of feminist metaphors, but is found alongside and within them as their difficult counterparts and companions.
We are left, then, with a picture of God as a God of many faces—as many as the 600,000 souls that stood at Sinai and the complexities and conflicts of Jewish and human existence. At the center of this picture stands the Jewish/feminist experience of a God encountered in the midst of community—a God revealed as the community and those within it discover their destiny and understand that destiny as part of a larger universe of action and response.86Niebuhr, The Responsible Self, 83, 86–87. This God is male/female lover, friend, companion, cocreator, the one who, seeing what is best in us, lures us to be the most we can become. This God is ground and source of all life, creating, holding, sustaining the great web of existence and, as part of it, the human companions who labor to make the world a home for the divine presence. This God is the God of Israel, the God the nascent community experienced and acknowledged behind the wonderful events at the Red Sea. This is the God the people stood before at Sinai, coming to their identity as a people, responding with the myriad laws, institutions, and customs that have given form and substance to their communal life. This is the God to whom they found themselves tied in a covenant, reciprocally binding through good times and bad: friend, holy terror, persistent goad.
Jewish feminists, in seeking to name this God of our experience, search for images of God that convey God’s power and presence in community, at the same time trying to undo that community’s hierarchical distortions. Selecting metaphors for God that acknowledge the differences within a covenantal community, we are also aware of the many covenants and greater differences that lie beyond our particular naming. As feminists, as Jews, we come to respond to and speak of God in certain characteristic ways. So every community in its uniqueness imagines the power that surrounds and sustains it. The naming of God and Israel that would turn God into Israel’s God and Israel into “his” chosen people is part of the dualistic, hierarchical misnaming of God and reality that emerges out of and supports a patriarchal worldview. In speaking of the moving, changing ground and source, our companion and our lover, we name toward the God known in community that cherishes diversity within and without, even as that diversity has its warrant in the God of myriad names.