God She

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, July 31, 2010

The convention is to refer to God with the masculine pronoun, though this morning Kendall chose not to follow that convention and referred to God as she.

Of course we all know intellectually that God is not a person, that God does not have a body. This was one of Maimonides 13 essential principals of faith, dating back to the 12th century, which later were popularized throughout the Jewish world in the song “Yigdal” with which many of us are familiar.

“Ein lo demut haguf, veeino guf, God has neither form nor body. God is incorporeal.”

We know this from Biblical teaching as well. The second commandment teaches us to make no image of God: “You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image or any likeness of what is in the Heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth. “ The rabbis of the Talmud go to great lengths to explain to us that we shouldn’t be confused by the Torah speaking about God’s voice, or God’s arm. The Torah only speaks that way because that is the style of human language. Those are the metaphors that we understand but they are not to be taken literally.

In the late 1970’s there was a lot of discussion within the feminist community about the use of the masculine pronoun, both for God and for the community. Eventually the use of “he” to designate the worshipper was largely eliminated. We no longer address the congregation as “men of Israel,” for example, and even the old prayer book, the Gates of Prayer, recognized that there were men and women in the congregation.

Dealing with God language was more complicated. First of all there were those for whom God as Father or God as King was a very familiar and comforting image. Though the Bible has many images of God, shepherd, rock, place, healer, fortress, maker, light and friend, to name a few, the image of Father and King is longstanding.

Secondly, there were disagreements between those who felt it was most helpful to remove any gendered language in speaking about God, and those who felt that we as human beings can’t get beyond thinking in gender.

I leaned more to the position that using non-gendered language is truer to the essence of Jewish teaching. The word Adonai for example, which is often translated as Lord, actually represents the tetragrammaton, the special particular name for God, the yud hey vav hey. This word comes from the root to be, and is meant to convey that God is, was and ever will be. For me the translation Eternal, best captures the meaning of the Hebrew and here at Shir Hadash we often use that in place of the word Lord.

A good friend of mine though, Rabbi Maggie Wenig, who went on to teach at the Hebrew Union College, argued that we as human beings always think in gendered terms. From the moment a baby is born, for example, we ask, is it a boy or a girl. If we are going to relate to God, then we must imitate the Bible, and speak in language with which we can identify. Therefore she and others urged that we broaden our images of God to include feminine images as well. These images exist in the Bible, where God is pictured as both as giving birth to and nursing the people of Israel, and especially later in cabbalistic texts, which speak about the shechinah, God’s feminine sheltering presence. These images can help a new generation find a way to relate to God that speaks to them.

That Moses was presenting a God who could not be seen was a great challenge to the ancient Israelites. Many thousands of years later, we continue to struggle with our understanding of God and in finding meaningful ways to talk about God.