Tag: gender

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God’s Pronouns – Terumah 5783

Have you ever felt misunderstood? Mis-characterized? Mis-judged? Yeah, so that happens to all of us, and probably almost every day.

Do you think God has ever felt misunderstood? Well, if we accept for the moment the anthropomorphic projection of human feelings onto God, absolutely. (Let me say right up front here, and many of you know this already, but I have some fairly unorthodox ways of understanding God, so I will be the first to say that it is extraordinarily unlikely that God “feels” like humans do. We’ll come back to that.)

Earlier this month, the Church of England’s General Synod announced that they are currently evaluating ways of referring to God which reflect contemporary perspectives on gender. Now, for the Jews, this is nothing new or surprising. If you have been paying close attention, you might have noticed that the siddur/prayerbook we use here at Beth Shalom, Siddur Lev Shalem, avoids using gendered pronouns when referring to God in English, and avoids gendered terms such as “King,” “Lord,” and “Master,” instead using “Sovereign,” or leaving the Hebrew untranslated. I have tried to avoid gendered terms in English when referring to God. This was actually something I first heard my childhood rabbi, Rabbi Arthur Rulnick, do when I was in high school, all the way back in the 1980s.

But of course, the reality of Jewish text is that in Hebrew, the vast majority of references to God are undeniably masculine. And not only the names or descriptors for God, but every adjective, verb, pronoun including suffixes is gendered as well. And there are no gender-neutral forms in the Hebrew language. (The English use of “they” as a non-gendered pronoun does not work in Hebrew.)

Just as a quick example, consider the berakhah recited before engaging in the mitzvah of Torah study:

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה’ אֱ-לֹהֵֽינוּ מֶֽלֶךְ הָעוֹלָם אֲשֶׁר קִדְּ֒שָֽׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְצִוָּנוּ לַעֲסֹק בְּדִבְרֵי תוֹרָה:

Barukh Attah Adonai, Eloheinu Melekh ha’olam, asher qiddeshanu bemitzvotav, vetzivanu la’asoq bedivrei Torah.
Praised are You, Adonai our God, King of the Universe, Who sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to be engrossed in the words of Torah.

Of the 13 Hebrew words in that berakhah, seven of them, more than half, refer to God as masculine. Changing them to, for example, feminine language would require major surgery, and would be quite awkward. And no non-gendered terms exist. While we may choose to translate to English however we want, in Hebrew there is no getting around God’s apparent male-ness, at least as far as our ancestors understood God as they wrote these words.

And yet, despite the language, can we really think of God as masculine? 

In the first Creation story of Bereshit / Genesis (1:27), when humans are created betzelem Elohim, in God’s image, they are created as “zakhar uneqevah” – male and female. There is even a midrash which describes the first human as having a male side and a female side, which were subsequently split apart (an idea also presented, by the way, in Plato’s Symposium in Aristophanes’ speech on the origin of love). 

So if people were created in God’s image and as both male and female, we can only deduce that God certainly has male and female aspects as well, and therefore God can be considered neither entirely male nor entirely female, so neither feminine language nor masculine language accurately applies to the Qadosh Barukh Hu*, even if all three of those words are decidedly masculine.

As the Talmud mentions from time to time, “Dibberah Torah kilshon benei adam.” The Torah speaks in human language. Since our language is limited, and Hebrew has no neuter forms, the default for God became masculine. The human mind has this silly habit of wanting to compartmentalize, to categorize neatly. But God, unequivocally, cannot be put into any kind of box.

But one of the most marvelous things that I learned in rabbinical school from my teacher Rabbi Neil Gillman z”l is that God language is by necessity metaphorical. God’s “mighty hand and outstretched arm”? Metaphor. The noise God makes while walking through the Garden of Eden during the breezy time of the day (Bereshit / Genesis 3:8)? Clearly metaphor. God’s voice when “speaking” to Moshe at the beginning of Parashat Terumah (Shemot / Exodus 25:1)? 

וַיְדַבֵּ֥ר ה’ אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֥ה לֵּאמֹֽר׃

Vaydabber Adonai el Moshe lemor.
God spoke to Moses, saying…

This one is so metaphorical that the second verb, lemor, to say, reinforces the fact that God is not speaking in any conventional way. God is communicating with Moshe, but since God has no mouth as we understand mouths, the Torah adds the second verb lemor / “to say” to demonstrate that “vaydabber” / “speaking” does not actually mean speaking the way that humans speak.

Ein lo demur haguf, ve-eino guf, we sing cheerfully during Yigdal, which is a summary of Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles of Faith. God has neither the form of a body, nor any kind of physical body at all. Lo na’arokh elav qedushato – we cannot even estimate the extent of God’s non-physical holiness. It is unlimited, unfathomable, unconfined.

If all God language is metaphor, then clearly God’s gender is also metaphorical in addition to being limited by human language. In a conversation I had with Rabbi Rachel Adler, whom you heard in this space last week, I suggested that we could understand that God has no gender; she replied that God encompasses all genders.

And in her landmark book from 1998, Engendering Judaism, Rabbi Adler also speaks of the power of metaphor. Metaphor is ideal for tefillah / prayer because it is, she said, “complex, multi vocal, full of resonances, because it is the language of discovery and metamorphosis, the language that points toward the unknown, the language that lights up the darkness.” The metaphorical language we use for God leaves room for human creativity in interpretation. It creates a space for us.

And while wrestling with the challenges of masculine God-language and in particular the archaic nature of the ancient metaphors which we still use, she also concedes that these metaphors continue to hold their power because they point beyond themselves and are incomplete. “Incompleteness,” she writes, “preserves metaphor’s truthfulness; rhetorical processes that distort metaphor are those that hide or deny its incompleteness.” 

In other words, the moment we understand the language as making God male, we have limited and thereby weakened God. The incomplete metaphor retains its mystery and its power. 

By instead reaching out to God with our imagination, which transcends language, we are drawn closer. By leaving space in the metaphor, we can ascend higher.

I remember so clearly when Rabbi Gillman, speaking about the language of tefillah, distinguished the Conservative movement’s approach from that of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, who created the first Reconstructionist siddur. Rabbi Kaplan simply changed the Hebrew in passages which challenged his theology, substituting for the second paragraph of the Shema, and the blessings over the Torah, and parts of Aleinu. 

Rabbi Gillman characterized Rabbi Kaplan’s approach as, “If I don’t believe it, I don’t say it.” 

And then he added, “I’m a liturgical traditionalist.” I’ll tinker with the translation instead. And that has been the Conservative movement’s philosophy regarding liturgy for nearly a century. Perhaps 97% of what we say in our tefillot here at Beth Shalom is exactly the same as what they say in Orthodox synagogues; where we differ more concretely is on the English side of the page, and in our hearts and minds.

What Rabbi Gillman taught, and Rabbi Rachel Adler also addresses, is that the ancient Hebrew has power, even when the literal translation does not work for us. But we use our imaginations to get to the place where those metaphors continue to function in our contemporary spiritual landscape.

And that is an essential message of Jewish life. What did we read about today in Parashat Terumah? That we must build a mishkan, a dwelling-place for God on Earth. And that metaphor is presented to us in the Torah in excruciating detail, spreading over five parashiyyot. And what will this mishkan do? It will enable the in-dwelling of God. Shemot / Exodus 25:8:

וְעָ֥שׂוּ לִ֖י מִקְדָּ֑שׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּ֖י בְּתוֹכָֽם׃

Ve’asu li miqdash, veshakhanti betokham. 
Make Me a sanctuary, and I shall dwell among the Israelites.

More metaphor, of course. 

And where is this mishkan today? Where is the Temple, the Beit HaMiqdash today? Where are the sacrifices that much of this central part of the Torah reference? We build it inside ourselves, and that is where God dwells. 

Even in its great detail, the idea of the mishkan is fundamentally incomplete in the Torah.

It described a place for worship, but did not capture the entire range of how we can understand the mishkan and the sacrificial mode of worship. Parashat Terumah speaks, silently and with no physical mouth, about the way we worship today; about prayer and synagogues and moments of silence and joyous singing and wailing grief and beating our chests and prostrating ourselves and all the imaginative ways in which we reach toward God.

We have dramatically changed the mode of worship, but we are still within the Torah’s metaphor of the mishkan. And we see this over and over in rabbinic Judaism: re-imagining the Torah’s language so that it applies to us here and now, wherever “here and now” has been throughout Jewish history.

In reading these passages, we must concede that our ancestors have re-imagined so much in Jewish life. And we continue to re-imagine God, the God in whose image we are all created, the God who cannot be limited to a body, or a single gender. The mystery is more powerful when we lean into our imaginations, and do not toil in the mundanities of inadequate human language. How dare we even think that masculine terms for God can limit the Qadosh Barukh Hu to such a narrow understanding of masculinity?

Our intellect and creativity must be greater than that. Human language is limited; but metaphors leave space for all of us to be seen within. God encompasses all genders.

So is God misunderstood? Clearly. But in not entirely understanding God, we leave room for an inestimable holiness, one which is only limited by our imagination. It is in that realm, and beyond in the infinite, where God dwells.

~

Rabbi Seth Adelson

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Pittsburgh, PA, Shabbat morning, 2/25/2023.)

* הקדוש ברום הוא/ haQadosh Barukh Hu, a term for God, literally means, “The Holy One, Blessed be He.” Both qadosh and barukh are also male-gendered terms. Some translate this term as “the Holy, Blessed One.”

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Race, Gender, and Who We Are Today, or, Is Gal Gadot White? – Qorah 5777

You may be aware of an Internet dispute that popped up a few weeks ago with the release of the new Wonder Woman film. Some critics were quick to note the unfortunate tendency in the world of comic-book heroes turned into movies to feature only white actors. Wonder Woman is, according to some, yet another example of such an oversight.

Leaping into this fray, with a commentary posted on the website comicbook.com, was a brief piece about this by Matthew Mueller, arguing that Gal Gadot, the Israeli actress and model who plays the lead, is not “white”; rather, she is Ashkenazi Jewish.

How Wonder Woman Solves The Comic Book Movie Villain Problem

I must concede that I have often questioned the idea of Jews being white, and when I have submitted forms that ask for my race, I have occasionally checked off “Other.”

Despite the fact that Jewish students on college campuses are reminded of their “white privilege,” I think it’s a stretch to call us “white.”

But that’s mostly because “race” (I’m using a lot of air-quotes here) is an unfortunately enduring social construct that comes from 19th-century thinking about the palette of human physical traits, reducing them into approximately three major branches. But of course humanity is more of a continuum; the lines are not so clear. That is why scientists today speak of ethnic groups or populations rather than “races.”

But really, the challenge is that the human mind likes categorization. That’s the way we work. Part of the lens through which we understand the information we take in relies on a kind of series of shortcuts: black/white/yellow, male/female, gay/straight, etc. Our minds are not trained to think flexibly about these categories.

And this mode of thinking certainly permeates our tradition as well. The Torah exhibits a need to categorize, to classify, to separate. Consider the laws of kashrut: if a land animal has split hooves and chews its cud (series of stomachs and culture of gut bacteria that break down cellulose) it is fitting to eat; if not, then are not permitted to eat it. There is no grey area. Fish, as you know, must have fins and scales. (And some of you know that there are certain fish, like sturgeon and swordfish, which have scales early on but lose them. The Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards permit these fish as kosher.)

The sociologist Mary Douglas, in her seminal work Purity and Danger, examined the need of religion to categorize; things that cross boundaries were, to ancient people, dangerous. Our ancestors strived to keep things separate; think about the Torah’s laws about not sowing two kinds of seed together (Deut. 22:9), or not allowing wool and linen to be woven together in clothing (Deut. 22:11).

And that thinking continues into rabbinic literature; hence the continuous need in halakhah to determine where are the boundaries: what time of the day may you recite minhah / the afternoon service? Can you eat a grilled cheese sandwich on a plate used for eating a hamburger within 24 hours? Is electricity a form of fire, and if not, can you turn on a light switch on Shabbat?

One of my favorite examples of the rabbinic need to set boundaries is that of the woman in labor who is in the miqveh, in the process of converting to Judaism, and she is crowning at the same time (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Bekhorot 46b). How far out, the rabbis ask, may the baby be before s/he requires a separate conversion? The answer is (drum roll!) that if the baby’s nose has not yet emerged, then s/he is a Jew. Now THAT’S a boundary.

So one of the curious things about living in the 21st century is that we are rapidly expanding the range of identities.

Consider our erstwhile president, Barack Obama, who has described his family as “a mini-United Nations.” He was born to a Kenyan father and a mother descended from English, German, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Swiss, and French ancestors, who was also connected to a black former slave as well. Mr. Obama defies easy categorization, and although he may be referred to by some as the first “black” president, the reality is much more complex.

Have you had genetic testing? Nowadays, among the things that you can learn when you have your genes analyzed is your ethnic composition. I have not had this done, but I’d lay a fair wager that in addition to a hefty chunk of Ashkenazi Jew (itself a construct that dates to no earlier than about 1000 years ago, really only yesterday in terms of Jewish history), that there would be a fair mix of Slavic and Germanic, and who knows, perhaps even some Italian. (I’ve always enjoyed a hearty marinara.)

We are inching toward an age of gradients, in which there will be no black and white, nor gay or straight, but a virtually infinite variety of people that fall somewhere in-between.

While we may have been inclined to categorize people with reductionist brushes in the past, what may soon be the new norm is to acknowledge those gradients, to accept that none of us fits neatly into precise categories. And this transitional time will be challenging to many of us.

In parashat Qorah, which we read from today, there is a tension that comes through based on rabbinic interpretation of a couple of verses, a tension between what is eternally fixed and what is not.

First, there is the Qorah rebellion, which our bat mitzvah spoke about earlier. Pirqei Avot (5:19) cites this as challenge to the authority of Moshe and Aharon as a dispute that is not for the sake of heaven, a mahloqet she-einah leshem shamayim. What is a mahloqet leshem shamayim? A dispute which is holy, and will last forever. Internecine political struggles, which are not holy, do not last; disputes over the various understanding of our tradition are.

Elsewhere in the parashah (Numbers 18:19), we read about the “berit melah,” literally the “covenant of salt” that is between God and humans.

יט  כֹּל תְּרוּמֹת הַקֳּדָשִׁים, אֲשֶׁר יָרִימוּ בְנֵי-יִשְׂרָאֵל לַה’–נָתַתִּי לְךָ וּלְבָנֶיךָ וְלִבְנֹתֶיךָ אִתְּךָ, לְחָק-עוֹלָם:  בְּרִית מֶלַח עוֹלָם הִוא לִפְנֵי ה’, לְךָ וּלְזַרְעֲךָ אִתָּךְ.

19 All the sacred gifts that the Israelites set aside for the Lord I give to you, to your sons, and to the daughters that are with you, as a due for all time. It shall be an everlasting covenant of salt before the Lord, and for your offspring as well.

What is the nature of this covenant? It is something that lasts forever, that is stable and unchangeable, like salt.

The tension that we might perceive here is that nothing is fixed and immutable. The way we relate to God, the way we understand Jewish life, our relationship to Jewish text – these things have all changed over the last twenty years, let alone the last 2,000. And these things are, in fact, in the category of mahloqet leshem shamayim, holy controversies that will continue forever; how we worship, how we observe Jewish law, how we engage with our holy texts – these things are not fixed.

Two weeks ago, in honor of Pride Shabbat, BD Wahlberg spoke to us about BD’s experience in not being confined to one of two binary genders, and how we might understand that in a Jewish context.

I know that for some, BD’s talk was inspiring and affirming. For others among us, it may have been challenging and disorienting.

But facing the challenges of how we understand gender, how we understand “race” and ethnicity, these are holy challenges that we must continue to wrestle with. We cannot pretend that any of these things are like salt, unchangeable. We have to acknowledge that just as Judaism made room for relating to God through words instead of sacrifices, or accepted sturgeon as kosher, or learned that electricity is not fire and therefore may be used on Shabbat, that the way we categorize people also has to change.

And, to refer back to a point that BD made, we have to acknowledge that all of us are created “betzelem Elohim,” in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). And if that means that we do not fit into neat categories, well, then we are in mahloqet leshem shamayim territory once again. It is a holy struggle that will continue.

So is Gal Gadot “white”? Is Barack Obama “black”? Is BD a man or a woman? The answer to any of those questions could be yes, no, or neither. Once our minds have acclimated to this brave new world, we will no longer have to answer such questions. But in the meantime, let’s just live with the postulate that each of us is divine in our own way.

Shabbat shalom!

~

(Originally delivered at Congregation Beth Shalom, Shabbat morning, 6/24/17.)

~

Articles about Gal Gadot and the “whiteness” of Ashkenazi Jews

May 31

http://comicbook.com/dc/2017/05/31/wonder-woman-person-of-color/

June 2

http://forward.com/culture/film-tv/373658/gal-gadots-wonder-woman-is-white-lets-not-pretend-otherwise/

June 4

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/yes-ashkenazi-jews-including-gal-gadot-are-people-of-color/

June 11

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ashkenazi-jews-are-still-people-of-color-reply-to-critics/