What About God?
Falk, Marcia
WHAT ABOUT GOD? What about God? God the Father is not enough-and God the Mother doesn't solve the problem. New blessings for old wine. MARCIA FALK "Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive,...
...I couldn't really believe that such a genius as God would not get bored with so much praise: did he really need so much positive feedback...
...Let us bless the flow of life that revives us, sustains us and brings us to this time...
...Its potentially profound implications could not affect the way I then lived...
...I lift my vessel to bless this moment...
...But with the exception of the final image, the fruit of the vine, I do not find words here to contain my kavannah...
...woman is secondary, in being and value...
...Copyright © 1985 by Marcia Falk...
...I had many questions about God and prayer, and I believed it was acceptable to have them...
...In the name of monotheism, for the sake of unity, I would like our prayers to articulate mutually supportive relationships between male and female, and between transcendence and immanence...
...In prayer, it was Marcia Falk teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles...
...And now I have my blessing...
...The male God legitimated men's power, such that questioning their exclusive right to it was not yet thinkable for me...
...This error is called idolatry, some call it a sin...
...Not time in the abstract, not time torn from place like spirit split from body, but time hallowed by wholeness, time and place joined in creation, a repair of the dualistic thinking that rends the monotheistic dream...
...It's not merely a matter of changing male images to seemingly equivalent female ones: the relatively simp'e (though still courageous) act of "feminizing" the male God has proved, to many of us, to be inadequate, and often absurd...
...Rather than passively acknowledge the blessedness of the male "you," what will happen if I make a wish...
...And I say: Nevarech et eyn hachayyim matzmichatpri hagafen...
...Ayin, an image from the body of nature that resonates with figurative meaning: ayin, origin, source...
...So also, the vine comes to Suggest a model for human interconnected-ness, for the human bonds that sustain life...
...He was a genius, but did he understand the way I felt...
...Some may ask, "But how can soft, wet clay contain...
...But in practice, in liturgical use, this theological principle is lost...
...It has said: man alone is created in God's image...
...The recent past has seen amazing breakthroughs...
...And I liked the courage and open-mindedness of a tradition with no easy answers, a tradition I saw as in pursuit of justice and truth...
...For we are potters, and the materials are our birthright: images made of words that express our deep, est longings and best dreams...
...we are called to answer the sustenance with tending, to keep the trust not through domination but through care...
...There are no shortcuts...
...But I talked to him as though he were, as the liturgy depicted him, as / pictured him...
...My kavannah might go like this: The vine is courageous and tenacious, as often each of us is called to be...
...that we tap the well by keeping ourselves open to awareness...
...I also had deep suspicions about whether God really needed the liturgy, whether it wasn't there mainly to keep me in line...
...it was clear that maleness was primary and femaleness secondary...
...Our history, then, is a tapestry, to which we continually add new weaving...
...The much-touted Shechinah, used to placate uppity Jewish women these days (as in, "The tradition has a feminine image of God, what more do you want...
...The ultimacy of an exclusively male God has come into question, and his defenders are ready to attack...
...Which is to say, I did not dare to imagine my own kinship to divinity...
...Mainly in two ways: through stories and through prayer...
...moreover, this appealed to my need for privacy of thought...
...For images have great power and tenacity...
...This is a crucial point...
...But can any single image do this...
...I begin the healing: Nevarech et eyn hachayyim-Let us bless the source oflifeAnd now I need another image, a verb that will branch out to both sides of my blessing and connect the immanent source of life to the fruit of our vines, not creating "something from nothing" but bonding the deeper power with our own powers, making a channel through which the strength may flow, enabling us to grow, allowing our vines to flower and fruit...
...Images are necessarily partial...
...The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.yy Abraham Joshua Heschel "All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware...
...And we cannot help but try to name our experience and even what goes beyond our experience: naming is a fundamentally human, deeply joyous act...
...We have begun to address divinity in our own voices, often saying "she" rather than "he...
...But should images of isolation and helplessness be identified as the fundamental representation of God's "female side...
...With this gesture, we enter that stream as it flows from the past and through us into the future...
...And, in the traditional Jewish way, follow what is new with a blessing for the new and for renewal: Nevarech et maayan chayyenu shehecheyyanu vekiyyimanu vehiggiyanu lazman hazeh...
...And today I am still proud to claim it as mine, because the Jewish commitment to pursue justice has led me to where I now am: a Jewish feminist, a feminist Jew, in the process of making feminist Judaism...
...For a feminized patriarchal image is still patriarchal . though now in transvestite masquerade...
...Our liturgy has taken the vision, the hope of monotheism and reduced it to a cult of idol-worship...
...Not that tears are not valid, not that I wouldn't want my images of divinity to include also solitude and suffering, for these are important aspects of experience which need reflection in our theology...
...Not that I didn't have theological questions during this period...
...This article is an adaptation of a speech she presented at a conference in Los Angeles in November, "Illuminating the Unwritten Scrolls: Women's Spirituality and Jewish Tradition," and is part of a work-in-Progress, The Book of Blessings...
...Some were powerful, but others were not, and some seemed outright awkward and wooden...
...Let us bless the source of life that ripens fruit on the vines...
...And with the support of my comrnu-nity, I would like to make more vessels...
...I consider the traditional blessing: Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech haolam bore pri hagafen...
...From a purely rational point of view, this reaction is ridiculous...
...Source as the place of nurture, like the oasis of Eyn Gedi from the biblical Song of Songs, a place still green and flowing today, a place where travelers rest, a place of renewal, a place in which to consecrate time...
...We keep the clay moist and malleable so the vessels never dry up, never become stone against which we might break our teeth...
...Jewish women have set this process in motion-and Jewish men are joining us-by composing and uttering new prayers, our own prayers, in which we begin to call divinity by the many ^es and images that arise from our jggpest selves...
...This is the limitation of any personal image of God, and Judaism recognizes this, at least conceptually...
...Nevarech et eyn hachayyim matzmichat pri hagafen venishzor et serigei chayyenu bemasoret ha'am...
...We do this because we take theology seriously and know we need to affirm ourselves back into it, restore ourselves to the place from which we have been removed...
...As always, we must trust the journey...
...Together we claim our voices and the unrecorded voices in our past, the forgotten and withheld words of our | foremothers...
...Focusing on the image of the vine gives me an approach to my blessing: a kavannah (in the second sense of the word), a preparatory meditation...
...I think it must mean that if we are all created in the image of divinity, the images with which we point toward divinity must reflect us all...
...After all, the world he made was full of variety, and surprise was one of his best inventions...
...On the deepest level, I "knew" that if God existed-or, more accurately, when he existed most vitally for me-it was as a male whom I addressed personally in moments of prayer...
...In Hebrew, one cannot even say "it"-"it" is always "he" or "she...
...That was what they meant, I supposed, by achieving kavannah, right intention: making my meaning come through someone else's words...
...Ah, I have tapped an image: it springs up from under and almost meets my lips...
...So I questioned (didn't everyone...
...Then let there be a multiplicity of images, a flowering of the power of naming-toward, so that in our articulation of variations we will approach our theme...
...Do we wish to divide experience along these classically sexist lines...
...I return to the vines of my kavannah, the vines that inspire this blessing...
...As a child praying, I never envisioned a female God...
...In Bible stories and in midrash, God was a character always referred to as "he," no matter what he was doing...
...In ancient culture, vines and vineyards often symbolized women: in the Song of Songs, the Bible's passionately eloquent collection of love poems, the vineyard is a richly mysterious metaphor for women's sexuality...
...Not vertical chains of domination, but lateral nets of community, the intertwining of lives in which we fruitfully engage ourselves...
...And I am impelled to speak, for I have reclaimed the power to do so by putting the responsibility for prayer back on the community of human voices...
...nothing less than monotheism is at stake: monotheism, Judaism's original raison d'etre...
...it keeps us at our center...
...MARCIA FALK "Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods...
...In the Song of Songs, women claim their sexuality and assert the mutuality of the love relationship, affirming as they do so their natural relation to all creation...
...I think that monotheism means that, despite our differences, I am more like you than I am unlike you...
...The few female images already available in the tradition do not provide an adequate solution...
...Nor has the Shechinah fared much better in our century...
...And while I like the name itself-Shechinah, from the Hebrew root "to dwell"-I would like to see immanence portrayed in ways that are not secondary to transcendence...
...Like the goblet that holds the wine the blessing contains my kavannah...
...We might think of community this way, as an interweaving of the paths of many vines...
...The flowering has already begun...
...Now I can speak freely, without foregone conclusions...
...Sad as it is, I cannot help but feel that, far from redeeming women, the image of the Shechinah has, until now, only supported the male-centered theological vision...
...And from this hierarchical dualism-the theological basis of sexism-flows the pernicious hierarchical thinking that underlies racism, classism, agism, homophobia and human domination of the rest of creation...
...We pass the clay back and forth-ancient earth, new earth-and pass the vessels among us and down to the next generation...
...When signifier is equated with signified, we have made our verbal images into an idol...
...In Bialik's poem, the Shechinah was a pitiful mama bird with a broken wing, invoked to portray the frailty and vulnerability of Jewish tradition in Bialik's time...
...Through the performance language of the Hebrew liturgy, I rehearsed weekly, during certain periods daily, this authoritative set of images that I had accepted but had not chosen...
...And we address God as "she" rather than as "it" because we know the ineffectuality of abstractions to challenge deep-seated images, know that "it" alone will never uproot the "he" which has been deeply embedded in us...
...And even once it became explicitly associated with the female, it did not empower women, especially not in kabbalistic thought, where male and female were hierarchically polarized...
...And as I claim the living community of which I am a part, I I feel the well of life that flows up, enabling me to speak, to find my voice and use it in good relation to the voices around me...
...I remember vividly the rather peculiar conversations I had with God when I was a young teenager...
...Then we must find new images to convey our visions, and we must be patient with ourselves (though not passive), for meaningful images will not be called into being by sheer acts of will, acts that attempt to imitate the traditional God who creates "something from nothing...
...But we are human, we need love and language...
...We find instead that our search for what is authoritative leads us to explore more deeply what is just, and that these explorations are not well-expressed by the image of a monarch, either female or male...
...from a feminist hymn by Ruth Duck as quite young-maybe four years Id—the first time I was told that God was neither male nor female, that he no body at all: he was beyond the Imitations of gender...
...whether God always heard me, and I wondered what it meant for him to hear...
...but exclusively that of a man...
...This bond, too, implies reciprocity: we depend on the earth and it sustains us...
...What I did not realize at the time was that, through my efforts to relate to God, I was also working out and practicing my relationship to authority in the world...
...And today we women are unrolling our tapestries, holding them up to the light, where their colors and intricate patterns, each perfect and imperfect stitch, may shine...
...Living j voices, speaking living words...
...God was an extremely knowledgeable, very intelligent old man-a genius, in fact...
...Trusting the process, we find that images emerge from our whole, engaged selves and from our communities...
...How was this image taught to me...
...Traditional Jewish prayer, in its insistence on a particular set of partial images, in its dogmatic naming of an exclusively male God, a God who may be allowed to have feminine attributes or aspects but whose primary reality is male, this prayer, which has become our liturgy, has turned the monotheistic'promise into a lie...
...Now what do I wish to sing...
...And so, the vine becomes a reminder of our bond to the garden, a symbolic link between our life and that of the earth, which feeds and supports us...
...So long as Jews kept on doing the right things, it seemed that we were allowed to question everything...
...I assumed that other people wondered about these things, too...
...Judaism itself seemed to encourage independent thinking, urged me to grapple with texts and ideas, and my family taught me to challenge, argue and probe...
...The Shechinah was not °riginally a female image...
...We need metaphors from all arenas of life, as many as are demanded and reflected by our individual strengths and needs...
...that out of our living, out of our particular needs, inspired by specific moments and occasions, the images that serve us will come into being...
...The women of the Song of Songs offer their lovers their own wine-yeyni-and the nectars of their own fruit—arcis rimoni...
...Clearly, it is not the inclusive One-God that is being threatened...
...Together we make and use new forms, filling them with our spontaneous meditations, our kavannot...
...Against the powerful conditioning of the liturgy in which I willingly engaged, the sophisticated abstract concept of an inclusive, genderless God stood no chance of making itself felt...
...I answer that the secret is in the spinning: centripetal force holds as no rigid forms can...
...My role was to bend and adapt to this primary being, for the real "other," I knew, was me...
...it did not become so until kabbalistic times...
...For when any single image or set of images claims the exclusive right to point toward ultimacy, it makes a claim beyond its partiality...
...Isn't it odd, then, that the basic "fact" I never doubted at that open and intensely questioning stage of my life was the maleness of God, and the legitimating nearer-to-godliness of males...
...So I begin again: what would happen ifInstead of baruch, "blessed," the verb in the passive mood, in the masculine singular form, what will happen if I open up the speech to actively proclaim what I am doing...
...Though not God, they were surely more like him than I, than any female could ever be...
...Through story, God came dramatically alive, but through prayer, he became an intimate part of my life...
...The vineyard is both the place where the lovers unite and the woman's own self, body and spirit...
...And today I wonder: was my lack of self-affirmation so total because I was raised in an educated Jewish home where I learned not just to recite but to understand the words of the Hebrew prayers, so that the images they depicted were engraved indelibly in me...
...If God is not really male, why should it matter if we call God "she...
...I search for words, first in Hebrew and then in English-Hebrew because it is very old and still constantly changing, the language of my people and, I am thankful, mine...
...For me, the image of the vine itself is resonant: it suggests vitality, sexuality, the forces of life that draw us toward life...
...Growing toward light, the vine twists without knowing what darkness may lie beyond...
...I would not have articulated it in this way then, but I am sure that I felt it, "knew" it was true...
...Of course, most of the time he was behaving much the way men did...
...I was impressed with this...
...Recognizing the power of God-talk to educate and shape our lives, Jewish women have begun in the past decade to take back the power of naming...
...I thought it made sense that we be judged not by our beliefs but by our actions...
...I would not have said so, would not have said, "God is a man," because I knew, conceptually, that this was incorrect...
...out of our deepest images, we construct our truths...
...How was it reinforced...
...and English, my mother tongue, the language of my American community...
...Of course, he was multilingual, but as he was particularly fond of being spoken to in Hebrew, I made a point of becoming conversant in his language...
...I think it means that we share the same source, and that one principle of justice governs us equally...
...Lo hametim yehalleluyah, says the j psalmist: it is not the dead but the liv- | ing who will sing of God...
...Between the lines, I worked hard to effect a meaningful relationship with this God, this immutable Other...
...much the same: God may have had a few feminine characteristics, but he was always a male...
...In Jewish tradition, the Shechinah has never been on equal footing with the mighty Kadosh Ba-ruch Hu, the Holy-One-Blessed-Be-He, her creator, her master, her groom, the ultimate reality of which she was only an emanation...
...And prayer was even more effective than story in impressing God's personality on me...
...At this stage of my life, I hardly wondered that rabbis were men, that rulers and people of great importance were men...
...And not all the lines in the prayers sounded eloquent to me...
...And I choose the verb form lehatzmiach, from the root meaning "grow from the ground," lehatzmiach, to enable to grow, to allow to flower, to nourish toward ripening...
...Alone, alone," was her cry, for all had abandoned her...
...In its journey, the vine intertwines with other vines...
...In the end, it comes down to this: what I would like to see, I must help nurture into being...
...I cannot believe we wish to do that...
...As a child, I certainly did not question whether the male image was true, or whether it would guide me in just ways...
...So too, I would like to see autonomous female images, not images that imply the essential otherness of woman...
...Suppose I say nevarech, active, future, first person plural, gender-inclusive, "let us bless...
...Perhaps the best way to begin is to return to the traditional Hebrew blessings, those powerful utterances that imbue in us so deeply their partial theology, and reformulate them so that they reflect the emerging Jewish feminist vision...
...that was unthinkable...
...Let us bless the source of life that ripens fruit on the vines as we weave the branches of our live: into the tradition...
...Martin Buber "For we are still Gods people, the journey is our home...
...Rather, we discover what artists know well: that authentic images rise from our unconscious as gifts...
...And the words for my image come to me: eyn hachayyim, the source of life...
...I did not question the validity of the he-God image until many years later...
...Now, how do I bless the fruit of these vines...
...Blessed are you, Lord our God, King of the world, who creates the fruit of the vine...
...And in my wildest, most daring dreams, I envision the result: Judaism's great gift for making distinctions joined with feminism's deep insights about integration, so that the distinctions, the choices we make, affirm us all in the healthy pursuit of life...
...Usually I settled for taking turns-a few words in his language, a few words in mine-and secretly I doubted whether simultaneity was worth the effort, although my teachers had urged me to try...
...I spoke to him in stereo, on a two-track sound system, or at least I tried to...
...Man" is no less partial than "woman," as clearly as "white" is no less partial than "black...
...When any particular set of images is worshiped exclusively, as though it were the in-effable itself, we have before us a clej, error of reason, one that Jews will recognize as hardly new...
...will lot suffice...
...For the ancient lifting of the wine goblet is a gesture with which Jews make the old new and the new timeless, as we embrace ourselves into history...
...My main problem with the prayers, however, was that I found myself tiring of the same words over and over, and I wondered: wouldn't God enjoy some variation, too...
...Yet when we do so we are accused by fellow Jews of the deeply threatening heresy of paganism...
...It would seem that the authentic expression of an authentic monotheism is not a singularity of image but an embracing unity of many images drawn from all of nature, of which we human beings are a part...
...And we spin out hundreds of shapes, elegant ones and awkward ones, rough ones and smoother ones, each one precious because together they contain the infinite variations of our lives...
...And I knew that it was permissible even to question the whole enterprise, to wonder whether God existed, which everyone certainly did at times, including people who were known to be "good Jews...
...Or did the greatness of his intellect obliterate feelings, feelings as unimportant as mine surely were...
...with this gesture we claim the tradition as we go forward to continue making it...
...What we think, or what we think we think, affects the way we live far less than the conscious and unconscious images we carry with us all the time...
...The implication was clear: he was big enough to play a feminine role on occasion...
...I, for one, cannot think of the Shechinah without recalling her burning tears as they fell on the young Bialik's Gemara page...
...This was a bewildering concept that I accepted to fa extent that I could fathom it, which is to say, I thought I understood it But at the same time, and even jarlier than that time, I was presented with an image implicit in the pronoun «he" and depicted in nouns such as "lord," "father," "master," "king...
...The image of God that was carved into a corner of my head and heart, all through childhood and on into adolescence, was never that of a woman, or even a half-man/half-woman, certainly not that of a neuter (what would an image of a neuter person be...
...All the while, the anthropomorphic images of the he-God were being repeated and practiced by my own tongue...
...And where better to start than with a kiddush, the blessing of sanctification usually made over the fruit of the vine, the blessing with which we mark every Sabbath, every holiday, every special occasion in our Jewish lives...
...My goal was to tell him what I was really thinking at the same time, the precise moment, that I uttered the formulaic words of the liturgy...
...She is the author of a translation of the Song of Songs, and of two books of poems forthcoming in 1985, It Is July In Virginia and This Year In Jerusalem...
...Here was a very gender-limited picture-entirely male-and this picture had coherence and impact, far more than the concept of God's genderlessness...
...I did notfeel, in any sense, my own likeness to God's image, even though I was taught that I was created in it, because in the terms of the prayers which were supposed to make God accessible to human understanding, God was always more like my brother than like me...
...I was proud to identify with this tradition...
...but even when not, even when God was being motherly, or otherwise acting like a woman, he was still "he...
...I was "other" in all senses: it was not just a matter of God being God and I being human...
...I search for words for this well-that-springs-up to flow and nurture life, and I find a word from one of our earliest texts: ayin, a fountain flowing from the earth, as in Deuteronomy 8:7: eretz nachalei mayim ayanot utehomot yotzim babikah uvahar, a land of water courses, fountains, and depths that spring out of valleys and hills...
...This process has been useful, however, in clarifying our theological concerns: in translating the king into a queen, for example, we discover that images of domination are not what we wish to embrace...
...So let us think carefully: what is it we are affirming with a monotheistic creed...
...We are choosing, that is, to redeem the forgotten half, to restore the eradicated half of the all-inclusive God...
...We need images to fill the voids between what we are and all that we might be...
...In doing so, we confront the worthy challenges that any serious liturgical movement must face...
Vol. 10 • March 1985 • No. 3
