Encountering a Feminine God

...This feminine God, after all, was the model of all human acts of creativity and caregiving...

...But I am, I now know, forever transformed by that moment of encounter with the other dimension of God, the feminine God, for whom love and nurturing are of ultimate value...

...The experience of childbirth and the capacity for wonder that was reborn in me through the experience, have blossomed into a new way of life for me, a new openness to spirituality, a new capacity for experiencing God as a reality in my life...

...Even then, I suffered with David, knowing that I, like he, had been taught to grossly undervalue the personal, intuitive and spiritual dimensions of life...

...Even the Shechina, the Divine Presence, which 13th-century Jewish mystics associated with God's feminine principle, is a male-created concept...

...The professor retorted, "That's the tragedy of it, David...

...Far from judging me in my hiatus in addressing Her, She rejoiced that I had instead found Her, and myself, in the midst of caring for my infant daughter...

...Suddenly, I gave birth to a daughter and everything changed...

...I had not once missed donating (praying) the shachnnl (morning) service for at least 15 years...

...Liberal, intellectual Jews especially have ceded the language of God to Christians and to Jewish fundamentalists, relegating attempts at experiential theology to the silence of libraries or the burial ground of suppressed feeling...

...It is significant that this moment of revelation of the Divine Feminine (as feminist theologian Virginia Ramey Mollenkott calls this dimension of God), came in the midst of a vital and tumultuous life experience, a woman's life experience, rather than in ways I had always sought revelations—as men typically do, as Jews typically do—through intellectual encounter...

...She rejoiced that I had found Her...

...In my own davening I had never corrected the unmistakably male image of God portrayed in the siddur...

...Once, God was only for other people—for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, for Rabbi Akiba and Maimonides, for the men that filled the Judaism of my youth...

...Somehow, though, I knew that my faithful and insistent relationship with mitzvot—even the traditionally male ones— would soon be reestablished...

...could not have anticipated how my experience of childbirth would shift the ground beneath my relationship with Jewish law...

...I had a well-developed approach to these issues, which I had shared in lectures to Conservative congregations around the country...

...Penina, my first child, was delivered by cacsarcan section, after a long and frightening labor and delivery experience...

...I have experienced my own wholeness in a new way...

...This God would have it no other way...

...As a child of the Jewish community, I, like many others, was taught to undervalue personal experience and the world of emotions...

...As I healed from labor and delivery, I discovered that I need not continue to live in a state of reverse decapitation, living only from the neck up, cutting off the fullness of non-intellectual aspects of my being...

...On that extraordinary Shabbat evening after Penina's birth, one other change occurred...

...I have learned that this need not be the only way to live as a Jew...

...Still, the experience of her birth and the spiritual opening it provided in my life if with me every day...

...I have been privileged to give birth, and to be reborn...

...My commitment to Jewish law and its commanding power reasserted itself, and even before I returned to my professional obligations as a rabbi, I was able to respond once again to my obligations as a traditional Jew...

...These questions occurred to me for fleeting moments that first tumultuous week of Penina's life...

...Even then, I knew that this teacher was terribly, tragically wrong...

...This in itself was extraordinary for me...

...Instead, I met a different God that Shabbat evening...

...of love as well as law...

...But on that Shabbat eve, I added to the list of our forefathers—Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—the list of our foremothers: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah...

...It was from Her that we had learned to create and nurture new life...

...As a feminist, I understood the social meanings of imagining the Ruling Power of the Universe as male...

...Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that her coming into the world changed my way of praying and my way of imagining and reaching out to God...

...Something entirely new was being born and nurtured in my spiritual life...

...As I write these lines, my daughter is an affectionate, creative two-year-old, more beautiful and wondrous than ever...

...For many years prior to this experience, I had wrestled with women's relationship to halacha (Jewish law), and with my own place in that system...

...Finally, I understood that the God with whom I spoke would insist on being the God of Sarah, of Rebecca, of Penina, of Amy...

...My relationship with the God of halacka, the God of law and judgment, returned as well...

...As a first-year college student, I had asked myself by what rationale I could, with integrity, agree simply to sleep later in the mornings than my male friends, blissfully shrugging that since I had no obligation to put on tefillin in the morning, I could awaken at 8:15 for our 8:30 class, while they were required to build in extra time to fulfill their Jewish obligations...

...I met a God of love and acceptance, of joy and celebration...

...What I could not have anticipated was the way in which my experience of childbirth would shift the ground beneath my relationship with Jewish law...

...As a religious leader, whom I'd been out of touch for many days, I imagined a God who rejoiced rather than judged, who affirmed rather than legislated...

...We have felt sophisticated and modern as a result, but we have also grown empty...

...I had wrestled with the issue, discussed and listened and argued the point...

...This was the God of nurture, not just of command...

...I fell thai as a modern woman committed to using my lime in many untraditional ways, this exemption from the requirements of halacha did not apply to me—except to the AMY EILBERG extent that I was willing to use the exemption as a cop-out...

...My davening will never be the same, as I now have the capacity to imagine the one God in infinitely broader ways than were available to me before this experience...

...I had asked myself, too, how I could feel Jewishly authentic in my feminist demands for equality in every aspect of Jewish life—including the right to be called to the Torah, to serve as a shelichat tzibur (prayer leader), and ultimately, to aspire to the rabbinate—knowing that Judaism is a system that emphasizes obligation over rights...

...Within a matter of weeks, I did find my way back to daily davening...

...I had declared myself a new kind of woman in the face of Jewish law, voluntarily accepting for myself all of the same religious obligations as males, and therefore claiming all the rights and privileges that were theirs For 13 years I had lived comfortably in this stance, defining for myself the kind of modern and traditional Jewish woman I sought to be...

...My encounter with the siddur and with God that Shabbat was suffused with the same spirit that had filled my days since Penina's birth, days in which tasks of caring for a newborn baby felt like acts of exquisite sanctity The God that I imagined that night had not missed my davening those intervening days, understanding that my days had been filled with holiness, while I nursed the baby, rocked her, changed her and loved her...

...There is one final piece to the story...

...After my experience with childbirth, I will never again bury the parts of myself that, as it turns out, are the most crucial in my quest for wholeness, for humanness, for spiritual growth...

...My davening that evening was loving, gentle and deliberate, generated by the energy of caring and caregiving more than by the need to discharge a legal obligation...

...The first days of her life, while wonderful and miraculous, found me exhausted and weak, so much so thai I was unable even to open the siddur (prayer book...

...I have grown better able to share a bit of that love with other people...

...You believe in your own experience...

...Thirteen years before my daughter's birth I had concluded that for me, as a kind of Jewish woman hitherto unknown in Jewish history and tradition, the rationale of exemption was unacceptable...

...Halacha exempts women from mitzvQt oszh shehaz^man gtrajna, a wide-ranging category of mitzvol whose performance is bound to particular times of the Jewish day or year...

...I was a little concerned: Were the rabbis right all along and my decision unsupportable'' Was it true, after all, what the apologists had alWays said, that a mother could not—or (in the explanation's more patronizing form) did not need to—serve God in the ways that Jewish men did...

...I was concerned about the poverty of human imagination that locks us into obviously flawed and limited images of the Infinite...

...Having served as God's partner in the act of creation, I have been reminded that I, too, am a creature of God, a wondrous and awe-inspiring creature created and nurtured by God...

...On that night, on behalf of my daughter, I would no longer tolerate ambiguity as to whether women are fully included in God's covenant with my people, whether women can claim equally with men to be created in God's image...

...I had read feminist theology for years...

...I allowed ten days to pass without uttering any traditional prayer longer than Kiddush on Shabbat...

...I knew that just as my life would surely soon return to normal— albeit a different "normal" than before—as I would soon return to sleeping at night and working during the day, so, too, would I soon resume my regular dooming schedule...

...My relationship with God is forever changed and enriched by that extraordinary time when, at a uniquely feminine moment of life, I found myself in touch with a feminine image of God...

...This God fully shared with me the overwhelming joyousness and miraculousness of my daughter's birth, and celebrated my own rebirth, as a mother...

...As I lovingly turned the pages of the siddur, the old friend with My davening that evening was loving, gentle and deliberate, generated by the energy of caring...

...it was then that I found myself able to encounter and appreciate a new image of God—in my heart as well as in my head...

...How would I now integrate my mothering into my view of myself as a modern woman living in relationship to Jewish tradition...

...Although for years I had read, studied and struggled with the issue, I—a traditional davener through and through—had never made the leap that so many others before me had made: to change the language of the siddur to include women's experience...

...I have come to feel the ongoing nurturance of a loving God...

...On the cognitive level, the idea of expanding my image of God to include feminine language and metaphor was not new to me...

...What is more, finally, the Amy reborn through this encounter would no longer have it any other way...

...Today, God is for me as well Today I know that books are not the only source of valuable learning in my life...

...The tenth day of Penina's life was Shabbat, and I was ready to pick up the siddur to daven...

...I had not even adjusted the human language of the liturgy, those words that confirm and perpetuate the exclusion of women from our image of Jewish community and of humanity...

...It came when I was uniquely open to the drama of my own life and growth...

...With time, these expectations were all fulfilled...

...I would not have been surprised to encounter the angry, thundering God who would disapprove of the hiatus in my davening, or judge the way I understood it...

...fii Today I am a more capable rabbi, for having the intuitive dimensions of my life unlocked...

...Hence the Shechina image in no way challenges male dominance in the world...

...Today I know that the experience of reaching for theological language to describe a life event is an invaluable skill of which many Jews have been deprived...

...This God understood the intrinsic sanctity of acts of nurturance...

...I was prepared, as always, to meet in my davening the God of Jewish law, the transcendent God of command and demand, of judgment of those who fail in their commitments...

...Today I know that I am more richly and genuinely human and, of course, an infinitely more capable rabbi, for having the intuitive and spiritual dimensions of my life unlocked...

...But with all of the intellectual struggling and exploring, the real moment of change happened not in books or lectures or even conversations, but in the midst of a profound life experience, a time of intense emotional and spiritual crisis and opportunity...

...I will never forget a moment in a Practical Rabbinics class at the Jewish Theological Seminary, when a student offered a bit of learning from his personal experience in response to a point made by the professor...

...We have blocked off many possibilities for spiritual enrichment by identifying theological talk with people distant from us...