Post by Rabbi Neil on Oct 11, 2024 16:32:08 GMT
From its origins, Judaism was always a deeply binary way of thinking. There was light and dark, day and night, holy and unholy, kosher and unkosher, Shabbat and the rest of the week, Jew and non-Jew, man and woman. That binary model of thinking was synchronous with a binary expression of language, so that the gendering of Hebrew was either masculine or feminine, as with some but not all languages. This Biblical paradigm of binary existence met with Greek thought, which was similarly binary in thinking, and together they helped to create the social paradigm of Western society that, thanks to the predominance of Greek thought, added even more binary opposites, such as body and soul, which did not exist in early Judaism. In mainstream Jewish thought from its inception, binary division was the paradigm of human existence – our lives needed to be separated into binary pairs for us to be human, and for society to function everyone had to have a clearly defined role in that binary society, either as a man or a woman.
One of Reform Judaism’s most important contributions to shattering the earlier paradigms of Judaism was to include women in our prayers and rituals. Bat mitzvah became as assumed as much as bar mitzvah. Prayers included feminine versions, such as the inclusion of she’asani bat chorin alongside she’asani ben chorin, giving space for feminine pronouns in our Hebrew as well as masculine ones. To be fair, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, there was female liturgy known as t’khines, which were folk spirituality for women, which were fascinating and essential in demonstrating the power of Jewish women to create authentic liturgy that spoke to them. That liturgy was never allowed to be mainstream, though – it was published for women to use outside of the main prayer service. Reform Judaism shattered the gendered paradigm of prayer by including women, and we set a new inclusive paradigm that welcomed both masculine and feminine in the Hebrew.
The paradigm of reading the natural world, or even just human beings, as only either male or female, is quickly shattering, though, thanks to advances in science and increases in awareness of non-Western cultures. Finally, the voices of those who say that they are neither male nor female are being heard. To be clear, these are not new voices, even in Judaism. One ancient midrash explains that when Torah says of Adam “Male and female God created them,” that Adam was in fact intersex – both male and female. Talmud, 1500 years old, contains multiple references to intersex individuals who are neither fully male nor fully female but Talmud is so embedded in its own binary gender paradigm that it can only discuss those people in the context of whether they should be treated as male or as female in differing circumstances, instead of appreciating them for who they are, which is neither simply male nor female. Talmud was an essential effort to codify and unify Jewish thought as the Diaspora grew, so it was concretizing a paradigm and therefore wasn’t able to see beyond it. But we are, and we must.
Instead of he or she pronouns, there are many people today who prefer to use they/them pronouns, or a combination of pronouns such as she/they, and there are some who say that they prefer not to have pronouns used about them at all. For a huge number of people today, including an increasing number of members of our community, binary gendered assumptions are a vestige of a patriarchal, judgmental social paradigm that merely reflects a particular ancient paradigm far more than it actually reflects the reality of human diversity. And it is just one particular paradigm – there are many non-Western societies with other paradigms, such as societies today where a third gender is assumed, or those where individuals have an inner identity gender and an outer physical gender which sometimes match and which sometimes don’t.
Years ago, I asked questions during the High Holy Days about Avinu Malkeinu and challenged the language of God as Father and King. This year on Yom Kippur, I am challenging the language of God only as atah, as “You” in the masculine singular because I believe that doing so is essential for our communal atonement. Always calling God atah, masculine singular, places God in the paradigm of male hierarchical power and reinforces that same hierarchical power between us as people in prayer, as Mary Daly once famously wrote, “If God is male then the male is God.” When we pray to God using only masculine singular terms, we force God into a gender role that for very many Jews today isn’t appropriate, just like the early Rabbis of Talmud forced non-binary individuals into gender roles that weren’t appropriate because they lacked the imagination necessary to see beyond their own thought paradigm. In English, God’s gender is far easier because we can pray to God using the pronoun “You” and that isn’t gendered at all, but our prayer service isn’t just in English and cannot be only in English. So, we have to wrestle with the issue of what to do with a tradition and a language that is strongly gendered in a society that is increasingly not.
When the 8th edition of the British Reform Siddur was being introduced back in the early 2000s, In a large open discussion, I remember a member of my community back then objecting to changing the translation of Adonai from “Lord” to “Eternal” and changing the translation of Melech from “King” to “Ruler” because she said those terms took away God’s maleness and she was very clear that God is a man. I was going to challenge her by asking her in what way God was a man, for example, did God have giant cosmic dangly bits?!? – but thankfully a much wiser colleague intervened before I could say that and he explained that to those who consider God to be male, the terms “Eternal” and “Ruler” could still be read through a male lens. What he didn’t say, which I think is relevant to our theme of paradigms, was that she was reading liturgy through the contemporary paradigm of scientific thinking, and not through the religious paradigm of liturgy as trying to direct us to a particular kind of relationship. Despite her objections, non-gendered English translations came into the siddur and we were able in the British Reform movement to say that we had moved away from the masculine God. But looking back on it, what we were really saying was that we had moved away from the masculine God for everyone who didn’t know Hebrew. For those who did, God was still very much male.
Over many years, other Jewish movements have tried to address the problem of the apparent maleness of God in our liturgy by giving options for how the Hebrew is pronounced. Instead of Baruch Atah Adonai, their siddurim suggest possibilities like B’rucha At Yah, or B’rucha At Sh’chinah, using feminine forms of God. And those suggestions certainly open up the theological gender paradigm allowing for us to view God anew, but the way these words are read and used often fall into sexist tropes that come from patriarchy and that reinforce it – tropes that men are the powerful, functional actors in the world while women stay nearby to tenderly look after those in need. So, we need another model that may even need to include the work of modern Hebrew liturgists who are for the first time in history creating forms of Hebrew that are non-gendered.
I once read a fascinating Rabbinic thesis (well, strictly, I first wrote and then read a fascinating Rabbinic thesis!) about how Jewish theology for thousands of years kept a clear distinction between us and God by virtue of division of realms - God’s realm was the one of mixture whereas ours was the one of order. Our existence was ordered, usually in binary pairs, whereas God’s realm was mixed. Adam and Eve, the two closest beings to God, contradict the binary pair model of human existence specifically because of their proximity to God. The Seraphim, the fiery angels from the Divine realm, hide their cosmic bits so that they are neither visibly male or female. While most Israelites are not allowed to mix certain fibers together, the priests, who are the few individuals who draw closest to God, are allowed to. In our ancient theological paradigm, the human realm was one of binary opposites and hierarchy. God, outside of simplistic binary paradigms, shapes our world from tohu vavohu, formless void, and not only orders it but daily renews that order. But God is outside that order. God’s being is always far more nuanced than ours. God has always been unfathomable, indescribable…. except in liturgy where God was always described in words that referred to God but actually said more about us than God. For over a thousand years, our liturgy has projected a simplistic gender paradigm onto God – either as a male Lord and King or occasionally as a female Loving, Nurturing Mother. But if God is beyond description, if all liturgy is religiously directional and not scientifically descriptive, we need to change our liturgy. It’s not that it’s wrong to talk of God as Father and King, but rather it’s wrong to only talk of God as Father and King. We can, and should, mix metaphors when talking about God because ultimately what we’re talking about when we talk of God is our relationship to God and God’s relationship to us. So, the more metaphors we use of God, the deeper we can express and explore our relationship with God. Moving beyond the binary gender paradigm in our liturgy will therefore help us to deepen our relationship to God.
We actually have permission to do this from our Rosh Hashanah Machzor, which has a reading that lists many different metaphors of God and then says of them, “None of these are true, none of them are You.” It adds, “May these words be a bridge – they come from our hearts, may they lead us to You.” The terms that we use about God are not meant to be descriptions, but metaphors. They are symbols, not scientific expressions. They are directional, not factual. God isn’t male – it’s just that for millennia, we used liturgy as a signpost to connect with God by all starting at the same point, which was that of a normative Jewish male. For decades, we in the Reform movement have offered two starting points instead – the normative Jewish male or Jewish female, which was huge progress but now we need to create more starting points. In a society in which a huge number of young people in particular feel not only free but feel empowered and excited to express their own gender fluidity, I believe that we have an absolute religious duty to ensure that we have more than two starting points of prayer.
And it’s not just prayer – it’s identity in general – if we tell people, as we do here at Temple Beth Shalom, to “come as you are” but then they arrive in a physical space that is designed for only two gender paradigms, how can they authentically come as they are? And I know that question makes some people uncomfortable, probably in a very similar way to when some people turned round decades ago and asked if the gender paradigm of prayer could be expanded. I think we can hold people who need these questions to be asked at the same time as holding people who are challenged by them… I think that we can hold everyone through the necessary change together as a loving community. What we cannot do is just throw away a rich tradition of Jewish liturgy. We cannot follow the example of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan in these regards, who, in 1927, entirely removed from the Kol Nidre service the Kol Nidre prayer, which he found religiously very problematic! His community made it clear to him, and to future generations, that sometimes you have to treasure the past and add to it, and that you can’t discard it because you disagree with it. So, we cannot just replace what is already in our liturgy, we have to create liturgy that speaks in more voices. As I said on Rosh Hashanah, we have to demonstrate our current expressions of religiosity alongside our ancient, developing religion.
We at Temple Beth Shalom are a community of artists, of poets, of mystics, of liturgists, of people with extraordinary means of spiritual expression. Of all the communities of Jews that I know, we are the best-placed to shatter the ancient paradigm of binary liturgy by creating additional liturgy that we can then add to future High Holy Day services to complement the most essential parts of the traditional liturgy. One of the reasons our community exists is to preserve our liturgical past while ensuring our liturgical future. The meeting point for that past and future is now, it’s tonight. As we pray tonight, we need to not only preserve the past but also think about how to create our liturgical future. Our service this evening is not a textual reading and it's not a performance – it’s a guided step along a spiritual path. This evening as we pray, then, I encourage you to ask yourself which metaphors and language work for you and which metaphors and language do you also need to see in the future? What statements about us and about our relationship with the Divine do you need to see for our community to both preserve our liturgical past and simultaneously ensure our liturgical future? Tonight, we ask ourselves which language of God narrows our religious experience and which broadens it? Tonight, we open up an honest, challenging conversation with God about ourselves and our assumptions, and in so doing, we open up ourselves to meeting God anew, and that, ultimately, is what prayer, and particularly teshuvah is all about.
So, may our atonement this evening open us beyond our narrow assumptions of ourselves, of others, and of God, so that we might soon draw closer to God through a vast array of metaphors that both comfort us and challenge us. May we be strengthened by the search for new modes of spiritual expression, safe in the knowledge that that is and has always been the role of religious Jews throughout the ages. May we stand on the shoulders of previous generations so that by adding our own knowledge to which they did not have access, we might start to peer into liturgical vistas that they could not yet see. And may we soon stretch out a creative, loving, and multifaceted liturgical hand to the next generation who have already clearly shown us the way forward with love, with passion, and with a clear expression of the Divine in their hearts, and let us say, Amen.
One of Reform Judaism’s most important contributions to shattering the earlier paradigms of Judaism was to include women in our prayers and rituals. Bat mitzvah became as assumed as much as bar mitzvah. Prayers included feminine versions, such as the inclusion of she’asani bat chorin alongside she’asani ben chorin, giving space for feminine pronouns in our Hebrew as well as masculine ones. To be fair, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, there was female liturgy known as t’khines, which were folk spirituality for women, which were fascinating and essential in demonstrating the power of Jewish women to create authentic liturgy that spoke to them. That liturgy was never allowed to be mainstream, though – it was published for women to use outside of the main prayer service. Reform Judaism shattered the gendered paradigm of prayer by including women, and we set a new inclusive paradigm that welcomed both masculine and feminine in the Hebrew.
The paradigm of reading the natural world, or even just human beings, as only either male or female, is quickly shattering, though, thanks to advances in science and increases in awareness of non-Western cultures. Finally, the voices of those who say that they are neither male nor female are being heard. To be clear, these are not new voices, even in Judaism. One ancient midrash explains that when Torah says of Adam “Male and female God created them,” that Adam was in fact intersex – both male and female. Talmud, 1500 years old, contains multiple references to intersex individuals who are neither fully male nor fully female but Talmud is so embedded in its own binary gender paradigm that it can only discuss those people in the context of whether they should be treated as male or as female in differing circumstances, instead of appreciating them for who they are, which is neither simply male nor female. Talmud was an essential effort to codify and unify Jewish thought as the Diaspora grew, so it was concretizing a paradigm and therefore wasn’t able to see beyond it. But we are, and we must.
Instead of he or she pronouns, there are many people today who prefer to use they/them pronouns, or a combination of pronouns such as she/they, and there are some who say that they prefer not to have pronouns used about them at all. For a huge number of people today, including an increasing number of members of our community, binary gendered assumptions are a vestige of a patriarchal, judgmental social paradigm that merely reflects a particular ancient paradigm far more than it actually reflects the reality of human diversity. And it is just one particular paradigm – there are many non-Western societies with other paradigms, such as societies today where a third gender is assumed, or those where individuals have an inner identity gender and an outer physical gender which sometimes match and which sometimes don’t.
Years ago, I asked questions during the High Holy Days about Avinu Malkeinu and challenged the language of God as Father and King. This year on Yom Kippur, I am challenging the language of God only as atah, as “You” in the masculine singular because I believe that doing so is essential for our communal atonement. Always calling God atah, masculine singular, places God in the paradigm of male hierarchical power and reinforces that same hierarchical power between us as people in prayer, as Mary Daly once famously wrote, “If God is male then the male is God.” When we pray to God using only masculine singular terms, we force God into a gender role that for very many Jews today isn’t appropriate, just like the early Rabbis of Talmud forced non-binary individuals into gender roles that weren’t appropriate because they lacked the imagination necessary to see beyond their own thought paradigm. In English, God’s gender is far easier because we can pray to God using the pronoun “You” and that isn’t gendered at all, but our prayer service isn’t just in English and cannot be only in English. So, we have to wrestle with the issue of what to do with a tradition and a language that is strongly gendered in a society that is increasingly not.
When the 8th edition of the British Reform Siddur was being introduced back in the early 2000s, In a large open discussion, I remember a member of my community back then objecting to changing the translation of Adonai from “Lord” to “Eternal” and changing the translation of Melech from “King” to “Ruler” because she said those terms took away God’s maleness and she was very clear that God is a man. I was going to challenge her by asking her in what way God was a man, for example, did God have giant cosmic dangly bits?!? – but thankfully a much wiser colleague intervened before I could say that and he explained that to those who consider God to be male, the terms “Eternal” and “Ruler” could still be read through a male lens. What he didn’t say, which I think is relevant to our theme of paradigms, was that she was reading liturgy through the contemporary paradigm of scientific thinking, and not through the religious paradigm of liturgy as trying to direct us to a particular kind of relationship. Despite her objections, non-gendered English translations came into the siddur and we were able in the British Reform movement to say that we had moved away from the masculine God. But looking back on it, what we were really saying was that we had moved away from the masculine God for everyone who didn’t know Hebrew. For those who did, God was still very much male.
Over many years, other Jewish movements have tried to address the problem of the apparent maleness of God in our liturgy by giving options for how the Hebrew is pronounced. Instead of Baruch Atah Adonai, their siddurim suggest possibilities like B’rucha At Yah, or B’rucha At Sh’chinah, using feminine forms of God. And those suggestions certainly open up the theological gender paradigm allowing for us to view God anew, but the way these words are read and used often fall into sexist tropes that come from patriarchy and that reinforce it – tropes that men are the powerful, functional actors in the world while women stay nearby to tenderly look after those in need. So, we need another model that may even need to include the work of modern Hebrew liturgists who are for the first time in history creating forms of Hebrew that are non-gendered.
I once read a fascinating Rabbinic thesis (well, strictly, I first wrote and then read a fascinating Rabbinic thesis!) about how Jewish theology for thousands of years kept a clear distinction between us and God by virtue of division of realms - God’s realm was the one of mixture whereas ours was the one of order. Our existence was ordered, usually in binary pairs, whereas God’s realm was mixed. Adam and Eve, the two closest beings to God, contradict the binary pair model of human existence specifically because of their proximity to God. The Seraphim, the fiery angels from the Divine realm, hide their cosmic bits so that they are neither visibly male or female. While most Israelites are not allowed to mix certain fibers together, the priests, who are the few individuals who draw closest to God, are allowed to. In our ancient theological paradigm, the human realm was one of binary opposites and hierarchy. God, outside of simplistic binary paradigms, shapes our world from tohu vavohu, formless void, and not only orders it but daily renews that order. But God is outside that order. God’s being is always far more nuanced than ours. God has always been unfathomable, indescribable…. except in liturgy where God was always described in words that referred to God but actually said more about us than God. For over a thousand years, our liturgy has projected a simplistic gender paradigm onto God – either as a male Lord and King or occasionally as a female Loving, Nurturing Mother. But if God is beyond description, if all liturgy is religiously directional and not scientifically descriptive, we need to change our liturgy. It’s not that it’s wrong to talk of God as Father and King, but rather it’s wrong to only talk of God as Father and King. We can, and should, mix metaphors when talking about God because ultimately what we’re talking about when we talk of God is our relationship to God and God’s relationship to us. So, the more metaphors we use of God, the deeper we can express and explore our relationship with God. Moving beyond the binary gender paradigm in our liturgy will therefore help us to deepen our relationship to God.
We actually have permission to do this from our Rosh Hashanah Machzor, which has a reading that lists many different metaphors of God and then says of them, “None of these are true, none of them are You.” It adds, “May these words be a bridge – they come from our hearts, may they lead us to You.” The terms that we use about God are not meant to be descriptions, but metaphors. They are symbols, not scientific expressions. They are directional, not factual. God isn’t male – it’s just that for millennia, we used liturgy as a signpost to connect with God by all starting at the same point, which was that of a normative Jewish male. For decades, we in the Reform movement have offered two starting points instead – the normative Jewish male or Jewish female, which was huge progress but now we need to create more starting points. In a society in which a huge number of young people in particular feel not only free but feel empowered and excited to express their own gender fluidity, I believe that we have an absolute religious duty to ensure that we have more than two starting points of prayer.
And it’s not just prayer – it’s identity in general – if we tell people, as we do here at Temple Beth Shalom, to “come as you are” but then they arrive in a physical space that is designed for only two gender paradigms, how can they authentically come as they are? And I know that question makes some people uncomfortable, probably in a very similar way to when some people turned round decades ago and asked if the gender paradigm of prayer could be expanded. I think we can hold people who need these questions to be asked at the same time as holding people who are challenged by them… I think that we can hold everyone through the necessary change together as a loving community. What we cannot do is just throw away a rich tradition of Jewish liturgy. We cannot follow the example of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan in these regards, who, in 1927, entirely removed from the Kol Nidre service the Kol Nidre prayer, which he found religiously very problematic! His community made it clear to him, and to future generations, that sometimes you have to treasure the past and add to it, and that you can’t discard it because you disagree with it. So, we cannot just replace what is already in our liturgy, we have to create liturgy that speaks in more voices. As I said on Rosh Hashanah, we have to demonstrate our current expressions of religiosity alongside our ancient, developing religion.
We at Temple Beth Shalom are a community of artists, of poets, of mystics, of liturgists, of people with extraordinary means of spiritual expression. Of all the communities of Jews that I know, we are the best-placed to shatter the ancient paradigm of binary liturgy by creating additional liturgy that we can then add to future High Holy Day services to complement the most essential parts of the traditional liturgy. One of the reasons our community exists is to preserve our liturgical past while ensuring our liturgical future. The meeting point for that past and future is now, it’s tonight. As we pray tonight, we need to not only preserve the past but also think about how to create our liturgical future. Our service this evening is not a textual reading and it's not a performance – it’s a guided step along a spiritual path. This evening as we pray, then, I encourage you to ask yourself which metaphors and language work for you and which metaphors and language do you also need to see in the future? What statements about us and about our relationship with the Divine do you need to see for our community to both preserve our liturgical past and simultaneously ensure our liturgical future? Tonight, we ask ourselves which language of God narrows our religious experience and which broadens it? Tonight, we open up an honest, challenging conversation with God about ourselves and our assumptions, and in so doing, we open up ourselves to meeting God anew, and that, ultimately, is what prayer, and particularly teshuvah is all about.
So, may our atonement this evening open us beyond our narrow assumptions of ourselves, of others, and of God, so that we might soon draw closer to God through a vast array of metaphors that both comfort us and challenge us. May we be strengthened by the search for new modes of spiritual expression, safe in the knowledge that that is and has always been the role of religious Jews throughout the ages. May we stand on the shoulders of previous generations so that by adding our own knowledge to which they did not have access, we might start to peer into liturgical vistas that they could not yet see. And may we soon stretch out a creative, loving, and multifaceted liturgical hand to the next generation who have already clearly shown us the way forward with love, with passion, and with a clear expression of the Divine in their hearts, and let us say, Amen.