Post by Rabbi Neil on Nov 18, 2018 17:48:39 GMT
Delivered Rosh Hashanah Morning 5779
Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.
Bob Dylan, talking about the development of Jewish tradition and the obstacles that such developments face. Okay, so he wasn’t deliberately talking about the development of Jewish tradition, but he may as well have been. The people gather round in prayer and have to face the reality that the world is changing dramatically around them, the very way that society thinks is changing dramatically, so they face a choice. They can either learn to swim with the tide, which means changing what they were doing before, or they can sink like a stone. Just like the Jewish community, just like us. Jewish tradition has always developed, it’s always introduced new prayers into the liturgy, it’s always created new customs. It hasn’t always had a monolithic voice – Ashkenazi customs and Sephardi customs have been different, creating an exciting variety of traditions. That’s what we’ve told ourselves, anyway. Now, finally, after nearly fifteen years of the Rabbinate, I’ve realized that wasn’t totally true, and this sermon acts in part as my teshuvah for not having seen this earlier.
Despite some regional variance, there is and has always been a monolithic element to Judaism, an unchanging dominant strand that has not only helped define Judaism but has until now become the very essence of its being. That element, without which Judaism would be unrecognizable, is patriarchy. Judaism, even Reform Judaism, is still deeply patriarchal. That may be shocking to some, probably more men than women, but allow me to explain what I mean and how realizing this can help Reform Judaism move forward in really exciting ways. Reform Judaism first allowed and then encouraged women to participate in Judaism in exactly the same way as men have for thousands of years. It thought that was sufficient because men and women were now equal in every practical way… except maybe circumcision, the rite that brings a baby into Judaism most authentically, but we gloss over that because, hey, we have bat mitzvah and we have rabbis who are women, and we mention women in the t’fillah alongside the men, so everything is actually balanced!! We’re an egalitarian community, so it’s all good now!!! That’s what we’ve convinced ourselves is true, anyway.
I guess the best comparison is with race in this country. African-American men and then African-American women were given the right to vote and were told that they were now full members of society. Decades on, that’s still clearly not true. They theoretically have the right to speak at the polls, but many people still try to suppress that right without openly denying it. And in terms of the way American society is set up, African-Americans are clearly not treated equally. Interestingly, instead of “African-Americans” I was originally going to use the phrase “people of color” there, as though white were normative and color were the exception, as though white people don’t have color. But that’s kind of the point. When you’re normative and you give permission to those who have been excluded for generations to suddenly sit at the same table as you, it’s not really a level playing field at all, not in terms of language, thought, or communal behavior.
So it is with Judaism and gender. The normative being in Judaism is, and has always been, male. That is why of the six books of the Mishnah, one is literally entitled Women, and none are specifically entitled Men. The Mishnah sets up the fact that the normative individuals – the men – need to study and regulate women. As Mary Daly says of Western religions like Judaism and Christianity, “the entire conceptual systems of theology and ethics, developed under the conditions of patriarchy, have been the products of males and tend to serve the interests of sexist society.” Judaism doesn’t just act in a male way, it thinks in a male way. Rachel Adler wrote in her text Engendering Judaism that “Reform Judaism included women by categorizing them as “honorary men.” But making women honorary men made them deviant men. It required viewing their differences from men as defects in their masculinity…. This definition of equality not only hid discrimination that blocked women’s full participation: it barred women from articulating experiences and concerns that men did not share.” In other words, with the best of intentions, when Reform Judaism sought egalitarianism, it did so on male terms. It invited women into the pre-existing Jewish realm of men. What it did not do was reshape Judaism with both the voices of men and women, meaning that the authentic female experience of Judaism was ignored. To put it another way, when we read Torah we read that Moses was a prophet and that Miriam was a prophet. We know what Moses’ prophecy was because it’s very clearly written down. But where is Miriam’s prophecy? Judaism isn’t egalitarian when we give women permission to read Moses’ prophecy publicly, it’s egalitarian when we work out what Miriam’s prophecy was. It’s egalitarian when we realize that we’re missing half of Torah.
Sh’ma B’kolah – hear her voice. That’s a quotation from Genesis 21, the traditional Torah reading of Rosh Hashanah morning which we actually read on Second Day Rosh Hashanah. Regarding Sarah, God commands Abraham to listen to her voice, sh’ma b’kolah. But instead of that Torah portion, today we have the following chapter, an extraordinary reading of stupid men doing stupid things. Even our tradition, as gender-biased as it is, recognizes the differing gender responses between to the Akeidah, the Binding of Isaac. The Rabbis praise Abraham for rising up early to go and sacrifice his son. Such dedication to God! But they also understand that Sarah’s response would have been very different to her husband’s. In one Midrash, Isaac returned to his mother and she asks where he has been. He tells her everything. She utters cries corresponding to the blasts of the shofar, and then dies of shock. Did Abraham really get up early because he was so keen to fulfil God’s word? Or was it because he specifically didn’t want to tell his wife what he was about to do? Was Abraham so caught up in his masculine observance of masculine God’s will that he specifically avoided listening to her voice? Maybe that’s actually why this has been such an important traditional reading – because it reminds men of the traditional viewpoint of how to do Judaism properly, that is, without the influence of the women who might challenge us.
The theme of the sermons this year is “What if…?” so with all this in mind, here’s my second question in the series – What if we actually listened to the voices of women in Judaism? Before working out how we might respond to those voices, we first need to work out how we might even hear them. In her book The Coming of Lilith , Judith Plaskow suggests five stages that any community has to go through to move from egalitarianism to genuine equality. The first is to hear silence – to not just make excuses of patriarchy with rare examples of women who have a voice in our tradition, but to ask ourselves where there is silence that we never realized before. Where is Miriam’s prophecy? What was Huldah’s teaching? And if you’re thinking, “Who’s Huldah?” you just totally proved the point of the silencing of women in Judaism. The second stage is to make a space for naming silence. Hearing silence is often done in private, but for the Jewish community to move forward, it has to happen in public. The third stage is to create the structures that allow women to speak, not just creating separate female spaces but ensuring that women have every opportunity, even encouragement, to speak up. The fourth stage is to take the authority to fill in the silence. This is difficult because we don’t feel like we have the authority to reform Judaism, which is ironic considering our movement’s name! Sometimes this stage is uncomfortable because it’s messy, but we have to try. Fear of trying and of creating uncomfortable moments is essentially idolatry, because it gives ultimate power to tradition that it never had, and certainly doesn’t deserve. As Plaskow says, we have the authority to fill in the silence simply because we now acknowledge that we only have half of Torah. The fifth and final stage is checking back. Plaskow explains that this stage has to come last. We don’t ask if something is authentically Jewish before creating it because that stops us from creating anything. We create, and then we keep what’s authentic and we reject what isn’t. We experiment.
And we have specific authority to do that from our tradition, even creating customs that are originally uncomfortable. The Kol Nidre prayer was disliked by Rabbis for hundreds of years, yet now we’re totally comfortable with it. Tashlich was described as a despicable folk custom by the Rabbis, but now it’s the norm. Think of Hannah in the Haftarah silently praying by herself and the High priest, Eli, rebuking her for it. Yet her prayer became the t’fillah. Making the men uncomfortable because something is new and challenges their patriarchal tradition doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t exist. It’s time for us to hear authentic Jewish female voices and to respond accordingly. The traditional Jewish perspective is that the Jewish community has been in exile, yet really, as Batya Bauman points out, it’s the women who have been in exile from traditional Judaism.
If we accept that we only half-know Torah, then we also have to accept that we only half-know God. All the metaphors, all the expressions, all the prayers, they’re only the male half of the experience of the Divine. And that is totally epitomized by the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. As Mary Daly says, “The biblical and popular image of God as a great patriarch in heaven, rewarding and punishing according to his mysterious and seemingly arbitrary will, has dominated the imagination of millions over thousands of years.” She says that this is an idol, and that such an image of a judgmental God “confirms the rightness of … the reigning system [and] maintains false consciences and self-destructive guilt feelings.” Now, to be clear, I don’t want to spend this sermon tearing down that which exists, although I do understand authors such as Mary Daly who say that the method of liberation of society from repressive theological metaphors “involves a castrating of language and images that reflect and perpetuate the structures of a sexist world. I don’t think that removing avinu malkeinu is a positive step forward. Cutting out one half of Torah, or one half of God-talk, or one half of our liturgy, and replacing it with another totally differing half isn’t helpful because theological revenge isn’t appropriate. Instead, I prefer Rachel Adler’s path, when she says that “substituting words is not enough. We would have to make room for new genres, new gestures, new styles of prayer.” In other words, adding female elements in traditionally male prayers isn’t enough. Imoteinu Malkateinu after Avinu Malkeinu – adding a prayer that says “Our Mother, Our Queen” after one talking of “Our Father, Our King” isn’t enough. We need to rethink Judaism and add the half of our tradition that’s been missing for thousands of years. We need theological and ritualistic healing. We need to welcome home the exiles and then rebuild our home to make it a place that they want to live so that we can all dwell together. We need to be creative again.
Sister Joan Brown, a colleague of mine, said that she was excited to see so fewer and fewer people in places of worship today. Why? Because she says it shows that people want change, and that religious communities will soon enough have to realize that, as I started with this sermon, the times they are a changin’. That makes me think of the words of theologian Sally McFague, who explains that “theologies always have paid and always should pay serious attention to the picture of reality operative in their culture. If they do not, theology becomes anachronistic and irrelevant.” Fewer and fewer people, including Jews, see God as a big guy in the sky, despite what our liturgy often alludes to. So, it’s time to add before our siddur and machzor become anachronistic and irrelevant. All liturgy is a tapestry woven from ancient and modern forms, and now is the time to create more modern forms to weave into the already beautiful pattern. When I was preparing for this sermon, I read Rabbi Dov Marmur’s book Beyond Survival, in which he says that Judaism without God, Torah and Israel as the basis of Jewish identity is unthinkable. And yet I also read in Rachel Adler’s Engendering Judaism that Judith Plaskow found those three categories of God, Torah and Israel to be lacking as the basis of Jewish identity, and that she needed to add chapters on sexuality and on the repair of the world as well. Again, the reform of Judaism that is needed is not to replace that which has brought the men in our community comfort for thousands of years, it’s merely to add the missing half of our tradition to that which already exists.
So, what if we genuinely listened to the female voices, or perhaps Voice? To go even further, what if shma b’kolah – listen to her voice - didn’t just mean of the women around us, but also of God - Listen to Her Voice? What if we brought in new metaphors to add to Ruler, Sovereign, Redeemer, Shepherd, Creator, Judge, Father and King? I get that such additions might originally be jarring but with healthy community reflection on suggestions, that should not be an issue. But we certainly have permission to innovate, to reform, from our tradition. As Phyllis Trible points out, God created humanity in the Divine image as male and female. It couldn’t be clearer in the Genesis text. If male and female are in the Divine image, we can only know more about God when the Divine male metaphors are balanced by Divine female metaphors. So, let’s be innovative rather than critical. Let’s be Hannah, rather than Eli. Let’s have this year be the start of some staggering ritual creativity in our community.
Given all this, what do I as Rabbi of this wonderful community now do to take this forward? I think the answer is to create space and to then shut my mouth until asked. This isn’t necessarily a process for me to steer. I can express a hope that at some point in the future, our High Holiday services have started to become an exciting, deliberate blend of theological perspectives which nourish not just those of us who come to the High Holidays for a little Jewish guilt, but also those who want to gather with God in totally differing ways. Judaism was enriched by creative new theological perspectives – the anthropomorphic God of the Bible, the impenetrable God of Maimonides, the Ein Sof of the Kabbalists, the natural world of Spinoza, the yearning God of Heschel, the silent God of the Holocaust. We are not yet done with metaphors of God. We are not yet done creating rituals.
There are aspects of our tradition that could be used as a guide in whatever happens next. Hannah’s personal, anti-authoritarian act of prayer is one. The focus in the books of Psalms and Proverbs on chochmah, the Feminine Wisdom that acts almost as a companion to God, is another. As Proverbs has Wisdom say about God, “I was there when He set the heavens in place, when He marked out the horizon on the face of the deep, when He established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep, when He gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not overstep His command, and when He marked out the foundations of the earth. Then I was constantly at his side. I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in His presence, rejoicing in His whole world and delighting in humanity.” (Prov. 8:27-31) The masculine God of Judaism wasn’t alone in creation, the feminine Wisdom was there with Him. Listen to what She says – “Now then, my children, listen to me; blessed are those who keep my ways. Listen to my instruction and be wise; do not disregard it.” (Prov. 8:32-33) She – Wisdom – is personified repeatedly in the Bible yet her personification has been all but forgotten or erased from Jewish parlance. Eitz Chayim hi l’machazikim bah, v’tom’cheha mei’ushar. She is a Tree of Life to those who hold fast to Her and all of Her supporters are happy. (Prov. 3:18) But the Rabbis disliked that idea so they put that quotation at the Torah service, thereby making the subject of the verse Torah, which is feminine. She – Wisdom, pervasive, Divine Confidante – became It – Torah, told be held and studied by men. So, maybe Hannah and Wisdom herself could be guides or starting points for authentic exploration of the missing parts of Jewish tradition. Or, maybe not. Maybe it’s not for me, as a man, to say. What I can do, at least, as the Rabbi of this community, is to be available to help the community hear the silence, to make a space to name the silence, to create the structures that allow women to truly speak, to take the authority to fill the silence, and then to check back. Maybe I will be needed to help train those voices according to what they feel they need, and not what I feel they might need. I feel that after this proactive sermon I need to be fully reactive to the response, assuming that there is one, which I hope is a safe assumption. And not only do I ask that the community hold me accountable to this sermon through watching the response, but I also ask that we all hold each other accountable for creating a response in the first place.
After such a process, when we read the Akeidah, I hope that we might also think of it as a story about Sarah, despite her absence from the text… or perhaps specifically because of it. After all, if we include Sarah in the t’fillah, then it’s about time we learned how to also hear her voice. So, this year, let’s look at our textual tradition, particularly our liturgy, with a new perspective, which is the perspective of being moved by what is in front of us, but also by becoming aware of the silent voices of that tradition, the voices that were exiled from moving us spiritually in other ways….
Come Rabbis, congregants,
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.
Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.
Bob Dylan, talking about the development of Jewish tradition and the obstacles that such developments face. Okay, so he wasn’t deliberately talking about the development of Jewish tradition, but he may as well have been. The people gather round in prayer and have to face the reality that the world is changing dramatically around them, the very way that society thinks is changing dramatically, so they face a choice. They can either learn to swim with the tide, which means changing what they were doing before, or they can sink like a stone. Just like the Jewish community, just like us. Jewish tradition has always developed, it’s always introduced new prayers into the liturgy, it’s always created new customs. It hasn’t always had a monolithic voice – Ashkenazi customs and Sephardi customs have been different, creating an exciting variety of traditions. That’s what we’ve told ourselves, anyway. Now, finally, after nearly fifteen years of the Rabbinate, I’ve realized that wasn’t totally true, and this sermon acts in part as my teshuvah for not having seen this earlier.
Despite some regional variance, there is and has always been a monolithic element to Judaism, an unchanging dominant strand that has not only helped define Judaism but has until now become the very essence of its being. That element, without which Judaism would be unrecognizable, is patriarchy. Judaism, even Reform Judaism, is still deeply patriarchal. That may be shocking to some, probably more men than women, but allow me to explain what I mean and how realizing this can help Reform Judaism move forward in really exciting ways. Reform Judaism first allowed and then encouraged women to participate in Judaism in exactly the same way as men have for thousands of years. It thought that was sufficient because men and women were now equal in every practical way… except maybe circumcision, the rite that brings a baby into Judaism most authentically, but we gloss over that because, hey, we have bat mitzvah and we have rabbis who are women, and we mention women in the t’fillah alongside the men, so everything is actually balanced!! We’re an egalitarian community, so it’s all good now!!! That’s what we’ve convinced ourselves is true, anyway.
I guess the best comparison is with race in this country. African-American men and then African-American women were given the right to vote and were told that they were now full members of society. Decades on, that’s still clearly not true. They theoretically have the right to speak at the polls, but many people still try to suppress that right without openly denying it. And in terms of the way American society is set up, African-Americans are clearly not treated equally. Interestingly, instead of “African-Americans” I was originally going to use the phrase “people of color” there, as though white were normative and color were the exception, as though white people don’t have color. But that’s kind of the point. When you’re normative and you give permission to those who have been excluded for generations to suddenly sit at the same table as you, it’s not really a level playing field at all, not in terms of language, thought, or communal behavior.
So it is with Judaism and gender. The normative being in Judaism is, and has always been, male. That is why of the six books of the Mishnah, one is literally entitled Women, and none are specifically entitled Men. The Mishnah sets up the fact that the normative individuals – the men – need to study and regulate women. As Mary Daly says of Western religions like Judaism and Christianity, “the entire conceptual systems of theology and ethics, developed under the conditions of patriarchy, have been the products of males and tend to serve the interests of sexist society.” Judaism doesn’t just act in a male way, it thinks in a male way. Rachel Adler wrote in her text Engendering Judaism that “Reform Judaism included women by categorizing them as “honorary men.” But making women honorary men made them deviant men. It required viewing their differences from men as defects in their masculinity…. This definition of equality not only hid discrimination that blocked women’s full participation: it barred women from articulating experiences and concerns that men did not share.” In other words, with the best of intentions, when Reform Judaism sought egalitarianism, it did so on male terms. It invited women into the pre-existing Jewish realm of men. What it did not do was reshape Judaism with both the voices of men and women, meaning that the authentic female experience of Judaism was ignored. To put it another way, when we read Torah we read that Moses was a prophet and that Miriam was a prophet. We know what Moses’ prophecy was because it’s very clearly written down. But where is Miriam’s prophecy? Judaism isn’t egalitarian when we give women permission to read Moses’ prophecy publicly, it’s egalitarian when we work out what Miriam’s prophecy was. It’s egalitarian when we realize that we’re missing half of Torah.
Sh’ma B’kolah – hear her voice. That’s a quotation from Genesis 21, the traditional Torah reading of Rosh Hashanah morning which we actually read on Second Day Rosh Hashanah. Regarding Sarah, God commands Abraham to listen to her voice, sh’ma b’kolah. But instead of that Torah portion, today we have the following chapter, an extraordinary reading of stupid men doing stupid things. Even our tradition, as gender-biased as it is, recognizes the differing gender responses between to the Akeidah, the Binding of Isaac. The Rabbis praise Abraham for rising up early to go and sacrifice his son. Such dedication to God! But they also understand that Sarah’s response would have been very different to her husband’s. In one Midrash, Isaac returned to his mother and she asks where he has been. He tells her everything. She utters cries corresponding to the blasts of the shofar, and then dies of shock. Did Abraham really get up early because he was so keen to fulfil God’s word? Or was it because he specifically didn’t want to tell his wife what he was about to do? Was Abraham so caught up in his masculine observance of masculine God’s will that he specifically avoided listening to her voice? Maybe that’s actually why this has been such an important traditional reading – because it reminds men of the traditional viewpoint of how to do Judaism properly, that is, without the influence of the women who might challenge us.
The theme of the sermons this year is “What if…?” so with all this in mind, here’s my second question in the series – What if we actually listened to the voices of women in Judaism? Before working out how we might respond to those voices, we first need to work out how we might even hear them. In her book The Coming of Lilith , Judith Plaskow suggests five stages that any community has to go through to move from egalitarianism to genuine equality. The first is to hear silence – to not just make excuses of patriarchy with rare examples of women who have a voice in our tradition, but to ask ourselves where there is silence that we never realized before. Where is Miriam’s prophecy? What was Huldah’s teaching? And if you’re thinking, “Who’s Huldah?” you just totally proved the point of the silencing of women in Judaism. The second stage is to make a space for naming silence. Hearing silence is often done in private, but for the Jewish community to move forward, it has to happen in public. The third stage is to create the structures that allow women to speak, not just creating separate female spaces but ensuring that women have every opportunity, even encouragement, to speak up. The fourth stage is to take the authority to fill in the silence. This is difficult because we don’t feel like we have the authority to reform Judaism, which is ironic considering our movement’s name! Sometimes this stage is uncomfortable because it’s messy, but we have to try. Fear of trying and of creating uncomfortable moments is essentially idolatry, because it gives ultimate power to tradition that it never had, and certainly doesn’t deserve. As Plaskow says, we have the authority to fill in the silence simply because we now acknowledge that we only have half of Torah. The fifth and final stage is checking back. Plaskow explains that this stage has to come last. We don’t ask if something is authentically Jewish before creating it because that stops us from creating anything. We create, and then we keep what’s authentic and we reject what isn’t. We experiment.
And we have specific authority to do that from our tradition, even creating customs that are originally uncomfortable. The Kol Nidre prayer was disliked by Rabbis for hundreds of years, yet now we’re totally comfortable with it. Tashlich was described as a despicable folk custom by the Rabbis, but now it’s the norm. Think of Hannah in the Haftarah silently praying by herself and the High priest, Eli, rebuking her for it. Yet her prayer became the t’fillah. Making the men uncomfortable because something is new and challenges their patriarchal tradition doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t exist. It’s time for us to hear authentic Jewish female voices and to respond accordingly. The traditional Jewish perspective is that the Jewish community has been in exile, yet really, as Batya Bauman points out, it’s the women who have been in exile from traditional Judaism.
If we accept that we only half-know Torah, then we also have to accept that we only half-know God. All the metaphors, all the expressions, all the prayers, they’re only the male half of the experience of the Divine. And that is totally epitomized by the liturgy of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. As Mary Daly says, “The biblical and popular image of God as a great patriarch in heaven, rewarding and punishing according to his mysterious and seemingly arbitrary will, has dominated the imagination of millions over thousands of years.” She says that this is an idol, and that such an image of a judgmental God “confirms the rightness of … the reigning system [and] maintains false consciences and self-destructive guilt feelings.” Now, to be clear, I don’t want to spend this sermon tearing down that which exists, although I do understand authors such as Mary Daly who say that the method of liberation of society from repressive theological metaphors “involves a castrating of language and images that reflect and perpetuate the structures of a sexist world. I don’t think that removing avinu malkeinu is a positive step forward. Cutting out one half of Torah, or one half of God-talk, or one half of our liturgy, and replacing it with another totally differing half isn’t helpful because theological revenge isn’t appropriate. Instead, I prefer Rachel Adler’s path, when she says that “substituting words is not enough. We would have to make room for new genres, new gestures, new styles of prayer.” In other words, adding female elements in traditionally male prayers isn’t enough. Imoteinu Malkateinu after Avinu Malkeinu – adding a prayer that says “Our Mother, Our Queen” after one talking of “Our Father, Our King” isn’t enough. We need to rethink Judaism and add the half of our tradition that’s been missing for thousands of years. We need theological and ritualistic healing. We need to welcome home the exiles and then rebuild our home to make it a place that they want to live so that we can all dwell together. We need to be creative again.
Sister Joan Brown, a colleague of mine, said that she was excited to see so fewer and fewer people in places of worship today. Why? Because she says it shows that people want change, and that religious communities will soon enough have to realize that, as I started with this sermon, the times they are a changin’. That makes me think of the words of theologian Sally McFague, who explains that “theologies always have paid and always should pay serious attention to the picture of reality operative in their culture. If they do not, theology becomes anachronistic and irrelevant.” Fewer and fewer people, including Jews, see God as a big guy in the sky, despite what our liturgy often alludes to. So, it’s time to add before our siddur and machzor become anachronistic and irrelevant. All liturgy is a tapestry woven from ancient and modern forms, and now is the time to create more modern forms to weave into the already beautiful pattern. When I was preparing for this sermon, I read Rabbi Dov Marmur’s book Beyond Survival, in which he says that Judaism without God, Torah and Israel as the basis of Jewish identity is unthinkable. And yet I also read in Rachel Adler’s Engendering Judaism that Judith Plaskow found those three categories of God, Torah and Israel to be lacking as the basis of Jewish identity, and that she needed to add chapters on sexuality and on the repair of the world as well. Again, the reform of Judaism that is needed is not to replace that which has brought the men in our community comfort for thousands of years, it’s merely to add the missing half of our tradition to that which already exists.
So, what if we genuinely listened to the female voices, or perhaps Voice? To go even further, what if shma b’kolah – listen to her voice - didn’t just mean of the women around us, but also of God - Listen to Her Voice? What if we brought in new metaphors to add to Ruler, Sovereign, Redeemer, Shepherd, Creator, Judge, Father and King? I get that such additions might originally be jarring but with healthy community reflection on suggestions, that should not be an issue. But we certainly have permission to innovate, to reform, from our tradition. As Phyllis Trible points out, God created humanity in the Divine image as male and female. It couldn’t be clearer in the Genesis text. If male and female are in the Divine image, we can only know more about God when the Divine male metaphors are balanced by Divine female metaphors. So, let’s be innovative rather than critical. Let’s be Hannah, rather than Eli. Let’s have this year be the start of some staggering ritual creativity in our community.
Given all this, what do I as Rabbi of this wonderful community now do to take this forward? I think the answer is to create space and to then shut my mouth until asked. This isn’t necessarily a process for me to steer. I can express a hope that at some point in the future, our High Holiday services have started to become an exciting, deliberate blend of theological perspectives which nourish not just those of us who come to the High Holidays for a little Jewish guilt, but also those who want to gather with God in totally differing ways. Judaism was enriched by creative new theological perspectives – the anthropomorphic God of the Bible, the impenetrable God of Maimonides, the Ein Sof of the Kabbalists, the natural world of Spinoza, the yearning God of Heschel, the silent God of the Holocaust. We are not yet done with metaphors of God. We are not yet done creating rituals.
There are aspects of our tradition that could be used as a guide in whatever happens next. Hannah’s personal, anti-authoritarian act of prayer is one. The focus in the books of Psalms and Proverbs on chochmah, the Feminine Wisdom that acts almost as a companion to God, is another. As Proverbs has Wisdom say about God, “I was there when He set the heavens in place, when He marked out the horizon on the face of the deep, when He established the clouds above and fixed securely the fountains of the deep, when He gave the sea its boundary so the waters would not overstep His command, and when He marked out the foundations of the earth. Then I was constantly at his side. I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in His presence, rejoicing in His whole world and delighting in humanity.” (Prov. 8:27-31) The masculine God of Judaism wasn’t alone in creation, the feminine Wisdom was there with Him. Listen to what She says – “Now then, my children, listen to me; blessed are those who keep my ways. Listen to my instruction and be wise; do not disregard it.” (Prov. 8:32-33) She – Wisdom – is personified repeatedly in the Bible yet her personification has been all but forgotten or erased from Jewish parlance. Eitz Chayim hi l’machazikim bah, v’tom’cheha mei’ushar. She is a Tree of Life to those who hold fast to Her and all of Her supporters are happy. (Prov. 3:18) But the Rabbis disliked that idea so they put that quotation at the Torah service, thereby making the subject of the verse Torah, which is feminine. She – Wisdom, pervasive, Divine Confidante – became It – Torah, told be held and studied by men. So, maybe Hannah and Wisdom herself could be guides or starting points for authentic exploration of the missing parts of Jewish tradition. Or, maybe not. Maybe it’s not for me, as a man, to say. What I can do, at least, as the Rabbi of this community, is to be available to help the community hear the silence, to make a space to name the silence, to create the structures that allow women to truly speak, to take the authority to fill the silence, and then to check back. Maybe I will be needed to help train those voices according to what they feel they need, and not what I feel they might need. I feel that after this proactive sermon I need to be fully reactive to the response, assuming that there is one, which I hope is a safe assumption. And not only do I ask that the community hold me accountable to this sermon through watching the response, but I also ask that we all hold each other accountable for creating a response in the first place.
After such a process, when we read the Akeidah, I hope that we might also think of it as a story about Sarah, despite her absence from the text… or perhaps specifically because of it. After all, if we include Sarah in the t’fillah, then it’s about time we learned how to also hear her voice. So, this year, let’s look at our textual tradition, particularly our liturgy, with a new perspective, which is the perspective of being moved by what is in front of us, but also by becoming aware of the silent voices of that tradition, the voices that were exiled from moving us spiritually in other ways….
Come Rabbis, congregants,
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.