She Torah
Hayley Antonelli
Dear friends,
(*There's a little invitation to a protest I don't want you to miss at the bottom.)
"I’d like to speak the blessings in the feminine,” Ella told me. “What would that be in Hebrew?”
It would start “Barchu et Adonai Hamvorechet.”
“And then?”
“Bruchah Adonai Hamvorechet le’olam va’ed!”
At her ceremony, for the blessings that officially made her a Bat Mitzvah, Ella flipped the gender of God. It took a young woman from a family of four women to soften the male-dominated idea of God for all of us in the room and suggest a Jewish Goddess instead.
This is not a new idea of course. In the Amidah we find the phrase “מודים אנחנו לך”, We thank You, in the feminine. There are many such examples in the prayers. Yah, as in Helleluyah is considered the feminine presence of God. In one of the central Kabbalistic depictions of divinity we find a trifecta of Gods, among them the Nukba, or female Goddess who plays a central role in the divine structure of things.
But overwhelmingly God is referred to grammatically as male, and that is the beginning of patriarchal thinking. How we speak is how we think is how we behave. There’s an obvious link from the male God to the death of Mahsa Amini and the oppression of women worldwide.
Since Ella’s Bat Mitzvah I began addressing God in the feminine in some of my prayers. The result has been a widening and welcoming of the idea of God. I continue to keep many of the prayers in the traditional male form, since beneath these notions of gender is a wider understanding of the genderlessness of God. God is the place of no separation, beyond definition, transcending ideas, identities, anything human thinking can produce.
That’s why many of us try in English at least to avoid gendering God altogether. Sometimes the pronoun “they” fits. More often no pronoun is better. But we have to use language unfortunately.
These last few months, a group of us has been gathering on Zoom to learn from our scholar-in-residence, Dr. Lizzie Berne Degear. Lizzie has been connecting us in powerful ways to the feminine in our tradition, and to the female roots of our tradition that have been buried under the male-dominated face of the last two millennia. She is opening our minds not only to female divinity, but also to pieces of the Jewish bible that could have been written by women. She has invited us to experience an ancient reality of women teachers, with a sweet and beautiful and inviting Torah on their lips.
Imagine a Torah written by women. Imagine Jewish law written by women. Imagine how that affects your connection to Judaism.
In next week’s letter you will hear from Dr. Lizzie in her own words about her work.
This week’s Parasha opens with a multi-gendered mesh of divinity:
“And Elohim spoke unto Moses, and said to him, I am YHVH; And I appeared unto Avraham, unto Yitzchak, and unto Ya’akov, as El Shaddai, but by my name YHVH I did not make Myself known to them.”
Of the three versions of divinity in these verses none are overtly gendered. Elohim is plural, grammatically meaning “gods.” YHVH is an unpronounceable mis conjugation of the verb “to be.” “El Shaddai” includes both male and female connotations, the word “El” denoting a male god, and “Shaddai” literally meaning “my breasts,” and harkening back to pre-Jewish Middle Eastern goddesses.
We have a lot of undoing to get through on route to this liberated divine fluidity that will allow all of us to be ourselves.
Before I sign off, I’d like to invite you all this coming Thursday to join our BLM chevrutah and protest the city’s inability to protect the human rights of the incarcerated, and to demand action to close the stain on this city that is Rikers Island Jail, where 19 people were killed last year in custody. Details HERE. Email Maia if you can make it, she's coordinating our group.
If you like, try this blessing in the feminine when you light the candles this evening:
Bruchah At Adonai Eloheynu Malkat Ha’olam Asher Kidshanu Bemitzvoteha Vetzivtanu Lehadlik Ner Shel Shabbat.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Misha