Gender and the Hidden Faces of God
When God was beginning to make heaven and earth, the earth was formless and void, there was darkness on the face of the deep, and a wind of God was sweeping on the face of the waters. And God said: Let there be light...
In Hebrew, the word ruach, wind or spirit, is one of the rare words that functions as both genders; that is, it is grammatically correct to use male or female verb forms with it. How striking that one of the first mentions of God in the Bible is ruach Elohim (a wind/spirit of God) – a dual-gendered term. Does this teach us anything about the nature of God? Is it even proper to think of a being as indescribable as God in terms of gender?
Of course, Jewish tradition does think of the divine in terms of gender. Usually that gender is male. Most of the nouns and verbs of the Bible describe God as male: Adonai (my lord, or more literally, my lords). Then there are hints that God has a more multilayered quality. God is named El Shaddai (“God of breasts” or “nurturing God”) and Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh (“I will be what I will be,” a non-gendered name). Later Jewish tradition adds to God’s masculine roles, calling God Ribono shel Olam (Master of the Universe, or perhaps Rabbi of the Universe) and also to God’s feminine roles, calling God Shechinah, or Indwelling Presence. What does it mean that some of God’s names are female? What does it mean that so many of God’s names (Adonai, Elohim) actually are plural?
In an 8th-century rabbinic commentary, we read: “Rabbi Levi taught that at Sinai the Holy One of Blessing appeared to them with many faces – a threatening face, a severe face, an angry face, a joyous face, a laughing face, a friendly face…. This is why Scripture teaches that ‘God spoke with you face after face’” (Pesikta Rabbati 21). God’s faces are multiple. They are as unique as we are. Each face God reveals to us teaches us something unique about God and about ourselves. It is true that none of the ways we imagine the Ineffable can capture the essence of divinity. Yet the efforts we make to see God’s face, to put an image to the imageless, do teach us something about the way divinity echoes in our own lives and psyches. They give us a path to walk toward the Holy. This is why Moses prays the impossible prayer: “Show me your glory!” (Exodus 33:18).
And this is why it is damaging when we repress faces of God that appear to us. We repress the revelatory part of ourselves. In particular, the Bible tends to repress or conceal female/feminine faces of God. For example, in the second verse of Genesis, quoted above, we read: “there was darkness on the face of the deep.” The word for deep, tehom, derives from Tiamat, the Babylonian goddess of the primordial ocean, whose body was torn apart to create the world. In the Bible, her face is covered in darkness, literally: “darkness on the face of the deep.” The Bible represses the image of God as mother giving her body to make the world, but hints at it in the single word tehom. This is what I would call a “repressed face” of the Divine.
Repressed faces tend to appear and reappear, because they express important components of our spiritual understanding. The mother-face hidden in the words al pnei tehom appears again in Genesis 3:20, when Adam names his wife Eve, “because she was the mother of all the living.” As Aviva Zornberg points out in her book The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious, Eve is not the mother of all the living; she is only the mother of human life. Zornberg sees this as a sign of Adam’s confusion, but it may also be an eruption of the repressed divine mother, who truly is the mother of all life. Similarly, the departure of the Israelites from Egypt through a watery tunnel is a partially concealed image of a divine birth.
As Jewish tradition developed over thousands of years, the mother-face of God emerged in fuller ways. For example, Midrash Tanhuma, a 9th-century midrash collection, tells us: “When the Holy One began to create the world, the Holy One made it as a child grows within its mother. Just as the fetus in its mother’s womb starts at the navel and spreads out this way and that way to the four sides, so too the Holy One made the world …” (Midrash Tanchuma, Pekudei 3). The 12th-century mystical Zohar describes the Shechinah, the Divine Presence, by saying: “When Israel by reciting the blessing ‘who spreads a tabernacle of peace over us’ invites this tabernacle of peace into their homes as a holy guest, a divine sanctity comes down and spreads her wings over Israel like a mother encompassing her children…” (Zohar I, 48a). While this fuller exposition of God as mother may have been partly in response to contemporaneous divine mother-figures such as the Virgin Mary, it also occurred because it is a human need to imagine all the faces of the holy, and not just one or a few. As Rabbi Levi said, God appears with many faces.
God can even be a devouring mother. The Zohar teaches of the Shechinah: “We have learned that a thousand mighty mountains standing before her are just one bite for her. A thousand great rivers she swallows in one gulp” (Zohar I, 223a). Exploring a face of God means looking at all the ways it appears to us, not only the pleasant ways. God can appear as the av harachaman, the compassionate father of the Yom Kippur liturgy, or as the frightening father-figure of Genesis who commands Abraham to sacrifice his son.
God is compassionate and scary because we are compassionate and scary. God is male and female and neither, because we are male and female, and sometimes neither. Faces of the Divine come through to us because we need them to understand ourselves. When we chase some of them away, we chase away parts of ourselves, or parts of our community. I’ve spent a fair amount of my career trying to recover the repressed feminine divine for contemporary Jews, because I believe we need Her to be whole.
This is why, for me, it is a failing of modern Jewish liturgy that it tends to reflect male-gendered, or, in more progressive contexts, non-gendered views of God. The female faces of God are images I need, so that I can meditate on motherhood, spousehood, sisterhood, on trying to be the best woman I can be. Just as I need to meditate on God as the Master of the Universe, the Father, the Teacher, the Righteous One, the Creator, the Infinite, so I need to meditate on God as Mother, Bride, and Wise Woman.
One way the Conservative prayer book could help would be to translate Lecha Dodi more literally. This beautiful 16th-century liturgical poem by Shlomo haLevi Alkabetz welcomes in Shabbat and the presence of the Shechinah. Modern translations tend to tone down the mystical quality of the prayer’s language and therefore the astonishing images of God as bride, pauper, friend, and prophetess. A prayer book that includes quotes from Jewish tradition about the faces of the One, including some I’ve mentioned above, would be most welcome. This might be challenging for many people in the pews, but it would be enlightening as well.
The Talmud relates a story about God’s typical day: “There are 12 hours in the day. During the first three God sits and studies Torah. In the second three God sits and judges the entire world, and when God finds the world worthy of destruction, God stands up from the throne of justice and moves to the throne of mercy. In the third three hours, God sits and feeds the whole world from the horned buffalo to the eggs of lice. And in the fourth three hours, God sits and plays with Leviathan” (Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 3b). In this text, the Holy One is scholar, judge, compassionate witness, nurturing feeder, and playing child. I can relate to this God when I am a nursing mother, when I am learning Torah, when I am watching my daughter play with her toy dragon, and when I am giving tzedakah. I can relate to this God as a mysterious force, as an intimate companion, or as both at once.
We spend so much energy on keeping God’s gender consistent, or sometimes on working to erase our language about God as gendered, but we leave our unconscious assumptions in place. In this way, we make fear of certain kinds of images a part of our prayer experience. We also block our ability to gain access to God in new and creative ways. May this high holiday season be an invitation to see the Holy through a lens we’ve never used before, and to see ourselves in ways that inspire and change us for the better.
Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, is the director of spiritual education at the Academy of Jewish Religion (www.ajrsem.org) and the cofounder of Tel Shemesh (www.telshemesh.org), and the Kohenet Institute (www.kohenet.com). She is the author of The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons and Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women.
