Religion

Whose Image?

I am just finishing Revisions: Seeing Torah Through a Feminist Lens by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein, a very interesting book!  In it she is seeking authentic ways for women to read Torah as an integral part of their lives.  She succeeds on many levels for me, a Protestant Christian.  Briefly, her commentaries on several women in the Old Testament (Eve, Leah and Rachel, Miriam and the other women of the Exodus including Moses’ wife Tzippora, and the daughters of Tzelophehad) are fresh and insightful. (Well, — anything about the daughters of Tzelophehad would have been fresh for me.)   Her next excursion into the symbolism and rituals of blood and water are less compelling to me, but still interesting.  She advocates a repossession of the mikveh, the pool for cleansing, as a ritual for celebrating the renewal and blessing of menses as well as other important events in women’s lives.   Finally, she discusses gender language and the feminist attributes of God.   Here, at the heart of her argument, I begin to feel some discomfort.

I have no problem at all with her position that “Women of today need a meaningful religious vocabulary around our biology as well as around our concerns…” (136).   I have more problems with a quotation from Carol Christ, “As women struggle to create a new culture in which women’s power, body, will, and bonds are celebrated, it seems natural that the Goddess would reemerge as symbol of the newfound beauty, strength, and power of women” (166).   Goldstein pretty clearly is committed to discovering and interpreting the feminine element present in the God of the Torah.  Christ seems to me to come from a different place, and (after all this), the question that interests me at the moment is how we attempt to create God in our own image.  On the one hand, I have certainly encountered Christian leaders who claim that women are lesser beings than men - the whole “He for God; she for God in him” notion.  I don’t have to think very long to throw that out as unthinking traditionalism.  I hope that leaves me with a transcendent and immanent being, larger than identity by gender while not discounting gender.

What I wonder is how anybody deals with his god as he finds the traditional concepts too small, no longer addressing the reality of life as he lives it.  I’m thinking now of science fiction writers like Neil Gaimon in American Gods or Scarlett Thomas in The End of Mr.Y where a god’s power is limited by the number of people who still worship him.  How does that address reality as we live it?   I don’t believe that the God of the Bible stands outside this conversation.   In fact, I’d like to engage some of you in this conversation if you’re at all interested.