Tikkun Magazine, March/April 2010
Sacred Pronouns
by Judith Plaskow
The issue of the role of male God-language in producing and maintaining a male-dominated Judaism was first raised by feminists over thirty-five years ago. From the early 1970s, when Rita Gross argued that Jewish inability to say "God-She" was the ultimate symbol of women's degradation, through the 1980s and 1990s, feminists both insisted on the importance of female language and wrote poetry and created new liturgies that expressed their visions of who "God-She" might be. Today, except for a few brave voices speaking of a Jewish Goddess, the issue seems to have fizzled, and no new language has emerged for over a decade. Why?
I don't know for sure, but let me offer some suggestions. First of all, most Jews other than the ultra-Orthodox are reluctant and even deeply embarrassed to speak about God. Insofar as new images of God must emerge out of the spiritual experiences of communities, the absence of communal willingness to talk about the nature of God and to share experiences of the sacred makes it difficult to sustain liturgical innovation.
Secondly, early feminist liturgical creativity took for granted the gender binary and was sometimes essentialist -- characteristics that have been rendered embarrassing by queer theory's insistence that gender is unstable, malleable, and performative. How can one talk about female images of God without presupposing that there is femaleness and without reinforcing traditional female stereotypes? Doesn't the insistence that God is both male and female represent the ultimate reification of gender dualism?
Thirdly -- and this is not a new insight -- changing God's gender does not go nearly far enough in transforming the conception of God enshrined in the prayer book. Female language challenges the idolatry of the dominant male image of God but does not of itself offer an alternative to a God separate from and above the world. Indeed, in some ways it exacerbates the problems with the traditional liturgy by highlighting the extent to which a God in female garb is still the God of traditional theism.
Yet these reasons, while significant, cannot account for the continued hold of male language in most prayer books. It is hard not to suspect that the issue of female imagery has disappeared partly for the same reasons it was always fiercely resisted: the possibilities of female power and the power of female sexuality cannot be taken seriously in a male-dominated society. Jews still cannot say "God-She" not because we have struggled with questions of male dominance and come out the other side into a more spacious and fluid understanding of gender but because, for all the changes of the last forty years, such language still seems trivial and degrading.
What's needed, then, is a renewed conversation about the nature and gender of God that takes account of new understandings of gender. If God is found within the world, how do we make real in the language of prayer the presence of God in all of creation? This is no less a question for the twenty-first century than it was for the twentieth.
Judith Plaskow is professor of religious studies at Manhattan College and author of many books and articles in feminist theology, including The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003.
Plaskow, Judith. 2010. Sacred Pronouns. Tikkun 25(2):55 http://www.tikkun.org/article.php/mar2010plaskow
