Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [26]
The parental metaphor for God is early and quite universal. It has to do with our human quest for origins. It is the “Who made me?” of those who know on some level that they are here because of their parents’ union. God becomes a deeper parent or, to use Freudian language, a projected parent, one who can do in a perfect way all that parents are supposed—and so often fail—to do. This includes nurturance, protection from harm, teaching us how to live, and providing a proper moral and personal example. God is Father (rather than Mother) because we are the product of patriarchal societies, those where men had dominance and where men's spheres of action were the most highly valued. The fact that we are critical of such societies today and hope to change that bias should not keep us from acknowledging those historical realities. All of us, even those now born into several generations of feminist-influenced Judaism or Christianity, are products of many centuries of patriarchy.
The royal metaphor for God is as ancient as human kingship, and also much precedes the Bible. Royal households naturally supported the notion of kinglike gods. As one scholar of the ancient Near East put it, speaking of the Sargonic age (about 2300 BCE), “The new ideology of the deified king … worked both ways — the king became more like a god, but at the same time the gods became more like kings.”17 Depictions from widespread ancient sites show the gods crowned, dressed in royal raiment, or adorned with whatever other symbols glorified human kingship. This metaphor is chiefly about power and reflects the place within the religious mind that longs for submission to a supreme and trustworthy authority. It is tied to our acceptance of mortality and thus more broadly to our human sense of ultimate powerlessness. As the author of the book of Job might have said it (though he did so with considerably more eloquence), “You've got all the marbles in this game, O Lord, so I kneel before Your greatness.”
In my younger years I used to rail against these images, treating them as whipping boys for all that was wrong with religion. Father imagery for God worked well, I would say, as long as we lived in stable communities where generations loyally followed one another undisturbed, when the shoemaker's son became a shoemaker, the rabbi's son a rabbi, and the finest thing you could say to a person was “Your father is a great man!” In an age like ours, however, where adolescent rebellion is taken for granted (and my own story was the case in point), God as projected father will have to be deposed (“kicked in the shins,” I used to say, and “shins” was a euphemism), just as parental authority is questioned and rejected almost as a rite of passage in each generation. God as projected father, as Freud so rightly understood, was bound for a fall.
All this was quite convincing to me until, at the age of thirty-five, I suddenly found myself the father of a newborn infant. As I looked down at my daughter for the first time, the bonding was so complete (and this was a case of adoption, not biology, by the way) that I knew without question that this child would be with me forever and that I would give my life to protect her. This was before she could even smile or captivate me with eye contact. Then I understood that God as Father means just that: God loves me and embraces me in this total, uncomplicated, and wholly unearned way. I am loved just because I am, even though I have done nothing to “deserve” love.18 The parental metaphor remains