Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [29]
The force that holds back these forces within us was depicted by Freud as the superego, the repressive but moralizing force that rechannels our energies into forces that make for civilization, its “discontents” lying beneath it like the gods of old, never quite fully vanquished. A more contemporary psychological model might look at an inner balancing of archetypically “male” and “female” energies within the self, affected by hormones that bear within them all the developmental legacy of human history. The “female” side of that legacy, borne within male as well as within female bodies, represents the “nesting” instinct, the fostering of home and family (hence tending toward monogamy), and cooperation with others in building a society. The “male,” borne by both genders but more typically dominant in men, is aggressive and competitive, oriented toward conquest (manifested by some in sexual behavior), but protective and loving toward those a man has declared “his own.” It is the inner balance of those forces, especially in the context of family living, that brings about a civilized order of humanity.
The God depictions of ancient Israel represent this ongoing human struggle. They do so from the point of view of males largely because it was males who created them. But in seeing Israel, the collective embodiment of Jewry, as female, they were reflecting on her role as a shaper of the imagination as well. This can be seen in the history of the most famous of all texts describing God, the words spoken by a mysterious divine voice as Moses stood at Sinai supplicating for the forgiveness of his people. Exodus 34:6-7 reads: “Y-H-W-H, Y-H-W-H, a compassionate and gracious God, long-suffering and magnanimous in true love, keeping that love for the multitudes, forgiving sin, transgression, and misdeed, but surely not cleansing them entirely, revisiting the sins of the fathers upon their children, down to the third and fourth generations.” The early synagogue adopted this passage as central to its liturgy. All selihot, or prayers for forgiveness, are built around it as a refrain. But when read in the synagogue, the text is rather different: “Y-H-W-H, Y-H-W-H, a compassionate and gracious God, long-suffering and magnanimous in true love, keeping that love for the multitudes, forgiving sin, transgression, and misdeed, and cleansing!” The absolute form of the verb naqeh (“cleansing”) is simply cut off from the negative it was meant to underscore, with its meaning totally transformed. This is truly an emasculation of the text (sarsehu vedarshehu!), one that documents like no other the transformation of a God who seeks retribution from descendents of uncleansed sinners into One who forgives and cleanses with unmitigated compassion. This bit of radical Midrashic surgery was created by anonymous liturgical authors within the early rabbinic community. It may be deemed likely that these authors were males. But we might also metaphorically understand that here it was kenessetyisra'el, the Community of Israel, God's “female” beloved, who defeated, tamed, or educated her Spouse.
The Missing Metaphor
In the corpus of classical Jewish writings (almost all either narrative or homiletical), images of Father and King are indeed essential to the ways in which God was depicted. These two images are to a degree variants of one another; both reflect an older male figure before whom one is to stand in loving awe. But there is another key picture of God widespread in the ancient sources that became almost unknown to later Judaism, for an interesting series of historical reasons. That is the metaphor of God as Spouse or Lover, first of the Community of Israel but then also of the individual.26
The history of this metaphor goes to the very heart of Israel's national saga, the tale of redemption from Egypt. Israel's most vivid recollection of God dwells on this moment, and it is here that this