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A Masculine Critique of a Father God
Howard Eilberg-Schwartz is associate professor of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University.
Convinced by the argument that within the Jewish tradition, God has not been beyond gender, many men like myself have found the feminist criticism of God language in the classic texts and liturgy compelling. As imagined in our tradition, God is generally a "He" who is described in predominantly male images: King, Father, Husband, Shepherd, and Man of War, to name only a few. We acknowledge, moreover, the social critique implied by this insight.
The masculinity of God both reflects and reinforces male domination in the religious domain if not the social order. As Judith Plaskow put it in Standing Again at Sinai, "When God is pictured as male in a community that understands `man' to have been created in God's image, it only makes sense that maleness functions as the norm of Jewish humanity." Those of us who support this critique also advocate the rewriting of Jewish liturgy and ritual so that it is more reflective of women's experience.
But this kind of male response to feminism is partial and perhaps even patronizing. In many ways, men have remained aloof bystanders to a process that we see as irrelevant to us. We participate in the changes because we want women to feel that their experiences are equally reflected in Jewish tradition. But we fail to extend the feminist critique, to examine the challenge it presents to us as men: To what extent do classical Jewish texts and liturgy in fact provide conceptions of masculinity that meet our needs? Do the myths and rituals that feature male characters speak to the kinds of masculinities that now define us? What impact does a masculine image of God have for us?
Men have tended to ignore these questions because, along with women feminists, we have assumed that the answers are self-evident: The tradition must already speak for us as men because it was made by men and for men. But the fact that it spoke for men of the past does not mean it speaks for men of the present, especially men who have taken the feminist critique seriously. In other words, we must engage the tradition...