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One of the centerpieces of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy is the "Avinu Malkeinu" prayer - Our Father, Our King. It's a desperate and emotional appeal for forgiveness, set to powerful melodies over the centuries.
It's also a hurdle for many people, regular and occasional synagogue-goers alike. Some can't relate to a "king," or bristle at the gendered implications of "father." Whatever they hoped to feel or achieve in prayer is undermined by the archaic language and metaphors that don't speak to them.
That is the challenge described in Rabbi Toba Spitzer's book, "God Is Here: Reimagining the Divine." The spiritual leader of Congregation Dorshei Tzedek in Newton, Massachusetts, Spitzer understands how the language of Jewish prayer can stand in the way of the meaningful spiritual experience many people are seeking. Her solution is to "dislodge" unhelpful metaphors of prayer and look for meaning in different ones - ancient and modern - in ways that help people think and talk about "something that is greater than ourselves."
The book asks what might be useful if we were to think of God as water, or fire, or a place or yes, even a king. All are metaphors for God found in the Torah and the Jewish prayer book. You don't need to ask whether you believe that God is a parent or a monarch, she says, but rather explore where the poetry of metaphor can take you. "My hope," she writes, "is that we can recapture the alive-ness which once pervaded our holy texts, and reconstruct our metaphors so that they are once again engaging and meaningful."
Spitzer is the past president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association and is the first LGBTQ rabbi to head a national rabbinic organization. She spoke with me via Zoom.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity
It's the High Holidays. People find themselves in a synagogue for the first time all year, where even regular synagogue-goers face that firehose of liturgical language that may not speak to them. For both sets of people, there may be a sense that the Iron Age metaphors of the prayer book - God is king, heavenly father, shepherd or even a potter - don't resonate with them. You say "people...