catalyst wrote:Cnorman18 wrote:
What is God?
We don't know.
But obviously by other things you have written on this thread, you are showing "whatever god is"(if such a thing exists, other than in the minds of the believers IN "it") it IS masculine in "entity" even when stating it is "unknown", over just being an "IT".
The constant referral to its personalised "identity" as HE, speaks volumes.
A take I have never really understood, considering even in asexual(parthenogenic) "production" of new life, it has in near ALL cases been the female and not the male to do it.
This is a very common and understandable misperception of Jewish teachings.
It was acknowledged and taught
from the very beginning that God's gender is at once both male and female. This is emphasized pretty clearly in the very first chapter of Genesis:
Verse 27: "And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them."
Pretty hard to miss. This verse was read to mean exactly what it says from the beginning of the tradition; God's image is both male and female. Just as in English, the collective noun "man," used here as in "mankind," includes both men and women.
The main reason that God is consistently referred to as "He" in the Bible (and in my own writing) is an accident of language; there is no appropriate personal pronoun that is gender-neutral in either English or Hebrew. "It" simply won't do; we don't even call our
pets "it," and most people seem to think that's it's less rude to call a child who is present by the wrong pronoun than to refer to that child as "it." That word is applied to objects, not persons, and is commonly used to demean and denigrate its subject, as in the words of the serial killer in
The Silence of the Lambs. A person is either
he or
she, but never
it.
The conventional choice, in a society such as our own with a patriarchal history, is
He; but there are, as it happens, new approaches to liturgy and Bible translation in modern Judaism that attempt something closer to gender neutrality. The new Reform prayerbook recently published in the UK is particularly notable in that regard, using "She" as often as "He."
If that's not enough, the fact is that several of the names or words applied to God in the Hebrew Bible are in fact of feminine form, most notably
Shekhinah, which denotes the presence of God. In every study session or book that I have participated in or read, these points are made clear, especially if anyone questions the use of the masculine pronoun or if the point is relevant to the discussion.
Religious writings have also given "it"(assumed as a He) very human emotions of being jealous or pleased or angry, hence alleged "justifications" for actions, even in the Hebrew writings.
I have posted comments on this before. God is also described in the Bible as having hands, eyes, and a mouth, but no Jew has ever -
ever - read those passages literally. Those passages which refer to God's anger (or love, or sorrow, or whatever) are considered equally metaphorical.
We have no way of knowing God's emotions, or indeed if He has emotions; nor do we presume to know His thoughts. Those images are used because we have no others that would be meaningful to us, and that was even more true three thousand years ago.
Just as when Jews discuss, say, the Flood story
as if it really happened, for the sake of the concepts and principles taught there, without for a moment thinking it to be literally true, we speak of "the mighty hand and outstretched arm" of God without believing that God has limbs; and we speak of God's love and wrath in the same way. Those terms are about the consequences
for humans of disobedience or devotion in the narratives and laws; we have no warrant to say that we know what God Himself is thinking or feeling from
His point of view.
All these teachings are made explicit in the Talmud, and are well known to most Jewishly educated Jews. That is not to say that there are not Jews who take their religion for granted, have not studied it beyond Bar Mitzvah age, and think literally - just as many ill-educated or fundamentalist Christians do. Even so, those shallow and literal beliefs are not the teachings of modern Judaism.
I will say again, as I have said so many times before: it is not wise, fair, nor accurate to make assumptions about Jewish beliefs from reading the Bible alone. Jewish teachings are not to be found there, but in the tradition.
