How would you describe God? Powerful and all-mighty? Or perhaps loving and supportive?
Newsweek’s science column this week was about how language shapes the way people think, based on the work of Dr. Lera Boroditsky, a researcher in cognitive linguistics. The main point was that grammatical gender in language has a big impact on the way we see the world. Recent studies demonstrate that in languages which assign gender to their nouns, the way people describe the world around them is affected by gender. The Spanish word for “bridge” is male, and native Spanish speakers defined “bridge” with stereotypically male terms, such as sturdy, strong, and towering. Native German speakers, whose word for bridge is female, used more feminine words such as beautiful, elegant, and slender. The testing was done in English, and yet these native speakers of gendered languages continued to use masculine or feminine descriptions based on the gender of the noun in their native language.
This led me to think about Hebrew, and our language for God. Hebrew is a gendered language, our the words of our Torah portray God as decidedly male. Yes, there are feminine names for aspects of God, like Shechina, but the overwhelming majority of Jewish language about God for worship and study is masculine. In most prayers and in the Torah, God takes masculine adjectives and verb forms -- so even when the name of God seems gender-neutral, the rest of the sentence about God is overtly masculine.
Consider the Shema. Even if we say that the words used for God -- Adonai and Eloheinu -- are gender-neutral, the word “one,” echad, is masculine. There is no gender-neutral word for “one” in Hebrew -- it is either masculine (echad) or feminine (achat). And as in most prayers, the gender is the masculine.
In recent years Reform Judaism has been careful to use gender-neutral God language. Where words like Adonai used to be translated as “Lord” or “King,” remain untranslated or a gender neutral term is used such as “Sovereign.”
But does that solve the problem (assuming there is one)? Is gender already built into our prayers because it is built into Hebrew? When we talk about God, even in English, “He” is considered neutral, whereas referring to God as “She” still has an element of surprise to it. And “It” is just too impersonal for a people that have such a personal relationship with God.
We can resort to metaphors. In the Reconstructionist prayer book, instead of using “Lord” or even “Adonai,” each prayer has a context-sensitive metaphor to refer to God. (For example, “Blessed are You, the Awakener, who removes slumber from my eyelids.”) But even the most creative English translations can not escape the masculine Hebrew.
We have over 3000 years of masculine God language that shapes our understanding of God and of Judaism. Can we change the way we think about God and prayer? Should we even try?
[Posted by Rabbi Shawna Brynjegard-Bialik]
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