One of my readers, SavtaV, emailed me this:
Q. Is Hashem a male? In Hebrew, it’s necessary to choose a gender, because all the adjectives and verbs require it. Not so in English – and without a body, it doesn’t make a lot of sense (to me) to choose – but I’ve noticed you always refer to “Him.” And what about the Shechinah?
A. I’m hardly a Kabbalist, but since I consider it core and central to my life to continually cultivate my relationship to God, I have spent time thinking and learning about this question.
Hashem (God) is neither male nor female. God contains both male and female attributes. It is difficult to speak of these things, for two reasons:
1. No human can truly conceptualize God, as the whole concept transcends everything we know. It transcends the five senses; it transcends time and space and science. Can your mind truly conceive that numbers go on FOREVER? Mine can’t. Infinity is but one of the facets of God that are ultimately unknowable by humans. That doesn’t prove their inability to exist – we all know infinity exists, yet we can’t draw it or truly know it.
2. As soon as you start talking about males and females, there are people that get uncomfortable. As soon as I shall generalize in this post about traditionally “male” attributes and traditionally “female” attributes, some of you will get annoyed. So sorry for that, but I’m going to do it anyway, because I still think that most of the males in this world more or less fit the prototype, and most females in the world more or less fit the prototype, while I acknowledge that many exceptions exist.
Typically male attributes include power and strength.
Typically female attributes include insightfulness, the drive to nurture, and sympathy.
When God acts towards us in typically “male” ways, or when we pray to God in a way that evokes those attributes, we use male names. When God acts in “female” ways, or when we want God to, we use female names.
Examples:
1. “Elo-him” (I hyphenated the name so as not to take God’s name in vain, in the event someone prints and discards this post.)
This name means: God of power. Its construction is male, and its meaning is classically male. This is also the name of strict justice, as opposed to kindness/compassion.
2. There is a four-letter name of God that is so holy I can’t even write it. We don’t pronounce it as its spelled, even in our prayers. We pronounce it “Ado-nay” which means “my master” – but in true form it is a feminine name in its grammatical construction, and whenever used, refers to the attribute of compassion and mercy – typically feminine attributes.
3. Shechinah – God’s compassionate presence. This is classically female in construction, and denotes care and love – feminine traits.
So in English, it would be most correct to say “it” since God is neither male nor female. However, this is clumsy, and therefore not worth it for me.
Nevertheless in Hebrew, the pronoun used for God is, indeed, “he.” This is because God’s overriding quality is that of power and strength over the whole world. When we ask God for things, we say “You” in the masculine form, indicating that God possesses all the power and strength to give us these things.
(Btw, what’s so fascinating about THAT is that how many other languages are there where the pronoun “you” must be qualified as either male or female? While many – most? – languages genderize nouns – with the interesting exception of English – very few – and I’m sure my readers will correct me if I’m wrong – genderizes the “you” pronoun. Why this is true is a whole ‘nother topic. Just saying it’s not like it’s an inconvenient fact that a pronoun must be chosen – it’s deliberate.)
It’s also notable that EVERY noun in Hebrew is either male or female. Is a table male? Of course not, but on some deep level it contains a classically “male” purpose, and when you say “it [the table] is made of wood” in Hebrew, the true translation would be “he is made of wood.” In fact, if you listen closely when Israelis speak English, they very often say “he” or “she” for objects instead of “it” (and not just for trucks or boats).
A much deeper and interesting discussion of the male and female attributes of God is here.
Would love to hear your (respectful) thoughts, insights, and input on this topic.
Ruchi, thank you for this well written explanation. I like the example of objects being male or female in the Hebrew language. My brain really connected with that as a means of conceptualizing why we refer to G-d in these personified ways and I personally was not offended in the least.
The only thing I would add is that ALL humans have both female and male traits intertwined, they are just more of one. For instance if my husband is acting towards me with a loving kindness typical of a female, then it would be that he was acting in the feminine. and vice versa. It has little to do with the blurring of gender roles, it is the fact that we are all parts of the same, divided in a way I would best describe as a tear (this my OWN interpretation here, so bear with me!)When something is torn in half, they become two separate entities but they retains fragments of the other half.
Even in English we have this concept when we say "you're getting in touch with your feminine/masculine side" about someone who is perhaps doing something that is generally considered opposite their typical gender role such as cooking for a man or fixing a car for a women etc.
Mrs. Koval, you hyphenated Elo-him in case someone would print and later discard, which got me thinking about hyphenating God as G-d. (I know, it's slightly off topic.) You don't seem to hyphenate the word. Why not? Is it simply a personal preference?
I ask because I noticed that, say, even within different books published by a common publisher, like Artscroll, some write God and some write G-d. What got me wondering more is I noticed within two books by the SAME author, one of them hyphenates and the other doesn't. For example, the book Twerski On Spirituality hyphenates the word, whereas the author's From Bondage to Freedom does not.
I never thought to ask a shaila about this. Is it not halacha based, but more just a personal preference or sensitivity?
Yossel, good point. My husband actually asked me why I don't hyphenate G-d in this blog. I said because people only read it online and it's not in print; hence, no fear of erasure. But somehow when I was ready to type in a true Hebrew name, it just felt sacreligious. Perhaps I shall start hyphenating G-d. I don't know why there are stylistic differences. It's English, not Hebrew, so I imagine that takes it down a notch. Perhaps it's a gray area.
A quick note from Wikipedia mentions that most Afro-Asiatic langiages have gendered second person. Interestingly, Thai has second person male and neuter but not second person female, at least if I understand the chart correctly.:
Thanks Larry, I've amended the post to reflect that. Cool factoid.
G-d is both male and female, since G-d is all-inclusive – He contains in Himself all that exists.
Full disclosure: I'm Conservative, hippy dippy in some cases, and quite a feminist. I believe that in large part, we in the West refer to G-d as a man or in male forms because of the patriarchal norms of our society. I do not like this.
But I have also noticed that when speaking to monolingual feminist Jews (i.e. English-only speakers who know just enough Hebrew to participate in services), they are MUCH more outraged about this fact than I. And I think it is because in Spanish, we have gendered language too.
(As an aside, I think it's funny that you mentioned table as being quite male in Hebrew and therefore appropriately male–in Spanish it's mesa and therefore female and makes me think of one of the central places of the home, and thus very female to me. Language is so funny!) Because of Spanish, I do not think of a chair being any more "womanly" than I do a branch of a tree being "manly." It's just an efficient organization system for language for me.
But, that said, my siddur is gender-neutral in English. It does lead to some awkward phrases sometimes, but it fits intellectually to me and makes me happier. I've used haggadot that switch between Baruch atah and Brucha at… and it’s just okay. I am full of contradictions!
A lot of people don't hyphenate the God because it isn't an actual name of God. It's only a name we use to refer to him in English such as "Hashem" is used. Though… there are those types that hyphenate H-shem but i have no idea why because it's actually a way of referring to God without using His name. Some people do argue that since "God" is how we refer to Him in English it still counts as a name and should be hyphenated. That one seems to differ from community to community. Then there are the types what will only say Elokim instead of the correct variation….
Yeah it gets just a little confusing! lol
I think the discussion above about the gender of 'table' is a good analogy of how our view of Hashem is necessarily distorted through the lens of language, Ruchi knows the word table as a masculine noun, and thus sees a table as strong, sturdy, etc. MB knows table as feminine and sees it as the center of the home (or kitchen), But a table is just a table, and has no gender. So too with Hashem.
On an unrelated note, I wanted to insert the word kayavochel into the last sentence (So too, kayavochel, with Hashem) but I couldn't google the proper transliteration. Can anyone help me out?
Mikvahbound: very interesting that English-speakers, who are used to increasingly common gender-neutral language in general, would find the gendered prayers offensive or at least clumsy (if using egalitarian translations). That had not occurred to me, but makes lots of sense.
Tzipporah: the question of whether G-d is a name of G-d (!) is exactly the debate between the hyphenaters and the non-hyphenaters. For certain Hashem is NOT – agreed.
Larry:
Kaveyachol is a word that means "as if it could be" and is used, almost tongue-in-cheek, when humanizing G-d's ways with a model we can relate to (the Hand of G-d, shine Your Face upon us… of course G-d possesses neither hand nor face, but this metaphor is used so that us humans can have a smidge of understanding). In English this is called anthropomorphism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism
In any event, I will take issue with the table thing because according to the Kabbalah, which I am not well-versed in, the Hebrew language, which is not really Hebrew as we know it, but rather the language in the Torah, known as the "Holy Tongue" is the language of reality; the language via which the world was created; the language through which G-d chose to convey His will. Therefore whatever gender a noun is in Hebrew, I will consider it's true reality. Who decided a table is female in Spanish?
Example:
Heaven = shamayim in Hebrew. Male noun.
Earth = aretz in Hebrew. Female noun.
Heaven rains down small droplets of life-giving force: water.
Earth accepts this force within itself, nurtures and sustains it with the soil within, incubates life deep within where no one can see, and, months later, produces a living thing.
The classic relationship between male and female.