In the Name of the Mother

“In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” This invocation to the Holy Trinity is so familiar in Christian prayer that it probably hardly registers that two of these terms are decidedly gender-specific, with the third term implied as being so by the first two. This can be a troubling point to maneuver around for those liberal souls who might insist that ‘God’ is neither male nor female, when the phrase ‘God the father’ has become so entrenched in our consciousness.

To help us to a greater understanding, let me here offer a thought of the Sikh sage and spiritual teacher Harbhajan Singh Khalsa, known as Yogi Bhajan: “Why do we call God the Father? Father does not have a creative nature... father can only seed. We are a soul and part of that whole great soul which is the seed in you. Creativity of sustenance and deliverance is from the mother, and that is why the Earth is called mother.”

Why indeed is God ‘the father’? It perhaps needs a mental effort to realize that things were not always this way, for in the beliefs of Ancient Babylonia the First Cause was female: the primordial Cosmic Ocean from whose waters all arose. It was the mingling of two waters, the salt waters of the seas and the fresh waters of the rivers and lakes of the land, which allowed all creation to begin, and it was the primordial Feminine which provided the impetus to initiate that momentous act. In this creative scheme of things no ‘father’ was necessary.

In nature as well ‘no father is necessary’, for in nature we encounter ‘parthenogenesis’, meaning ‘virgin birth’, and it is by no means uncommon in many species of reptiles, in bees, and in plants. No male is needed for these life forms to procreate: they simply do what they do! Nature might be showing us the way forward by example, although we in our Western mindset might still be a long way from ‘God the mother’.

To go back even further in time from these very first Babylonian beliefs of the primordial Mother Ocean, but staying in the Middle East, we arrive at the ancient civilization of Sumer, and the temple of Sumer’s High Priestess Enheduanna. Who did Enheduanna worship as the Supreme Creative force? The goddess Inanna, to whom the High Priestess composed several heartfelt and moving prayers – now among the oldest surviving writings in existence.

This ancient religious landscape already looks fundamentally different from our Holy Trinity of today, for God is only 'God the Father' in those patriarchal traditions which had - and still have - a vested interest in preserving their own power. But as Yogi Bhajan points out, the Creative Force is both initiating and sustaining: it is the Mother of all, the Divine Ground of all being.

Artwork: The Healing Women by Michael Malm

The Shekhinah

        

Where can we find a powerful image of the Divine feminine within Jewish sources? One name for Her which has been with us for centuries is the Shekhinah, the “dweller within.” In ancient times, the Shekhinah was a Talmudic word for the glory of God that rested on the mishkan (the mishkan was the Tabernacle, God’s sacred dwelling space in the wilderness (see Exodus 26-28). The Israelites saw the “glory of God” (kavod adonai) as tangible, powerful, and sacred, a pillar of fire or cloud guiding the Israelites through the wilderness.

According to the Talmud, the Shekhinah, the Indwelling, is the Divine that resides within the life of the world, dwelling on earth with the Jewish people and going into exile with them when they are exiled. While the traditional Jewish image of the transcendent God is male, in the kabbalah, that image has been accompanied by the feminine image of the Shekhinah—the inner glory of existence.

In the Zohar (a medieval mystical work), there are ten facets or sefirot of the Divine, and the Shekhinah (also known as malchut) is the tenth and final one, closest to the created world. She is a mystical embodiment of the feminine, earth-centered presence of God, and was also called the bride of God, the Sabbath, the Torah, the moon, the earth, and the apple orchard. Mysticism depicts the Shekhinah as female, but she can be both female and male. Two biblical figures who symbolize her are Rachel (wife of Jacob and mother of the Israelite nation) and David (shepherd, psalmist, and king of Israel). The Shekhinah rests on those who study, pray, visit the sick, welcome the new moon, welcome guests, give charity to the poor, dwell in the harvest booth called the sukkah, or perform other sacred activities.

The Shekhinah embodies joy, yet she is also a symbol of shared suffering and empathy, not only with a nation’s exile, but with all the hurts of the world. Mystics believe that in messianic times She will be reunited with her heavenly partner and that they will become one. Many Jewish poets of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries have reclaimed her as a powerful feminine image of God.
Yet the Shekhinah as She is portrayed by Jewish sources is not a panacea for all that ails the way we look at God. Until recently kabbalists have considered Her the lowest and most inactive part of the Godhead, the last and least in a series of ten steps of creation.

The Shekhinah embodies traditional feminine traits like passivity and nurturing, and at the same time she is associated with death and darkness. These images, taken uncritically, can be damaging to women and to the male conception of the feminine. To discover the Shekhinah as the full embodiment of the feminine Divine, we must transform her from a stereotype into a living divinity who speaks to us in many different kinds of voices: mother and daughter, old and young, light and dark, compassion and anger, revelation and mystery.

We can rediscover the Shekhinah throughout Jewish text, throughout history, and throughout the natural world. God in the Bible is sometimes mother eagle and sometimes Holy Wisdom crying out in the streets. In the Talmud and midrash, the Divine is sometimes portrayed as a nursing mother or as the (female) twin of Israel. In the Zohar, there are multiple feminine God-images, such as Binah (understanding), also known as Immah Ilaah (the higher mother), who is called the womb and palace of creation, the fountain of understanding, the well of souls. Then there is Lilith, a mythic figure whom the tradition demonized but who for some is the embodiment of sexuality and freedom.

We also cannot forget that the images and stories of the Shekhinah are connected to traditions of the Divine feminine around the world, from the ancient goddess Inanna, who is described as a warrior for her people just as the Shekhinah is in the Zohar; to the Virgin Mary, who is an intercessor in matters of Divine judgment like the Shekhinah; to Kuan Yin of Asia, who embodies compassion for those who suffer, just as the Shekhinah does. Jews have been afraid to acknowledge the Shekhinah’s relationship to goddesses and goddess-like images because of the traditional Jewish prohibition against idolatry. Yet to deny our connection to the Divine feminine as it is expressed and loved by others is to deny our connection to the human, and feminine, religious experience, and to render invisible some of the sources of our own spirituality.

Today feminist theologians and earth-centered Jews have reclaimed the Shekhinah as a unified deity in her own right, dwelling within living things and the earth, seeking peace and promoting human connection, speaking through women as well as men, working through the neglected and invisible, promoting change and healing brokenness. She is the Goddess- an image of the forces of life and the mysteries of creation.

The Shekhinah, for some, is a reminder that there is no division between creation and divinity. The Shekhinah allows us to break through the exclusively male and hierarchical visions of God and imagine a God that changes as we change, that evokes nature as well as the supernatural. When we speak to the immanent Shekhinah, She speaks not to us, but through us, and through all the varied facets of the world.

Jill Hammer 

Rabbi, feminist and seeker.

Yuletide Greetings

‘’Yuletide Greetings!” is the cheery message on one of my Christmas cards this year. Yuletide is a familiar term for this season, but where does the word actually come from? It seems that in Scandinavian lands ‘Jul’ or ‘Jule’ was, and still is, the term for the midwinter month, and there still exists the tradition of burning the Yule log on the hearth fire. 

But like the Christmas tree itself, many of these customs have been carried over from old pagan traditions. Even the very date of Christmas has nothing to do with the actual day of the birth of Jesus, but is believed to originally have been a celebration for the Sun God, perhaps to persuade that god to return to strength and brightness following the shortest and darkest days of the year.

It is a sad fact that when early Christianity was making inroads into Europe many pagan temples and sacred sites were destroyed by those zealously spreading the word of the new faith, and churches of the new religion were built upon the remaining foundations. So we have the buildings of one faith built upon the remains of the faiths which came before it, and new traditions and celebratory dates also were ‘built upon’ those of the previous faiths.

These layerings of traditions, dates and buildings tell us, not just what is, but what has been in our past. The ruins of the past are always to be glimpsed in the present. But what of the future? We cannot know what faiths and beliefs the future may hold, in a hundred, or even in a thousand years. Perhaps, like our own present, the distant future will contain the fragmented pieces of the beliefs which now dominate our world, which themselves have been replaced by other faiths which the unknown future holds. But what if we tread still further into the unknown? What if we reach out, not a mere millennium, but some five thousand years into our future?

Five thousand years ago the civilization of Sumer existed: a time as far into our past as we are imagining our hypothetical future. In that time there was no dominant male god. In that time there was a great goddess: Inanna. In that time the Supreme Deity was a ‘she’. Who would dare predict that in another five thousand years this will not happen again, and that ‘God the Father’ will belong among the ruins of a dim and distant past, which is our own time. Perhaps it will take far less time than another five millennia for this to happen, for these things do seem to happen in unpredictable cycles.

A tipping point is reached, and suddenly the landscape around us changes, and nothing is quite as we had known it. It is the landscape of faiths, of traditions, and we need to dig just a little way down to discover that our foundations are those of another faith entirely. Perhaps this is the time of the year to celebrate, not one faith in particular, but faith itself: a faith which renews itself through all the ages, finding new forms in its striving to bring a measure of trust and peace of heart. 

Painting Druids bringing the Mistletoe by Edward Atkinson Hornel

Inanna and the Old Woman at the Gate

This is dangerous work, this thing we women do, feeling everything, passing through the gate that way. This is our play with the spirits: we gain what we risk. So it is with Inanna; what she would gain and therefore what she must risk is life itself. Inanna hears Ereshkigal crying, so she has to go. She has to go: after all, isn't Inanna a woman?

We stand on the crack between the worlds in our women's bodies. We look both ways on the horns of life, forward, to see our children through, backward, to remember. That's why our love takes so much courage. Inanna comes through here, asking me the way. I know her symptoms - haven't I seen them a hundred times before? I would have cried for her if she hadn't so many tears for herself already. I am Daughter of the Sun, Inanna says, but I am so wet, I am so wet, I am rain without a river to collect me, I am a flood with no banks to embrace me, and still I cannot stop crying. Old Woman, what can I do with all my water?

"You have the water of life itself in you", I tell her, "It is your responsibility to cry it home." How Inanna cries! She cries as if she has already become the wind: It's not enough, she says, the way I've made myself up, it's not enough; my crown and my kingdom, it's not enough, all my light - not enough, my stores of wealth - not enough, the soldiers who would trade away everything for one night with me - not enough. My sweet companion Ninshubah, who has stepped her path from childhood to womanhood alongside my own - not enough. Even Dumuzi, my king, flesh of my flesh, not enough. My own beloved sons - who are to me as life itself, not enough. There are some kinds of tears that cannot be wiped away. Like prayers, they announce us.

My body! Inanna cries, this hopeless beauty of mine is like the skull of a melon. I don't know who has eaten my insides. This candle of flesh I carry only illuminates everything yellow as bones of sand. I know what Inanna is saying when she asks me how to get through that gate, when she asks me how to dream. Old Woman, Inanna says, teach me how to dream.

"Don't ask me that!" I tell her, "We all know how to dream. Just some of us listen to our dreams. So you just listen to whatever it is stampeding inside you, pulling you over. You just ride it where it takes you. Aren't you yourself the morning and the evening star? There's no woman can't walk through walls, navigating her dreams. There's no woman can't walk through time - don't you have two sons to prove it?"

Can't I give her something more? Inanna wants to know. Something to make it safe? But all I can give her are the words I keep as the witness at the gate: "Ereshkigal is your own sister, and all the scribes in Sumer haven't any more power than what's written in the mother's milk you shared: that's the ink that draws us into this world. And what draws us in draws us out again, both directions."

I didn’t tell her the rest. What good would it do? What must be, must be. But even the underworld rewards the courage of love.

Text: The Descent of Inanna ©Madronna Holden

Photo: model Anna Chipovskaya by Nicolay Biryukov