After the background, the actual story.
May. 7th, 2013 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexIt's possible that the prefaratory posts (part 1, part 2, and part 3) will be more interesting than this, the actual story I want to tell. So be it. Since this is a lot about Judaism and feminism I'd be particularly interested in hearing thoughts from my female Jewish friends. But don't let that stop the rest of you from adding thoughts.
This is about the differences between my own son's bar mitzvah, and the bar mitzvah of a friend of his the week after. I take as given that attempts to include other people and give other people opportunities do not exclude me - or rather should not. But that's what ended up happening and it's stuck with me enough to prompt this whole series of posts.
As I've mentioned I was raised fairly standard suburban-American Conservative Jewish. I know the prayers well enough that I can adapt to local variants in melodies and the service has a pace and a rhythm that feels comfortable. For my own son's bar mitzvah I was pleased to play greeter, welcoming people as they came in. During the service I was able to move around, spending time with family, friends, visitors. I didn't really have to pick up a prayer book (the Siddur) most of the time - I just knew what was going on and when I didn't, I could pick it up from the folk around me. There was a sense of comfort and community that transcended my own ambiguous relationship with G-d.
I did worry about the non-Jews there - to what degree would they be lost or uncomfortable? There are some things in the Bar Mitzvah service that are done in English but most of it is in Hebrew. Judaism, as I've noted in the earlier posts, is full of odd little traditions and things that have been made up and passed along that don't necessarily make a lot of sense to anyone else (or even to us, sometimes). It has been very helpful to read the responses from some of the non-Jews in attendance on how they connected to what went on.
Before I go on it helps if you know that Hebrew is a heavily gendered language. It's not just that we refer to G-d as the Father, and King, both of which are explicitly masculine words. We also say "Bless(masculine)" rather than "Bless(feminine)". The religious structure of the prayers - what we ask for, how we ask, what we give thanks for - is very much oriented around a father-headed household. We give some nods to the matriarchs of the tribe, but with very few exceptions they get short shrift.
If one is Orthodox, things are heavily sex-segregated and women are forbidden from open participation in many religious practices. Part of the choice K made was having his bar mitzvah at this Conservative temple where his mother, his aunt, and his (female) cousin could be active participants in the service. It was also a big deal that one of his teachers from the (Orthodox) Chabad where he started his learning crossed the picket lines (so to speak) to come to this service. Not only did she come to a mixed-sex service she even stood on the bimah with him and helped lead a prayer. So issues of women and Judaism figured prominently in planning and having my son's event.
Still, the bottom line is that Conservative Judaism - even with the changes made to include women as leaders and participants - is still a patriarchal religion with a male-dominated theological structure. Women have to work to be included. Not so for the second bar mitzvah.
The second celebration was at Chavurat Shalom in Cambridge. The Chav, as it's called, is a very Reform, egalitarian, modern congregation. I was a little taken aback when I went there and picked up their prayerbook. They've replaced the entire Siddur with something of their own creation. This isn't just doing the traditional prayers and things in English so that Americans can follow along; it's a wholesale revamp of what it means to do a Shabbat service and bar mitzvah within it.
It was one of the most alienating experiences of my life.
As someone mentioned in a comment to an earlier post, returning to a congregation of faith one has grown up in can be very much like coming home. On the surface these Chav worshippers are people I should fit in with. They're white, suburban Jews with a strongly egalitarian, feminist, modern sensibility. Their goals, described in the front of their Siddur are laudable: inclusion of women, recognition of the evolution of faith, etc.
But the product? Well, let me start by saying you do not make things more equal by arbitrarily replacing 50% of the masculine-gendered phrases with feminine-gendered ones. They've also taken out all the references to G-d-as-father and replaced them with G-d-as-mother and G-d-as-nurturer imagery.
On the surface that's not overtly wrong - those images are part of the tradition, even if significantly underplayed. It makes sense to me that they ought to be more emphasized and understood as part of the totality. But remember that analogy about the jewels? Part of what it means to be Jewish in this model is to struggle with the hard stuff. You engage with what interests you, not just scooping up the easy bits. Passover is a great example of this - it's full of difficult and contradictory stuff. Every so often I think I understand it a little more, not because someone has made it easier for me or taken out the contradictions but because I worked to understand.
If you read the Torah (all of it, not just the good bits) you see G-d depicted in ways that are unpleasant, to say the least. Those Jewish patriarchs weren't saints, to put it lightly. We had lots of prophets full of brimstone and dire warnings, though you'd never know that from the Chav. What they presented was this soft and cuddly G-d, all about the caring and nurturing, with the rough edges and uncomfortable bits filed off or hidden away.
I'm still not sure G-d exists, but I'm pretty sure if G-d exists then G-d is not a Care Bear. This was Care Bear Judaism, and that was a problem for me. Wrangling my religion around so it properly includes and credits women is necessary so let's get to the wrangling. I had no problems disregarding the Biblical prohibition on mixed-fiber fabrics and see previous post about lobsters. I can treat the one or two sentences on homosexuality the same way. But none of that seems to me to require a wholesale revamp.
Because in making this effort to revamp things to be open-arms and inclusive the result is that I got lost. Watching people at the Chav service stumbling over the artificially feminized blessing one says before and after reading Torah, I felt sorry for them and ever-more-alienated. I expected to be among my people, coming home, and what I got was a bit of a rude awakening.
Jews like to say that G-d closes one door so that another can be opened. Maybe this writing is part of the new door that got opened for me. It sure is a lot to think about.
This is about the differences between my own son's bar mitzvah, and the bar mitzvah of a friend of his the week after. I take as given that attempts to include other people and give other people opportunities do not exclude me - or rather should not. But that's what ended up happening and it's stuck with me enough to prompt this whole series of posts.
As I've mentioned I was raised fairly standard suburban-American Conservative Jewish. I know the prayers well enough that I can adapt to local variants in melodies and the service has a pace and a rhythm that feels comfortable. For my own son's bar mitzvah I was pleased to play greeter, welcoming people as they came in. During the service I was able to move around, spending time with family, friends, visitors. I didn't really have to pick up a prayer book (the Siddur) most of the time - I just knew what was going on and when I didn't, I could pick it up from the folk around me. There was a sense of comfort and community that transcended my own ambiguous relationship with G-d.
I did worry about the non-Jews there - to what degree would they be lost or uncomfortable? There are some things in the Bar Mitzvah service that are done in English but most of it is in Hebrew. Judaism, as I've noted in the earlier posts, is full of odd little traditions and things that have been made up and passed along that don't necessarily make a lot of sense to anyone else (or even to us, sometimes). It has been very helpful to read the responses from some of the non-Jews in attendance on how they connected to what went on.
Before I go on it helps if you know that Hebrew is a heavily gendered language. It's not just that we refer to G-d as the Father, and King, both of which are explicitly masculine words. We also say "Bless(masculine)" rather than "Bless(feminine)". The religious structure of the prayers - what we ask for, how we ask, what we give thanks for - is very much oriented around a father-headed household. We give some nods to the matriarchs of the tribe, but with very few exceptions they get short shrift.
If one is Orthodox, things are heavily sex-segregated and women are forbidden from open participation in many religious practices. Part of the choice K made was having his bar mitzvah at this Conservative temple where his mother, his aunt, and his (female) cousin could be active participants in the service. It was also a big deal that one of his teachers from the (Orthodox) Chabad where he started his learning crossed the picket lines (so to speak) to come to this service. Not only did she come to a mixed-sex service she even stood on the bimah with him and helped lead a prayer. So issues of women and Judaism figured prominently in planning and having my son's event.
Still, the bottom line is that Conservative Judaism - even with the changes made to include women as leaders and participants - is still a patriarchal religion with a male-dominated theological structure. Women have to work to be included. Not so for the second bar mitzvah.
The second celebration was at Chavurat Shalom in Cambridge. The Chav, as it's called, is a very Reform, egalitarian, modern congregation. I was a little taken aback when I went there and picked up their prayerbook. They've replaced the entire Siddur with something of their own creation. This isn't just doing the traditional prayers and things in English so that Americans can follow along; it's a wholesale revamp of what it means to do a Shabbat service and bar mitzvah within it.
It was one of the most alienating experiences of my life.
As someone mentioned in a comment to an earlier post, returning to a congregation of faith one has grown up in can be very much like coming home. On the surface these Chav worshippers are people I should fit in with. They're white, suburban Jews with a strongly egalitarian, feminist, modern sensibility. Their goals, described in the front of their Siddur are laudable: inclusion of women, recognition of the evolution of faith, etc.
But the product? Well, let me start by saying you do not make things more equal by arbitrarily replacing 50% of the masculine-gendered phrases with feminine-gendered ones. They've also taken out all the references to G-d-as-father and replaced them with G-d-as-mother and G-d-as-nurturer imagery.
On the surface that's not overtly wrong - those images are part of the tradition, even if significantly underplayed. It makes sense to me that they ought to be more emphasized and understood as part of the totality. But remember that analogy about the jewels? Part of what it means to be Jewish in this model is to struggle with the hard stuff. You engage with what interests you, not just scooping up the easy bits. Passover is a great example of this - it's full of difficult and contradictory stuff. Every so often I think I understand it a little more, not because someone has made it easier for me or taken out the contradictions but because I worked to understand.
If you read the Torah (all of it, not just the good bits) you see G-d depicted in ways that are unpleasant, to say the least. Those Jewish patriarchs weren't saints, to put it lightly. We had lots of prophets full of brimstone and dire warnings, though you'd never know that from the Chav. What they presented was this soft and cuddly G-d, all about the caring and nurturing, with the rough edges and uncomfortable bits filed off or hidden away.
I'm still not sure G-d exists, but I'm pretty sure if G-d exists then G-d is not a Care Bear. This was Care Bear Judaism, and that was a problem for me. Wrangling my religion around so it properly includes and credits women is necessary so let's get to the wrangling. I had no problems disregarding the Biblical prohibition on mixed-fiber fabrics and see previous post about lobsters. I can treat the one or two sentences on homosexuality the same way. But none of that seems to me to require a wholesale revamp.
Because in making this effort to revamp things to be open-arms and inclusive the result is that I got lost. Watching people at the Chav service stumbling over the artificially feminized blessing one says before and after reading Torah, I felt sorry for them and ever-more-alienated. I expected to be among my people, coming home, and what I got was a bit of a rude awakening.
Jews like to say that G-d closes one door so that another can be opened. Maybe this writing is part of the new door that got opened for me. It sure is a lot to think about.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-05-07 02:43 pm (UTC)It's also hard to explain my reasoning when the typical response to any discussion of it has been "well, it's all made up anyway!"
no subject
Date: 2013-05-07 02:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-07 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-07 04:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-07 06:16 pm (UTC)And I'm proud of it.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-07 06:28 pm (UTC)I would also love this conversation, though we've probably had some of it, already.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-07 06:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-08 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-09 02:24 pm (UTC)http://www.patheos.com/blogs/panmankey/2013/05/wicca-and-the-fork-in-the-road/
Relevant quote:
Wicca was originally meant to be a term that applied only to people who were initiated into a specific tradition of Witchcraft. There was no way to become a “Wiccan” (or become one of “the Wicca”) without an initiation. This was the system of Gerald Gardner (or perhaps his initiators), his initiates, and later his imitators and admirers. Almost every “Wiccan Tradition” owes a tip of the hat to Gardner, his system became the dominant one (even in traditions that might have predated Gardner, this is called the “Gardnerian Magnet” by scholars), and most groups that use the word “Wicca” can trace their origins to Gardner, one of his followers, or his Book of Shadows.
Please note, even though the author of that piece identifies as an initiated witch (within the concept of Wicca as discussed in the excerpt) he also suggests that the genie is out of the bottle on the prescriptivist/descriptivist use of the word "Wicca", and also suggests that calling what isn't initiatory Wicca (but uses some of its visible framework) watered down or bastardized is both a value judgment and incorrect.
He says that in response to this article:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/sermonsfromthemound/2013/04/the-pagan-umbrella-is-leaking/
wherein another initiate says
Many of the people who don’t want to identify as Pagan complain about the dominance of watered-down Wicca style rituals and ideas. They also assume that the simplistic version of Wicca presented by many 101 books is what initiated Wiccans practice. [...]
As a polytheist, initiated, Gardnerian Wiccan, I would really like it if eclectic Paganism was not “watered-down Wicca”. Create your own rituals; don’t bastardize ours. And please don’t assume that I am a duotheist, or a “soft” polytheist. I once spent some months on a polytheist mailing list, and was amazed by the hostility to Wicca. Just because some Wiccans have misrepresented your tradition, don’t assume that we’re all going to do so.
I will comment on my thoughts about this in another comment.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-09 02:47 pm (UTC)If there are no standards for what Wicca is, then who is to say that praying to Satan isn't Wicca?
But of course it's not, they say ... but how do they justify that?
Sure, you can charge for education/training in "no rules Wicca" - which then creates a customer/seller relationship, given that there is no accreditation system for the no rules teachers. And then the teacher OWES the student, even if it later turns out the student is unworthy.
There is a history that few of the "no rules" people know about:
from the first article -
There are a few definite “fork in the road” moments when it comes to the use of the word Wicca. The first one occurred in the early 1970′s when the first “how to” books began to appear. Now nearly anyone could get their hands on a version of Gardner’s system, which was especially appealing in the United States, a country far too big to make an “initiation only” Witchcraft viable. (We are certainly not “Gardnerians All,” but the influence of Gardner’s system is impossible to ignore.) By 1975 there were complete collections of Witch Rituals available, most notably Raymond Buckland’s The Tree (which uses the term Seax-Wica in the title), Ed Fitch’s Magical Rites From the Crystal Well, and Lady Sheba’s Grimoire. It became completely possible to create your own Wiccan Tradition in the privacy of your living room, as long as you were willing to change the definition of the word Wicca.
There are, however, some points Jason fails to mention - if any copy of Gardner's system got out in how to books in the 70s, it was a violation of oath, so, how much is it to be trusted?
He is also conflating, likely intentionally, the word witch and the word Wicca: "complete collections of Witch Rituals available", and then lists a work on Seax-Wica (Saxon Witchcraft) and the Crystal Well book (Sheba's work is another case entirely, and falls into the oathbreaking issue, from what I have been told)
Seax-Wica was an intentional creation of a Witchcraft Tradition which was NOT like Gardnerian Wicca (to which Buckland was initiated) - he made that system so he wouldn't violate his oaths.
Similarly for Ed Fitch and Crystal Well - he and others with him realized there was no way for everyone in the USA who wanted to, AND was possibly worthy of, being initiated, it's too big an area, not enough teachers for worthy students.
So, what do they do until they find a way to join an initiates group?
Fitch designed a completely new magical system which utilized many of the same sources which Gardner used to flesh out his system, yet ensured that none of what he published was oathbound - thus everyone who wanted some training could get it.
That system was later adopted without attribution or knowledge of its history, and that was done again and again, until few knew the source of it, but many thought it was the same Wicca as the Gardnerians et al did.
Fitch himself attended public rituals wherein the supposedly ancient book of shadows which the group was using was photo copied or hand-jammed copies of Crystal Well ... passed off as original work.
These are the things which lead me to the concern over the CareBear-ing of religion.
It also results in many of the people in "neo-Wicca" (as some have taken to calling it) thinking it is all sweetness and light - that there is no darkness or danger.
It's a fertility religion that celebrates the cycles of life ...
That includes death.
There is no rebirth of spring, in the Greek myths, without Persephone spending a winter in Hades.
Okay, rant over.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-09 02:55 pm (UTC)What I think I might need to say more clearly is that this particular revolutionary take on the traditional Saturday and bar mitzvah service took the form of care-bearing and as a result alienated me because it removed core elements of Jewishness I was raised with.
Hrm. The perils of telling a story publicly for the first time. I seem to get more wrong than right.
Thanks for taking the time to type all that out - I appreciate the input.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-09 03:02 pm (UTC)I do not think neo-Wiccans are inauthentic as witches.
I think they are as Wicca.
And the ways in which they have removed, or never had to begin with, core practices of initiatory Wicca, have been ways which made it easier, nicer, less strict, and darn-well sweet.
The ways in which they are inauthentic as Wicca are ways in which a care-beared practice evolved.
eta
However, I do see your point that in the Jewish situation, the two have not gone hand in hand.
An interesting analogy/taxonomy (flawed as they may be) I have seen on the Wicca (initiatory) issue is this:
Paganism - Witchcraft - Initiatory Witchcraft - Wicca - Gardnerian (etc)
vice
Christianity - Catholicism - Holy Orders - Priesthood - Dominican (etc).
no subject
Date: 2013-05-09 03:06 pm (UTC)Within Judaism we have a large set of people who call themselves "Reform" Jews. From a Conservative point of view we would still recognize them as Jews and with respect to their changes we would say "show your sources; show your work." Orthodox Jews would just say "no, that's wrong, stop doing that and by the way you're not really Jews either."
no subject
Date: 2013-05-09 03:14 pm (UTC)Yes. If they called themselves witches it would be fine by me, there is also no getting the horse back in the barn.
I'm told that it is very different in the UK - there are Pagans and there are Wiccans, and what they mean by Wicca over there is the initiatory kind, and no one who isn't of that has any issue with calling themselves simply Pagan.
I like how your Conservative groups would deal with it.
There ARE, I must point out, very serious and dedicated Pagan Witches out there who do research, who show their work, who get great results. I do not think they are inauthentic witches.
Some of them are of initiatory traditions which are specifically not derived from the same sources as Gardnerian Wicca (and its cousins, sometimes collectively known on this side of the pond as British Traditional Wicca/BTW) ... some of us (and them) refer to what they do as Traditional Initiatory Witchcraft/TIW - to confuse things, because of the stricter use of the word Wicca in the UK, TIW type paths are known there as British Traditional Witchcraft ... confusion abounds.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-07 02:53 pm (UTC)Actually
Date: 2013-05-07 04:00 pm (UTC)Re: Actually
Date: 2013-05-07 06:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-07 06:55 pm (UTC)I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and am surrounded by the neo-pagan movement. And it feels wrong. Goddess as a unicorn that shits rainbows is not correct. Goddess(tm) does not want to pick you up and cuddle you and tell you everything is all right and kiss your boo-boos away.
Winter comes. people get cancer... someone has to be a grown-up. YES adults can and should be merciful and just and forgiving; and whomEver in charge, I hope IS... BUT. It fills me with discomfort to say the least.
Inside the actors Studio question: You pass through the pearly gates, g-d stands before you; what is said? - my answer has always been "I am so sorry about all that, let me explain..."
no subject
Date: 2013-05-07 06:59 pm (UTC)That being said, she likely has some UPG which supports her theories.
However, I deal in collective Personal Gnosis situations, and what she does seems too fluffy for me.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-07 04:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-07 04:57 pm (UTC)As for masculine religions...
When I was taking my confirmation classes, a silly amount of time was spent on the Lord's Prayer, which in my tradition begins "Our Father, who art in heaven." So sure, there are phrases which may require explanation/discussion ("forgive us our debts") but the sheer amount of time spent on "by father we don't really mean male, etc." When, to anyone who's grown up in the faith, and even though I grew up as a liberal Presbyterian (women pastors, women can teach men, etc) it was really clear that all the god imagery is masculine. You can't just hand-wave that away. If you really MEAN that god transcends gender identity then the language should reflect that (language can make that hard, of course). Representation matters.
Sometimes, changes are hard and seem sudden (Martin Luther), sometimes they're gradual. Now, maybe the changes made were arbitrary and thoughtless. Maybe they don't make sense. But tradition for the sake of tradition is just as bogus as change for the sake of change (and I say this as probably one of your more conservative, tradition beholden readers). Getting girls into STEM isn't just making legos pink. Making religion more open to the community, and potentially even more accurate (the god in the tradition in which I was raised *does not* have a gender, in spite of all the masculine words in that same tradition) might not be such a bad thing even if it is discomfiting to wrest tradition out from under people. I'm told Vatican II was hard.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-07 06:14 pm (UTC)And this is one of those things that I have to deal with when I talk about things like this (http://drwex.livejournal.com/440996.html?thread=2842276#t2842276), as the type of stuff middle school girls tend to fixate on is not what Wicca (initiatory, tracing back to New Forest (England), and where the word came from, version) is.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-07 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-08 03:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-07 11:49 pm (UTC)I understand your opposition to the way some people sweep huge swaths of religious history under the rug. "Buddy Christ" happens in all modern religions, I think. The idea of God as an omniscient, loving parent is choosing to ignore more than half the texts of Judeo-Christianity, and I've seen it happen in polytheistic and earth-based religions as well.
On the other hand, I feel arguing against the traditional picture of God as male actually fits in to what you like about your tradition: questioning authority and arguing semantics in order to better understand God and the world around you. It may offend you as being an untraditional argument, but it is not the same as ignoring half or more of the history of your people.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-08 03:47 am (UTC)By going through and taking away all the difficult bits - the overt male-ness and the hierarchical nature of a worship that is based on a father/king figure the Chav has taken away all the questions. They've supplied answers - see, that was wrong and this is how it SHOULD be - and I view that as exactly incorrect in the way that the man in the first joke was incorrect by giving a definitive answer.
The answer isn't "G-d is male" or "G-d is female" or even "G-d is both/neither." The answer is "what questions does this make you need answers to, and how do you work to get those answers so they are sensible?"
I agree that "arguing against the traditional picture of G-d" is part of what I like. What I don't like is something that takes away all the arguments, and replaces it with something that reeks of tokenism - to me. One of the things I worry about is that as a male I can't judge how this appears from a female perspective so I'm especially grateful to have your input.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-08 02:50 pm (UTC)I'm going to speak of the tradition in which I was raised...
I think there are so many debates and questions about god that the gendering language is a minute part of it. In fact, I think the gendering of the language is more a reflection of who wrote the holy books and who was in charge of the church than anything god was attempting to share. There are so many aspects to god - in fact, gendering isn't even part of the basics in the "simple description of god" one gives a child in my tradition (which is that god is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent).
I am glad to be part of a tradition that broke away and "allowed" women pastors, "allowed" women to teach men, "allowed" women to hold any and all positions of power within the tradition. My relatives attend a church that's the conservative side of my tradition, where women may not be in positions of power over men. And you know what? While we each find the others church a bit peculiar, the essentials of the religion are the same. The questions and the struggles remain. There's a whole lot more to the religion than the gendering of language or a gender based hierarchy.
I know Judaism is heavily gender-based, but is it really so gender based that inclusive language removes all the questioning and debates? Does it even really remove most or the really central questions?
no subject
Date: 2013-05-08 03:25 pm (UTC)In the updated service there was not just a changing of gendered language, but a wholesale rewrite of the service, removing all but one or two of the traditional prayers and substituting others. If I re-tell this story I should probably be clearer on that. As other commenters have noted, revolutionary change is often more jarring than evolutionary change.
Now to the substantive points you raise. I think that the gendering of the service is important to this story in two ways. One is that a central fact of my son's bar mitzvah was that he chose to have his ceremony where his female relatives could participate. He could have chosen otherwise. So it's a significant personal factor. At a larger scale, the gendering of the religion is pervasive. It's entirely constructed around a father/king hierarchical image. The fact that Hebrew as a language reflects that in pervasive ways is important as well. The question of what constitutes "inclusive language" is an interesting one and plays into the fact that in Hebrew you cannot say many thing, including words like "bless," in an inclusive way. You must pick either a male or female construction of the word.
I'm glad that your tradition has managed to cope as well as it has. Other Jewish institutions have done so - see vvalkyri's comment for her experience with another way of responding.
Again, thank you for taking the time to read all these walls of text and respond.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-08 03:17 pm (UTC)Logic and questions by themselves can prove nothing. (Well, except for pure logic and math. Which this isn't.) Science says answers are gained through experiment. Therefore, the way to answer questions in Judaism is to actually test changes in practice. You can't "question" forever, eventually you have to try an answer.
(I've also seen a lot of situations where there's "removal of patriarchal bits" over here and "uncomfortable middle-aged guy" over there. Sometimes I'm the middle-aged guy. But I know how it tends to turn out.)
no subject
Date: 2013-05-08 03:30 pm (UTC)Interesting point. See the joke about the two lost Jews and the three synagogues. I would say that Judaism is something of a continual experiment, but experimentation necessarily requires the notion that some experiments will fail, right?
You can't "question" forever
Would Socrates agree with that? I also think it's not unique to Judaism to have mystery, unknowability, and ineffable nature at the core of things.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-09 02:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-08 06:00 pm (UTC)The congregation I belong to now has a mostly Hebrew service in which the Hebrew of the prayers is the same as it has been for centuries (an exception being the Aleinu prayer which I will get to later, and the last paragraph of the Kaddish where following the phrase al kol yisrael "on all Israel" we add v'al kol yoshvei teivel "and on all the inhabitants of the globe"). When English is used, however, the God language is neutralized by substituting "God" for the masculine singular pronoun and by saying the Hebrew word "Adonai" for "Lord" (even though Adonai means Lord). My take on this is that whether in literature or in liturgy, every translation is an interpretation of and a commentary on the original text. So the congregation is leaving the orginal text unchanged but using the translation to question and criticize the original Hebrew text's perceived shortcomings.
Another factor, as you've noted, is that Hebrew, like most of the world's languages, is rigidly gendered. In English the only parts of speech that have gender are pronouns. In most other languages nouns and adjectives are also gendered. Hebrew is the only modern spoken language in which verbs are gendered. This is because Hebrew's development was arrested early on, but now that it is a spoken language again changes are starting to occur, such as the dropping of the third person plural female forms (which to contemporary Israelis sound arch, overly formal, and old fashioned) and the use of the third person plural masculine for either gender.
But if you prefer the traditional language, which version of the Aleinu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleinu) prayer do you prefer? Would you restore the censored verses (which the Conservative siddur omits)?
no subject
Date: 2013-05-08 07:24 pm (UTC)I like the approach of neutralizing some of the language because English is more flexible. As for which version, I think it doesn't matter. As I said, I've been able to pick up on most variants and differences because it's within some measurable distance of what I'm used to.
no subject
Date: 2013-05-09 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-23 08:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-23 10:42 am (UTC)