“The recent past has seen a major breakthrough. Recognizing the power of God-talk to educate and shape our lives, women, and Jewish women especially, have begun, in the past decade, to take back the power of naming. We have begun to address divinity in our own voices, often saying ‘She’ rather than ‘He.’ We do this because we take theology seriously and know we need to affirm ourselves back into it, restore ourselves to the place from which we have been erased. And we address God as ‘She’ rather than as ‘It’ because we know the ineffectuality of abstractions to challenge deep-seated images, know that ‘It’ alone will never overthrow the ‘He’ which has been deeply embedded in us. (In Hebrew one cannot even say ‘It’; it is always either ‘He’ or ‘She.’) We are choosing, that is, to redeem the forgotten half - to restore the eradicated half - of the inclusive, genderless God. Yet, when we do so, we are accused of deep heresy. We are accused of abandoning Judaism for nothing less threatening than paganism.”

From “A Blessing for This Day,” talk by Marcia Falk at “Illuminating the Unwritten Scrolls: Women’s Spirituality and Jewish Tradition” conference, November 1984.

Credit: A Blessing for This Day, © 1984 by Marcia Lee Falk.