El Shaddai and the Feminine

This week’s Torah portion is Va-eira, which means, and God appeared. It tells about God’s promise to redeem the Israelites from Egyptian bondage and relates the unfolding of the first seven plagues in response to Pharaoh’s intransigence. The portion begins with God saying to Moses, I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob as El Shaddai, but with my name, yud hei vav hei, I did not make myself known to them. The name El Shaddai is sometimes translated as God Almighty, but it really means something quite different. El means God but Shaddai comes from the word, Dai, as in Dayenu. It means enough or sufficient. El Shaddai means God who provides sufficiently for us: in other words, God the nurturer. This role of nurturer or provider is further reinforced by another meaning of Shaddai: from the word Shadayim, or breasts. God is the Mother who feeds us, takes care of us, and provides for all our needs.
If this is so, why, we might ask, does the Torah have such a patriarchal feel, and so many masculine pronouns for God. Our confusion comes from our need to read the Torah literally, and this can be a big mistake. We are gendered. We have bodies for reproduction that are gendered and in the words of our sages, the Torah speaks in the language of human beings. We are male and female: God is not. We have arms and legs, and eyes and ears: God does not. When the Torah says, God-He: it is no more a reference to God being male than when it says, “If I have found favor in your eyes,” being a proof that God has eyes. These are metaphors. The former is a sign of respect. The latter is simply a manner of conveying an idea. We know this; our Torah commentators, such as Maimonides and Rashi emphasize it, but we forget.
We should not be particularly surprised either, by the preponderance of male names in the Torah if we can remember the society of the time the Torah was written down, or even consider the status of women in the Arab countries of the Middle East today. The Torah lays out laws of slavery, but this does not offend us as much as the Torah’s neglect of women because we have fought the battle over slavery, won it, and the struggle is behind us. But we are still in the midst of the struggle for equality between women and men in the labor force and in society, so the inequality still smarts. Also, many passages have been interpreted to the disadvantage of women in the past, but in many instances, a pro-feminine interpretation is also supported by the text.
But there is a deeper level on which the messages of El Shaddai and yud hei vav hei resonate. El Shaddai can be seen as the bearer of feminine energy in the world. Feminine and masculine energies were postulated by the psychologist Carl Jung. Every person combines feminine as well as masculine energies. When God manifests the Divine Presence to Moses later in Exodus, God describes the Divine personality as: compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abundant in kindness and truth, full of forgiveness, and who cleanses. These can be seen as the feminine values: relatedness, compassion or rachamim, which comes from the Hebrew word, rechem, or womb: the flow of blessings which cannot ever be the exclusive purview of either male or female, but which we humans identify with the Mother: softness, gentleness, receptivity, sustenance. What the Torah can be seen to be saying in Genesis is that God has come to balance the masculine energies of logic, strength, rationality, action, and exertion with the feminine energies of El Shaddai’s nature: compassion, emotion, nurturing. In this week’s Torah portion, Pharaoh exhibits the imbalance of an excess of masculine energies: the hardening of the heart rather than its softening. But God tells Moses a secret: that God is not only El Shaddai, the bearer of feminine energy, but that God is all Being. Being: existence, as the totality of every energy, must exhibit harmony: a blending of the complementary energies; and this is also what has erupted in Judaism every so often in our history, when the forces of logic, scholasticism, and hierarchy have held too much sway. It is at these times that the tradition of Kabbalah: the mystical counterpart to logical Judaism has gained in importance and emphasis. This is made explicit in the personification of God’s Presence by the Shechinah, the female aspect of God described by much Kabbalistic writing. The feminine aspect of God is said to be in exile and must be reunited with the male aspect of God, which will bring about the harmony of all being. In his book, Femininity Lost and Regained, Dr. Robert Johnson maintains that, in a psychological sense, parables about the mating of female and male produce consciousness. On a spiritual level, much more than consciousness results. Each wave of Jewish spirituality has brought with it a little more feminine energy: a little more relatedness, inclusiveness, and acceptance. This is what is happening again in our time. The values of El Shaddai, God of Compassion, are being reasserted in our society and in Judaism: witness the burgeoning interest in meditation and kabbalah in the wider human family. The values of El Shaddai are being reasserted as we come to grips with a smaller, more inclusive world: a world of brothers and sisters who share the environment of the earth, share information, and share the universal truths in all religions. In short: a world where we have to get along. The more we can bring the feminine values of El Shaddai into our lives, into our interactions, and into our world, the more harmony and Godliness we will create. We must not allow todays’s Pharoahs to dictate the values of society or to let Goethe’s ideal of the eternal feminine to remain a vision. Our collective survival depends on our ability to bring harmony to our world.