Theos-Talk Archives (April 1995 Message tl00155)

I waited till after Easter to tell you-all about this, but I do
want to run it by you, & see what you-all think of it.  It was an
experience that hit me over my feminist funny bone.

Since Alan Bain started teaching Kabalah, I decided to get one of
my few Kabala books off the shelf, & read it through (which I'd
never done before).  This one is by David Sheinkin MD.  Reading
some of his beautiful words, & growing loving & expansive, I read
that Jews should really study the Bible, because each letter's
sound, each letter's shape has meaning.  That seemed wonderfully
mysterious to me.  So I took down my especially beautiful Aryeh
Kaplan version of the 5 Books of Moses, & started to leaf around
in it.  In back of the book, I found Haftorah portions for the
1st & the 2d day of Passover.  This being the season, I began to
read those.  On the 1st day of Passover, the Haftorah says, God
told Joshua to circumcise all the "people", because all the ones
who had been circumsized in Egypt had by now died off, & the
younger ones needed to be circumsized.  "Well," I thought,"if
that's what they needed to belong to the good old boys club, more
power to them." I sort of half disregarded that the Bible said
Joshua circumsized all the "people", when in reality it was all
the "men".  Well, and so what.

On to the reading portion for the 2d day "The king commanded
Chikiah the High Priest, the priest of the 2d order, and the
doorkeepers to bring out from God's Temple all the vessels made
for Baal, for the Asherah, (a Goddess lfd) and for all the host
of heaven.  He burned them outside Jerusalem in the fields of
Kidron and carried their ashes the Bethel.  He deposed the
idolatrous priests, whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn
incense in the high palaces in the cities of Judah, and around
Jerusalem,; and also those who burned incense to Baal, to the
sun, to the moon, to the planets, and to all the hosts of heaven.
He removed the Asherah from God's house, outside Jerusalem to the
brook, Kidron; and there he burned it, beat it to dust, and threw
its dust on the graves of the common people.  He broke down the
house of the sodomites, in the area of God's house, __where the
women wove coverings for the Asherah__.".

I thought Asherah sounded a lot like Astarte, so I went to look
her up in my encyclopedia "Godesses & Heroines." Asherah was a
Canaanite Mother Goddess, wet nurse to the gods, & to human
rulers to.  Her symbol was a stick or tree anchored into the
ground.  I had read in one of my women's history books, that this
persecution of pagan gods in Biblical times, was often
persecution of a Goddess.  This kind of persecution went on over
many centuries, until finally, the male God was the only one
left, until very modern times, when it was decided that
worshiping only a male God resulted in very skewed worshipers..

Needless to say, with this discovery in my very own Bible, my
expansiveness ended, & my women's rights self got her hackles up.

The redemption came from 2 sources.  Returing to David Sheinkin's
book, published in 1986, he quotes the Bible "In the image of
God, He created him, male & female." and says that God was
actually androgynous.  He also goes on to say that the right
Sefiroth are masculine, the left Sefiroth ar feminine, the center
Sefiroth are androgynous.  A couple of pages further Sheinkin
says ."it is a clear principle throughout the Torah that whenever
there was a woman prophet & a man prophet alive at the same time,
the woman prophet was always on a higher level than her male
counterpart.  The Bible states this principle quite explicitly."
The female is already spiritualy charged he says, & the male
becomes so, "through circumcision", and various other rituals.
Makes a lot of sense, but anyway, that's what he says.  And it's
a darn sight better than burning Goddesses.

What really brought me back to my Easter peace, was a message
from a friend, happens to be a man friendly to women's causes.

"I wish you the felt presence of God and good spirits."