Growing up attending the Episcopal school where my mother taught, I heard the same benediction in my school’s chapel every week from Kindergarten through senior year:
May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May the Lord make HIS face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.
May the Lord lift up HIS countenance upon you and give you peace.
As canonical as these particular words would become in my mind, they are, in fact, an interpretation of the Priestly Blessing, found in Parshat Nasso, this week’s Torah portion. One could argue that the above words are just a literal translation of the original Hebrew. Translation, however, is fundamentally interpretation, as the rendering of God’s gender makes clear.
The need for translation to interpret Hebrew texts was necessary not just for my Episcopal school or TRS or any other community today. Ancient Jewish communities in the first centuries of the common era largely spoke Aramaic—not Hebrew—and created translations of Hebrew texts, which they infused these translations with their own interpretations. The most important Aramaic translation of the Torah, Targum Onkelos (literally: the Onkelos Translation), portrays God’s gender quite differently from the starkly masculine God that I was used to as a child. This translation from Hebrew to Aramaic—and here into English—reads:
May Adonai bless you and keep you.
May Adonai shine the face of the Divine Feminine on you and be compassionate to you.
May Adonai accept the Divine Feminine for you and ascribe to you peace.
The Divine Feminine—Shechinah—is a female presentation of God, an idea that may seem radical to many today. But unlike much of the discourse in contemporary America, the idea of gender fluidity has a long history in Judaism. Chabad Rabbi Tzvi Freeman notes, “The word Shechinah is feminine, and so when we refer to G‑d as the Shechinah, we say ‘She.’ Of course, we’re still referring to the same One G‑d, just in a different modality.” Referring to God with different pronouns is accepted as a normative in Jewish tradition.
As my teacher Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig explains in Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, “‘Zachar u’nikeva [male and female]’ is, I believe, a merism, a common Biblical figure of speech in which a whole is alluded to by some of its parts.” She argues that we should not read the line from Genesis as “God created every human being as either male or female” but instead as “God created human kind zachar u’nikevah male and female and every combination in between.” If humans contain multitudes of genders that are b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God, so, too, does God contain multitudes of genders.
As we celebrate Pride, we celebrate the myriad ways in which people identify with and express gender and sexuality. We celebrate all these reflections of God—of Shechinah.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbinic Intern David Elitzer
