God and Man in 5781

During this year’s Rosh Hashanah service, just as I read about Abraham leading an unsuspecting Isaac up Mount Moriah, intent on sacrificing him, the Lev Shalem machzor downloaded onto my phone cut out. I was momentarily spared the trigger of a father taking his own son’s life, a reminder of a painful relationship with my own father. Restarting my phone didn’t help. My ancient tablet took forever to load. I had no choice but to go analog and reached for the Adler High Holiday prayer book my parents used.

It was bittersweet holding what they davened from, there in the flicker of their yahrzeit candles. The book’s cloth covers were as black as my bar mitzvah suit and the boxy Hebrew typography on its glossy pages as prim as the sitcoms of that period. Paging through this relic was at least as uncomfortable as confronting one’s bad hair in a high school yearbook. Worse, it beamed me right back to the suffocating Old Boy Judaism of my Conservative synagogue in the Bronx in the mid-1960s.

Adler’s consistently masculine pronouns gave God a distinctly male voice that the men of our shul — rabbi, cantor, sexton and their counterparts in the junior congregation — no doubt felt addressed them personally. This masculine language also reinforced my impression of Judaism as a men’s club, right down to the suits checking High Holiday tickets at the door or the boys reciting Torah blessings in their unsure, post-bar mitzvah voices. The women of our shul worked in the office and sang in the Sisterhood musicals; none shared the bimah with me during my bar mitzvah. The minyan, drawn exclusively from this men’s club, was trusted to open the ark and carry its Torah. Along similar lines, the locker room wisecracks made by my father and uncles at the first bris I attended gave Judaism the feel of a fraternity that would hardly welcome a faygele like me.

The Adler’s literary translations, worthy of a Norton Critical Edition, reproduced the meter and structure of the original Hebrew as faithfully as period instruments recreate early music. Its archaic King James Version vibe, complete with walkeths and goeths (this in 1959) betrayed its eighteenth-century English origins, appropriate for a sovereign claiming divine right. It stripped any Thou from the I and Thou and rendered God an unapproachable divine monarch, which more or less sums up the approach of my shul’s cheder classes. No wonder I learned to picture God as the proverbial old man with a white, flowing beard — not unlike that Al Hirschfeld drawing of Bernard Shaw on the cover of my mother’s recording of My Fair Lady — and a New York Yankees baseball cap. (We lived near the stadium.)

My ten year-old mind saw such hypermasculine Judaism spilling over into the equally gendered realm of sports. Both worlds emphasized feats of skill, tribal loyalty and shaming. Both made me anxious; I feared mixing up the meat and dairy silverware or flubbing a left-field catch in equal measure. God and softball tested and demanded; shirkers were exposed and lackluster performance punished. Still, if one could go home after nine innings of softball, God-as-umpire, scorekeeper and team-chooser never quit the diamond of the Jews. My pitifully unathletic self saw God’s stern hand in all those who made sure guys would “man up”: my gym teacher, father, grandfather and camp counselor. If God was nigh, as we sang around Boy Scout campfires, he was ready to call balls and strikes and banish those who couldn’t hit a softball if their lives depended on it.

Judaism’s male focus is particularly apparent in Adler’s rendering of High Holiday Torah texts. Abraham not only attempts to kill one son but is ready to off a second by banishing him and his mother. Slacker Jonah’s self-absorbed misanthropy endangers the lives of others. Yet I was taught to admire Abraham’s steadfastness and show no compassion for Jonah’s spiritual crisis. I was supposed to take Abraham’s potential violence in stride, even when it reminded me of bullying classmates, and I was to condemn Jonah’s fecklessness and his flight, even if the closeted person I was at the time recognized the need to keep secrets by keeping one’s distance. Abraham forgoes parental love, while God’s tone-deaf reaction to Jonah’s spiritual impasse compares with police arresting a disturbed person instead of helping them. These stories identify blind obedience and a very masculine abhorrence of weakness as essential Jewish values demanded by an alpha-male God.

I was taught to admire Abraham’s steadfastness and show no compassion for Jonah’s spiritual crisis.

The Lev Shalem machzor, by contrast, realizes there’s a problem with this depiction. A marginal note suggests that Abraham should have protested God’s orders. A later gloss reads Jonah’s story as a searing inner conflict rather than mere weakness in Jonah’s disobedience. Both interpretations favor understanding over judgement; they make allowances for human complexity. Adler, however, delivers these texts straight out of the box with nary a comment. Its flowery Jacobean renderings tacitly advocate submission over reflection. They ignore the cost of what these men do to themselves as well as others, condoning zero-sum, toxic masculinity.

I was glad when Lev Shalem’s gender-diverse service lit up on my phone again. The tally of three patriarchs heralding the Amidah is rounded out with the four matriarchs. Blessings appear in variant forms, not only pronoun-wise but offering gender- and theologically-neutral renderings of God’s name. Such Judaism feels less feminized than normalized, reflecting a world I want to live in. Yet traces of musty black-and-white Adler lurked in the “traditional” translations paired with contemporary versions, which prompted me to wonder when tradition becomes oppressive. When is it time, for example, to take down Confederate statues? The stories recounted during the High Holidays are part of who we are, yes, but that needn’t preclude some retooling.

And then there’s Avinu Malkeinu, the magisterial prayer for forgiveness that rarely leaves me dry-eyed. Still, the repetitions of father and king marching down the pages of both the Adler and Lev Shalem can be daunting. Lev, however, leaves these words untranslated, somehow diluting their masculine authority just enough — for English readers, at least — for them to become figures of comfort rather than power. This year, each iteration of these words clapped against my heart, releasing a tear of forgiveness for my own father.

Adler’s issues center less around text or translation but around God, an idea both fluid and amorphous, an expression of universal good and human striving that is ultimately too infinite to be contained between the covers of any book. Yet the idea has been commandeered by those who might be politely termed spiritual administrators, usually male, who, for example, prevented women from becoming Conservative rabbis until 1985. And in 2009, after Avi Weiss, my parents’ rabbi, ordained Sara Hurwitz, the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America forbade its members from ordaining women. Ten years later, the Open Orthodox yeshiva founded by Weiss himself refused to ordain a gay rabbinical student. The best translations won’t easily loosen the chokehold of such male-centered Judaism; only a change of heart and mind can. In 2016, for example, my husband and I were married by a gay male rabbi.

The rabbi leading the services I streamed began this year’s Kol Nidre service as always: by announcing that she believes in a God who doesn’t care whether someone believes in God. It is easy for nonbelieving Jews such as myself to feel comfortable with a genderless, non-judgmental divine presence, unconcerned if I choose not to play softball that evening or ever again.

Eric Gabriel Lehman’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, Raritan and elsewhere. He lives with his husband and two turtles in New York and teaches at Queens College.