Erev Rosh Hashanah 5780

“God is a Woman, and She is Growing Older,” by Rabbi Margaret Wenig

God is a woman and she is growing older. She moves more slowly now. She cannot stand erect. Her face is lined. Her voice is scratchy. Sometimes she has to strain to hear. God is a woman and she is growing older; yet, she remembers everything.
On Rosh Hashanah, the anniversary of the day on which she gave us birth, God sits down at her kitchen table, opens the Book of Memories, and begins turning the pages; and God remembers.
“There, there is the world when it was new and my children when they were young.” As she turns each page she smiles, seeing before her, like so many dolls in a department store window, all the beautiful colors of our skin, all the varied shapes and sizes of our bodies. She marvels at our accomplishments: the music we have written, the gardens we have planted, the stories we have told, the ideas we have spun.
“Now, they can fly faster than the winds I send,” she says to herself, “and they sail across the waters which I gathered into seas. They even visit the moon which I set in the sky. But they rarely visit me.” There pasted into the pages of her book are all the cards we have ever sent to her when we did not bother to visit. She notices our signatures scrawled beneath the printed words someone else has composed.
God is lonely, longing for her children, her playful ones. All that dwells on earth does perish. But God endures, so she suffers the sadness of loosing all that she holds dear.
God is home, turning the pages of her book. “Come home,” she wants to say to us, “Come home.” But she won’t call. For she is afraid that we will say, “No.” She can anticipate the conversation: “We are so busy. We’d love to see you but we just can’t come. Too much to do. Too many responsibilities to juggle.”
Even if we don’t realize it, God knows that our business is just an excuse. She knows that we avoid returning to her because we don’t want to look into her age-worn face. It is hard for us to face a god who disappointed our childhood expectations: She did not give us everything we wanted. She did not make us triumphant in battle, successful in business and invincible to pain. We avoid going home to protect ourselves from our disappointment and to protect her. We don’t want her to see the disappointment in our eyes. Yet, God knows that it is there and she would have us come home anyway.
In a single glance she sees our birth and our death and all the years in between. She sees us as we were when we were young: when we idolized her and trustingly followed her anywhere; when our scrapes and bruises healed quickly, when we were filled with wonder at all things new. She sees us when we were young, when we thought that there was nothing we could not do.
She sees our middle years too: when our energy was unlimited. When we kept house, cooked and cleaned, cared for children, worked, and volunteered—when everyone needed us and we had no time for sleep. And God sees our later years: when we no longer felt so needed; when chaos disrupted the bodily rhythms we had learned to rely upon. She sees us sleeping alone in a room which once slept two. God sees things about us we have forgotten and things we do not yet know. For naught is hidden from God’s sight.
If we were to visit, we might sit down in God’s kitchen with a cup of tea. God might say, “So tell me, how are you?” Now we are afraid to open our mouths and tell her everything she already knows: whom we love; where we hurt; what we have broken or lost; what we wanted to be when we grew up.
We look away. “I never felt I could live up to your expectations.”
“I always believed you could do anything,” she answers.
“What about your future?” she asks us. We do not want to face our future. God hears our reluctance, and she understands.
We are growing older as God is growing older. How much like her we have become.
God holds our face in her two hands and whispers, “Do not be afraid, I will be faithful to the promise I made to you when you were young. I will be with you. Even in your old age I will be with you. When you are grey headed still I will hold you. I gave birth to you, I carried you. I will hold you still. Grow old along with me….”
Ahh, that is why we were created to grow older: each added day of life, each new year make us more like God who is ever growing older.
This Rosh Hashanah we sit in the house of prayer holding in our hands pages and pages of greeting cards bound together, thousands of words we ourselves have not written. Will we merely place our signatures at the bottom and drop the cards in the mail?
God would prefer that we come home. She is waiting for us as she has waited every Rosh Hashanah, waiting very patiently until we are ready. God will not sleep. She will leave the door open and the candles burning waiting patiently for us to come home.
Perhaps this year we will be able to look into God’s aging face and say, “Avinu Malkeinu, our Mother, our Queen, we have come home.”

This is a beautiful midrash on a personal theology that really resonates during the High Holy Days. During these Days of Awe, we so often hear of God as a Father and King, and to think of God as a Divine Mother is very powerful.

It is not too far off from kabbalistic theology, which presents the concept of Teshuvah as “return to the Divine Mother.” Playing on the idea of shuvah meaning “returning,” the kabbalists ask, “to what do we return?” We often say we return to the self we most want to become, but the mystics taught that we were returning to our mother. Perhaps Kabbalah was Rabbi Wenig’s inspiration!

Rabbi Wenig’s poem moves us in ways that I never could. This is not a self-deprecating comment. It is an acknowledgement that she, and half of the world with her, has a perspective that I do not. Her experience of aging and visiting with her own children, children she formed in her body, reminded her of the High Holy Days and how we might experience a visit as we return to our Divine Mother. She takes her understanding from nurturing her children, her own longing for more time with them, her own acknowledgement of things that we want to say to our mothers, to our children. She parallels all of this with an anthropomorphized God, but not the way we usually anthropomorphize. She takes the phrase Avinu Malkeinu of the High Holy Days and flips it to Our Mother, Our Queen. This is a perspective we are not used to, but an important one from which we must learn.

We usually learn from the male perspective. The Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, was clearly written by men. The most common name for a woman in the Bible is eshet, meaning “wife of.” We learn the names of all the male characters in the Bible, but rarely know a female character. Sure, we can rattle off names of significant female character, but that is precisely because they stand out. Most of the action of our sacred narrative is dominated by male action, mannish interpretations, and men telling us what the lessons are deep within our text.

We are getting better as a society. We are listening to women when they have something to teach. Some of the greatest rabbis of this generation are women. My bookshelves are full of incredible books by Jewish women. Nechama Liebowitz, Anita Diamant, Maggie Anton, and more. One of my favorites is the Women’s Torah Commentary, which features a compendium of modern women commentators on our sacred text, and is edited, written, and published exclusively by women. We also no longer use texts or music from those who have mistreated women. This is why we never do music from Shlomo Carlebach, for example, nor would we show a movie or TV show with Bill Cosby in it. These men have done far too much damage to the feminist conversation, and using their creations can taint the learning and prayer experience for all of us.

Perhaps the most unfortunate truth in all of this is that I am ill-equipped to break the chain of masculinity in our tradition. As egalitarian as I try to be, as promoting of women’s issues as I hope to be, as much as I want us to learn together about women’s issues, I am not a woman. It could even be said that this entire sermon is mansplaining. I cannot help being born male, nor would I change a thing. I enjoy being male, but I cannot teach from the perspective offered by Rabbi Wenig or any other female teacher. My experiences are different. I have never had to read myself in to our teachings. I have never been suppressed by gender hierarchy. I have never been ridiculed or parodied for trying to push the feminine point of view into our sources of knowledge. I just cannot empathize.

But I can sympathize. I can be supportive. I can learn with you women and men alike, and put together a program where we, as a community, learn from some amazing women this year. It is with this in mind that we are announcing that our study theme for the Jewish year 5780 will be Jewish Women Authors.

In addition to studying texts written from women’s perspectives, we will be bringing out several authors so we can learn from the sources. As Ben Zoma says in Pirkei Avot, “Who is wise? The one who learns from all people.” Jewish Women authors have a completely different perspective from mine. While we cannot expect to ever learn from all people, bringing some of these authors to CBT allows us to learn from a perspective that I cannot offer.

Our first author will be Cantor Barbara Ostfeld, whose novel Catbird: The Ballad of Barbi Prim, tells the story of an auspicious and talented 8-year-old who dreams of becoming a pioneer. Cantor Ostfeld is a pioneer herself, as she is the first female cantor in Jewish history. She will be joining us for Shabbat services on November 22, which is fittingly a Musical Shabbat, where she will teach about her book and her journey. There will be a dinner before Shabbat services that evening, and she will give us a preview as we dine, and she will stick around for a book signing and Q&A after services.

In January we are working on hosting Stephane Butnick, one of the hosts of the podcast Unorthodox, and author of the released-last-week The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia. If you are not familiar with the podcast Unorthodox, you should download an episode or two and listen in your car on the way home from services today. If you are not familiar with what a podcast is, she wrote a book.

In February we will welcome USA Today Bestselling author Rochelle Weinstein, who will present her fifth novel, This is Not How it Ends, which will be released on January 1, 2020. I have read three of her other four books, and every time I am enthralled by how she so beautifully crafts her characters, and how descriptive she is of the scenes she creates. Weinstein immerses her readers into the world of her novels, and if you have the chance to read any of them you will not be disappointed.

In addition to Cantor Ostfeld and Rochelle Weinstein, we are working with brand new author Melissa W. Hunter, whose first novel, What She Lost, features a protagonist based on her own grandmother, a Holocaust survivor whose experiences shape the course of Hunter’s story.

A big thank you and shout out to Nancy Danger, who is chairing this series of authors. Nancy and I are working hard to create an interesting and meaningful series for CBT.

You may or may not know the names Cantor Barbara Ostfeld, Stephanie Butnick, or Rochelle Weinstein, and I know you trust us to bring quality presenters to CBT. But you should know we are also courting a certain author who is very familiar to this congregation. Editor of The Sacred Calling: Four Decades of Women in the Rabbinate, Rabbi Rebecca Einstein Schorr is likely to be on book tour next summer or fall with a new offering from CCAR Press, and even though it will likely be after this programming year, we know she will make her home congregation a stop on her journey.

If you are interested in bringing an author to us this year, whether you have connections to her or not, please contact Nancy Danger to get on her Jewish Women Authors team. We are looking to book a couple more authors for the year, and we know this is going to be an amazing series for all of our learners.

More information will come through our weekly emails, texts, and on the new web site. So please keep your eyes peeled, and be sure to let Nancy know if you would like to help.

Throughout the year 5780, may we become wise the way Rabbi Ben Zoma would suggest. May our learning this year bring voices that we might otherwise not hear that open us up to new perspectives. May we celebrate Women Jewish Authors and enjoy another year of learning together as a community. May we allow new points of view to enrich our engagement with our sacred tradition of education. May our learning together make the new year better and sweeter than the years before.