Losing My Religion: The illusion of choice in religious leave-taking
July 15, 2013
By John Halstead
Recently, Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow engaged in an online conversation at the Feminism and Religion blog over the question of whether or not to remain in the patriarchal religion of one’s birth, with Christ taking the position of the “leave-taker” and Plaskow taking the position of the “reformer-from-within”.
Christ writes that she decided to leave Christianity when she realized that she did not embrace the “core doctrines” of Christianity or its “core symbols” (i.e., God as Lord and King). She writes that, even if she had been able to revision the masculinist language, “the continued repetition of these symbols by others was influencing their individual actions and the actions of the culture they were legitimating through them—and these actions were hurting others”.
Plaskow responds that, while she finds the masculinist language problematic, when she worships with her community, “I do not experience God as king or warrior, and my experience weighs as heavily for me as what you call the core symbols of the tradition.” Christ questions whether Plaskow is concerned about how the image of God as dominating male Other will affect her granddaughter, to which Plaskow responds with this beautiful passage:
“Thinking about my granddaughter puts me in touch with a whole dense network of symbols, other than those most troubling to you, that is central to my experience of Judaism and that I hope will be part of hers. Already at fourteen months, when Hannah (my granddaughter) saw the table set for the Sabbath, she put a kippah (skullcap) on her head and pretended she was singing. True, her father recites the blessing over wine using male God-language, but is that more important than sitting with her family around the table for a relaxed meal, dipping her finger in the wine, or feeling the texture of hallah in her mouth? At her first Passover Seder, she got to see a table laden with symbols, to taste the crumbly matzah and dip parsley in saltwater, combining a taste of spring with the tears of slavery. In a couple of years, she will be able to spill ten drops from the second cup of wine when we name the plagues as an expression of sorrow for the drowning of the Egyptians. In the fall, she will taste apples dipped in honey for a sweet year, hear the blasts of the shofar, and a couple of weeks later sit in our sukkah, decorated with pine needles and laden with fruit and gourds. Certainly, none of these symbols individually is as central as the male God, but together they make a web of sensuous, embodied connections to what it means to be a Jew. She will have at least one grandmother who will talk to her about how God is in all these things and can be thought of as a girl like her and not just as male. She will grow up in a family in which asking critical questions is part of what it means to be Jewish and will be taught to think about the stories and images she is being bequeathed. Do I wish that more Jews used Marcia Falk’s blessings instead of the traditional ones? Yes. Do I see her exposure to male language as something to be discussed with her and questioned? Yes. Would I prefer that she be deprived of all these experiences because of the centrality of male language? Definitely not.“
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/allergicpagan/2013/07/15/losing-my-religion-the-illusion-of-choice-in-religious-leave-taking/
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