From the Religious Practices Committee - May 2000

(This Committee will be publishing a series of articles explaining why and how we perform certain rituals in our congregation.)

"Naming God"

Prayer is the act of talking to God. The words that we use reflect our deepest desires, fears, joys and beliefs. As such, the way in which we address God is extremely important. Maimonides writes that we can never fully know what God is - we can only know what God is NOT. When it comes to naming God, we are always going to somehow come up short.

Today, many of our prayers are recited in English. When we translate prayers, we are confronted with difficulties. All translation is commentary - whether intentional or not. The preconceptions, prejudices and lifestyle of the translator are inexorably linked with the final product. In recent years, the issue of God language has become increasingly important as we have striven to become more egalitarian in our words and worship. For most of us, the image of God as an old man with a flowing beard is indelibly linked in our minds. When we speak of God as a "He" we are, consciously or unconsciously, reinforcing this image and, by extension, limiting God. This is also a factor when we refer to God as "Lord" or "Master" or even "Sovereign."

It is for this reason, among others, that we are striving to eliminate gender references for God and humanity from the service. Can removing gender go overboard? Of course it can. Sometimes removing pronouns from our prayers results in a sanitized liturgy - what I call praying to "To Whom It May Concern..." The biggest problem with egalitarian language occurs when our service includes prayers that are not gender-specific. When the prayer book says: "Lord" and the service leader says: "Adonai" or "Eternal," confusion results. Not everyone is sure what to say. There are times on Friday nights when the sound of multiple pronouns and names becomes quite chaotic. And yet, that very chaos is also a sign of the struggle that we face in coming to terms with an adult conception of God.

The Religious Practices Committee is in the midst of a long-term project of creating prayer books that are both meaningful and non-gender specific. We have completed our Shabbat morning service and are about to embark on Friday night. We ask patience as we work to create a liturgy that is both uplifting and reflective of our values and experience.

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