If God Is Gender-Fluid, Why Not Call Her a ‘She’?
Embracing a spirituality in which God is less of an authoritarian, more like a blade of grass
A few years ago, I came across a thoughtful op-ed in the New York Times by Rabbi Mark Sameth. In it, he made a provocative suggestion: God was not, in fact, a He. In the Jewish tradition, God is transgender.
“Counter to everything we grew up believing, the God of Israel — the God of the three monotheistic, Abrahamic religions to which fully half the people on the planet today belong — was understood by its earliest worshipers to be a dual-gendered deity,” Sameth asserts.
I appreciate this perspective for multiple reasons. First, I research and write about ancient Goddess worshipping traditions, and it’s incredibly refreshing to see anyone suggest that God might be something other than an old, white dude towering above us all. Second, his suggestion flew in the face of everything I learned about God as a kid. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, and while most of the talk was about Jesus and how He represented love, I had enough exposure to the Old Testament version of God (plus the viewpoints of those in my religious community) to know full well that He damn sure wasn’t a woman. To suggest that He was a She would not have been simply silly or foolish…
