Mother Mary and Judaism
by Ella Rozett
With
this icon the artist, Franciscan friar
Robert Lentz, wants to remind people that
Mary and Jesus were Jewish. It's so obvious
when you read the Bible and yet people
seem to want to forget. Christians, who
honor the Jewish identity of Jesus, Mary,
and the apostles, also honor their contemporary
Jewish brethren. If, on the other hand,
we ignore that Mary and Jesus were Jews,
we enable anti-Semitism to grow. Brother
Robert Lentz depicts Mary with the kind
of star of David the Nazis made Jews wear
and with barbed wire. Indeed, Mary and
Jesus would have been killed if they had
lived in reach of the Third Reich. The
Hebrew title of his icon reads, 'captive
daughter of Zion' which is taken from
Isaiah 52.2
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Jews accept Mary as just another Jewish mother
of just another Jewish son, who could have
been the Messiah - but wasn't, as far as they're
concerned. Generally they have no interest
in Mary - or rather in Miriam. (The Hebrew
name Miriam became Maria in Latin and Mary
in English.)
Christians on the other hand, have always
had a great interest in linking Mary and Jesus
to the Hebrew Bible and tradition, albeit
in a way not appreciated by Jews since Mary
and Jesus were to replace the things held
most holy by Israel. Mary was to be the new
ark of the covenant, Jesus the new temple.
Both were to embody the Wisdom of God described
in the Hebrew Bible.
Christian Mother
of God and Jewish God the Mother
Mystical Judaism has much to say about the
feminine face of God, called Shekhinah. She
grew out of the Hebrew Bible (which Christians
call the Old Testament) and out of later Jewish
experience and imagination, just like Mary,
the Mother of God, grew out of the Bible and
Christian experience and imagination. Certain
parallels can be drawn.
Shekhinah, means 'indwelling in the world',
God's immanence. A branch of Jewish mystics,
the Kabbalists, took this immanence, Lady
Wisdom, and the Holy Spirit, and crafted from
them God the Mother, the bride of the Father.
She is the totality of divine speech - the
Word, if you will. She is his bride in heaven,
but also on earth, for she tied herself to
the people, whom God chose to wed.
As Christ is God become human, so she too
became like us in order that God might be
close to his children and lead us back home.
God the Mother loved her children so much,
that she left God the Father in heaven and
descended to be with her kids, following them
into exile. People saw her roaming the communities
of her exiled refugee children at night, wearing
black and moaning loudly in pain. She cries
over her children's suffering, over the sin
of humanity which made her leave the embrace
of her bridegroom, and over her separation
from him.
The image reminds me of the mater dolorosa,
sorrowful mother Mary, crying not only for
her son Jesus, but for all her children, her
heart pierced with seven sorrows. Shekhinah
leaving her heavenly abode to be with her
children in exile also is reminiscent of Jesus
"Who, though he was in the form of God, did
not regard equality with God something to
be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking
the form of a slave, coming in human likeness;"
(Philippians 2:6-7)
According to Kabbalah, no one can come to
God except through Shekhinah. She is to Kabbalists
what Jesus is to Christians and what Mary
is to her devotees. The Zohar, the major classic
of Kabbalist literature, says: "Shekhinah
is the opening to the Divine: 'One who enters
must enter through this gate'."(*1)
Sounds a lot like Jesus in John 14:6: "I am
the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes
to the Father, except by me." But Mary too
is called the Gate of Heaven.
The kabbalistic persona of Shekhinah developed
over the centuries. Once she had taken on
human form, she gradually came to represent
all aspects of the feminine: the chaste virgin
and the promiscuous whore, the nurturing mother
and the bloodthirsty demon, the powerful queen
and the disenfranchised refugee.(*2)
This is the main difference between the Jewish
God the Mother and the Christian Mother of
God: Shekhinah has a demonic and a sexual
aspect, that are lacking almost entirely in
Mary.
Since a wife and mother was seen as an earthly
representative of Shekhinah, Kabbalists were
encouraged to have "kosher sex". By uniting
the feminine and the masculine in a pure way,
here on earth, they were also helping God
the Father and Mother reunite in heaven.(*3)
Pure sex was to be joyful, but chaste. I.e.
you had to be married, it had to be after
midnight, in the pitch dark, you couldn't
be naked, whorish, or animal like.(*4)
As Shekhinah and pure femininity became more
and more powerful in the minds of men, the
sons of Adam got scared. A powerful feminine
principle was intriguing at first, but when
it threatened to become uncontrollable by
men, when it resisted subordination, men hurried
to "put it in its place". How? They demonized
independently powerful femininity. They claimed
that not only women, but even God the Mother
had a tendency to fall from a divine into
a demonic state when she wasn't content to
be subordinate under the male. When Shekhinah
falls, she turns into Lillith, the demon who
was meant to be the first woman, but was exiled
to the realm of demons when she refused to
lay under Adam during intercourse.
To be fair, God the Father too could fall
into demonic states when he lost his divine
bride and attached himself to her demonic
shadow.(*5) Male and
female could be divine only when they were
together and in balance. Unfortunately, balanced
gender relations in the patriarchal mind (whether
Jewish or otherwise) does not mean equality.
Instead it means that the feminine is content
in her subordination under the masculine.
Demonizing the divine Mother when she gets
out of the control of men, reminds me of the
Catholic Church's dealings with Marian apparitions.
They have become very adapt at controlling
the Mother of God. If she says anything that
is not in accord with church doctrine or if
she criticizes a bishop, she is either immediately
stamped as an apparition of the devil instead
of God or, if they're feeling gracious, she
is granted a trial period to see if she learns
to behave.
Surely, it
is hard to allow God to control us. We'd all
prefer it the other way around.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
*1: verse 1:7b
of the Zohar, The Book of Enlightenment,
transl. by Daniel Matt, Paulist Press, Ramsey,
N.J.: 1983, p.37.
*2: Raphael Patai claims she inherited all
these traits from the ancient near Eastern
goddesses. In, The Hebrew Goddess,
Ktav Publishing House, New York: 1967, pp.
187 - 190.
*3: Rabbi Leah Novick, Encountering the
Shechinah, The Jewish Goddess, in: Shilrey
Nicholson, The Goddess Re-Awakening: the
Feminine Principle Today, Theosophical
Publishing House, Wheaton, Ill: 1989, p. 208
*4: Raphael Patai, op. cit. p. 265 and Isaiah
Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology
of Texts, Vol III, p. 1394.
*5: Raphael Patai, op. cit. p. 239
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