Anthropomorphic Angst

164 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 In bequeathing the midrashic approach to us, the rabbis did not envision that women-ordinary women as well as biblical scholars and professors of comparative literature-would read themselves into the communalprocess ofongoing interpretation. They could not imagine what the authors, editors, and contributors of these four volumes have demonstrated: that contemporary Jewish women would wrestle with the biblical texts for meaning for our lives; that we would embrace that process ofseeking meaningfor our lives as an obligation-an obligation we claim with joy as well as with all our strength, anger, pain, fierce loyalty, longing, and love. Jewish women today are moving from the background to the foreground, from silence to speech. Countertraditions, The Nakedness of the Fathers, Out of the Garden, and Reading Ruth will facilitate this movement. These four volumes, with all their honesty and insight, will embolden Jewish women to return to the texts of the tradition and claim them as our own. They will encourage us to dare to seek out Miriam's well here and now, to dare to expect there will be room enough for every Jew at her well, to dare to risk the pain of rejection by approaching the well, to dare to trust that there is an inexhaustible supply of water, to dare to dip our hand-made vessels into Miriam's well of silence full of meaning to draw forth water for life, and to dare to speak that meaning out loud. Anthropomorphic Angst by Sylvia Barack Fishman Brandeis University God's Phallus, and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism, by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. 312 pp. $27.50. For millennia, rabbinic commentators have averted their eyes ~hen biblical contexts suggest that· God might be envisioned, in anthropomorphic terms, as having the same reproductive anatomical apparatus as the human male. This avoidance signals more than delicacy or propriety, suggests Howard Eilberg-Schwartz in his fascinating new book, God's Review Essays 165 Phallus. Rather, rabbinic discomfort with the Creator as a phallic male reflects avoidance which is based in the biblical text itself. Unlike the creation narratives of cognate cultures, the Hebrew Bible, with very few exceptions, is almost devoid of language overtly describing God's symbolic loins. Those few passages which do contain such imagery are striking in their isolation; they are the exceptions which prove the rule. Moreover, Eilberg-Schwartz argues, biblical and rabbinic avoidance of such imagery indicates a profound anxiety about its possible homoerotic implications. Averting one's eyes from the loins of the divine father is linked to a similar aversion in dealing with human fathers, the author states. In Genesis, for example, when Noah makes himself drunk on wine after the flood's end and lies in unwitting dishabille, the son who views his besotted father's nakedness with equanimity dishonors his father and himself: the sons who avert their eyes and respectfully cover their drunken father restore his and their own decent humanity. Biblical and rabbinic traditions linked the principles of respectful distance from both human and divine fathers, says Eilberg-Schwartz: "An Israelite male who gazed at God was like Ham, who looked at his naked father. Israelite men were expected to be Semites, virtuous sons of Shem who avert their gaze from their father in heaven" (p. 97). However, when the powerful father or father figure invited a son or servant into a more familiar posture, such a gaze might not be dishonoring . A father or master might invite his son or servant to seal an oath by placing a hand under his thigh, for example, without either one of them incurring any dishonor. Similar protocols applied when dealing with the divine father. Only Moses was given permission to speak with God "mouth to mouth" (Num. 12:8), and the rabbinic commentaries link this intimacy between Moses and God with the tradition that he separated himselffrom conjugal relations with his wife Zipporah. Eilberg-Schwartz reports that in a tangentially related story about the sons ofAaron, Nadav and Avihu, who bring "strange fire" into the holy of holies and are killed by God for doing so (Lev. 10:1-3...