[HANASHIR:1761] Re: political correct lyrics

[Judy Git <hillel...>]

Okay - I put in my two cents a while ago when this first arose here, but it did 
it
pretty much on general terms.  Now I'm going to put in cents numbers three and 
four
and address the issue of liturgy directly.

Folks, I'm a teacher.  I assume that once a kid graduates from pre-school 
he/she is
wise enough to understand that when we say that we were created in the image of
G-d, this does NOT mean that G-d LOOKS like a human being.  When discussing this
with students, I point out that holding this kind of pre-school understanding of
G-d leads us to ridiculous questions such as "What color eyes does G-d have?"  
It
ALSO leads us to fixate on G-d's gender.  We KNOW that G-d is all inclusive and 
not
restricted to any one gender.  Do we really have to go into contortions by 
changing
the language or our prayers to do this??

G-d has many names, as has been pointed out parenthetically in this forum 
before.
Each name emphasizes a particular characteristic.  Even in English, we are 
pointing
at different things when we refer to Him as "The Almighty" than we do when we 
use
the term "The Holy One."  If we are really aware of Hebrew grammar, we can see
that, while G-d is most often referred to in the masculine (implying, I guess,
power and leadership to the people who wrote those prayers), He is also
occasionally addressed in the feminine, as in the term "Shchinah" and in the
beginning of the "Modim"  ("Modim anachny LACH.")  He is also very often 
referred
to in the PLURAL.  This does NOT (despite what some Christians would like to
believe) imply that G-d is more than one.  It simply implies the total 
universality
of our Creator.  The subtleties of these nuances really ought to be left alone, 
in
my humble (female) opinion, not to mention the fact that many of our prayers 
come
directly from the Torah.  Do we REALLY have the audacity to mess with the 
language
of the Torah?

I'll end where I began.  We ought to be intelligent enough and mature enough 
not to
need to reassure ourselves by worrying about politically correct language.  We 
KNOW
G-d is no more male than female in the same way that we KNOW He doesn't have 
blue
eyes or brown eyes.  Getting all caught up in pc language in our prayers 
implies  -
to me, anyway - that we are not all that certain of this and need reassuring. l 
I,
for one, do not.

Judy

Erik L. F. Contzius wrote:

> >Think of this: if we do change prayers and songs to gender sensitive ones, 
> >can
> >we do this just for the newer songs and still leave the older, traditional
> >prayers and songs in their original state?  Is this compromise a possibility?
> >If we change the traditions of the past in Jewish liturgy, mustn't we also
> >change the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Homer, Steinbeck, Leonardo da Vinci
> >(all male artists/writers on purpose)?  Isn't a little tiny something lost in
> >the process?
>
> a very valid point. it's the difference between thinking of our T'fillah as
> either transient words & thoughts that change with whatever socio-political
> wind blows or thinking of our T'fillah as a body of literature and poetry
> which are as eternal as many of the great works of art of any era, and as
> such, is always subject to interpretation and reinterpretation without
> _significantly_ changing the art itself (i.e. translating a work from one
> language to another). Can these words which have stood the test of time for
> so many years so easily be modified and changed (here, in the Hebrew)?
>
> erik l. f. contzius
> contzius (at) home(dot)com
> elkins park, pa
> http://members.home.com/contzius/