c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ In the ground-breaking new”Book of Blessings,”feminist poet and Hebrew translator Marcia Falk has created new metaphors for God that transcend the personal and human form in which God is normally addressed.

Gone, for example, is the traditional opening of Jewish prayers:”Praised are you, Lord Our God, King of the universe.”Falk instead opts for images of a divinity that permeates the natural world: “Let us bless the source of life

that brings forth bread from the earth.” Rooted in centuries of Jewish liturgical tradition, her blessings are meant to appeal to people of many faiths who find no meaning in a God described in human terms, be it the God of the Fathers or the feminine Spirit.”I can’t speak to a personal God,”Falk told an audience of scholars at the annual American Academy of Religion meeting in New Orleans in November.”To me this would simply be bad faith.” Most striking in Falk’s 530-page volume of Jewish prayers and poems, 13 years in the making and now published by Harper San Francisco, is the spare elegance of her blessings, some less than a dozen words on a single page.

Rather than praise God, she says, they are intended to”intensify life by increasing our awareness of the present even while awakening our connections to the past.” The traditional prayer after a meal, for example, is transformed into an occasion to acknowledge the source of nourishment and”seek sustenance for all who dwell in the world.”The prayer for washing the hands becomes a time to reflect on the”the holiness of body,”both sensual and sacred.

Her version of the Sh’ma, the best-known piece of Jewish liturgy, represents the poet at her most subversive. She replaces the classic declaration of monotheism _”Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is One”_ with a prayer about the unity of creation: “Hear, O Israel _

The Divine abounds everywhere

and dwells in everything;

the many are One.” And she substitutes ritual commandments with promises to protect the Earth and pursue justice and peace. “How does one dare to rewrite the Sh’ma?”she asks of the prayer that is the last words Jewish martyrs are said to have uttered.

Her answer:”We ought to try to say what we mean when we pray,”rather then clinging to ancient words for the sake of tradition.

Yet Falk is by no means the first Jewish commentator to reject anthropomorphic images. Maimonides, the leading intellectual figure of medieval Judaism, stressed God’s lack of physical existence and chastised people who took literally such biblical expressions as”the fingers of God.” Spinoza, a 17th-century philosopher, enraged Jewish traditionalists when he equated nature with God. And four centuries later, the contemporary Jewish Reconstructionist movement denied the existence of a personal or supernatural deity.

But if such thinking has been the stuff of commentary, it has rarely been reflected in prayer. Although there have been numerous exceptions, Jewish law banned new blessings after the 6th or 7th century. And even liberal Jewish communities that have changed”God-language”in English translations, have been loathe to alter the original Hebrew.

So it was with”fear and trembling”that Falk began writing her first blessings in both Hebrew and English in the early 1980s.

(OPTIONAL TRIM BEGINS)

She was well suited to the task. As a doctoral student in comparative literature at Stanford University, she had translated the Hebrew Bible’s Song of Songs into English _ a translation Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer described as”better than the King James version.”She loved the”pleasurable escape into the realms of sensuality, nature and Eros”in the only biblical book in which women speak more lines than men.

Her next project, translating Psalms, produced no such reverie, as she grappled with the monarchical language. “It was if a huge boulder was thrust before my eyes,”she later wrote,”and the boulder was: The Lord God Our King.” Praying in the synagogue proved just as troubling. Falk tried changing the liturgical language as she read, but”the dissonance became too great.” It wasn’t until an old friend, writer and activist Arthur Waskow, asked her to create meditations on the four blessings for a Havdalah service that marks the end of the Sabbath that Falk admitted she she no longer said the traditional prayers. “I can’t use those blessings anymore,”she told him. “So write your own,”he said. “I can’t,”she protested.”They’ll stone me.” But she wrote her blessings, which”came and went as if (they were) the most natural thing in the world.”And when she recited new benedictions at a 1984 Jewish spirituality conference in Los Angeles, 500 people rose to say”amen.” (OPTIONAL TRIM ENDS)

Only when Moment magazine published her first blessing in March 1985 did the controversy begin.

Her critics charged that her prayers were not authentically Jewish, and they accused her of breaking with the religious community by deviating from the prayers that unite Jews worldwide. Moreover, they said, she denied worshipers the possibility of an intimate relationship with the divine by reducing God to an abstraction, a criticism that continues a decade later.

Many Jewish worshipers, Falk countered, have no experience of such a personal relationship with a transcendent”Other,”but feel connected to a larger universe.

As a woman immersed in Hebrew and Jewish tradition, her prayers, she maintained, were distinctively Jewish. Her blessings emerged from years of dialogue with ancient theological and historical sources, connections upon which she elaborates in the scholarly commentary accompanying her prayers.

Rabbi Larry Hoffman, professor of liturgy at Hebrew Union College in New York, agrees.”I welcome `The Book of Blessings’ as being continuous with Jewish liturgical tradition in its broader sense,”he told an audience at the American Academy of Religion meeting.”Its use of Jewish liturgy’s essential structure, its serious attention to Hebrew as the ritual language of Jews, and above all its aim in formulating blessings, albeit transformed.” The success of the transformation, say Falk’s supporters, comes from her melding of a scholar’s mind and a poet’s voice. Much feminist liturgy, notes Judith Plaskow, author of”Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective,”is”an intellectual response to perceived problems in the traditional prayerbook,”often written by individuals or committees with no particular artistic gift. “`The Book of Blessings,'”Plaskow says,”is a Jewish feminist prayer book of genuine religious depth and enormous power.” Still, Plaskow is among the readers who miss the presence of a personal God in Falk’s work, the anthropomorphic language that permits intimate conversation and”the luxury of protest against God, a theme in Jewish theology I deeply value.” Falk has no interest in replacing traditional prayerbooks for people who find some or all of that language sustaining.”No single prayerbook, like no single image of the divine, can express the totality of the whole,”she says. Rather, she says she is writing for Jews and others who feel alienated from prayers that do not reflect their deepest beliefs.

Self-declared believers and non-believers have told Falk they find sustenance in her blessings, she says. When asked whether she considers herself a believer, Falk says it depends on how one defines the terms.

If believing means sensing a personal relationship with God-as-Other, she is not a believer. But if it means sensing”the unifying wholeness within creation,”the sense of the sacred that may be found”whenever our heart and minds, our blood and souls are stirred,”she is, indeed, a believer.

MJP END LIEBLICH