The Image of God in Judaism: Father or Mother?
(Letter from a reader)
22 Dic. 2004
I received a letter from a reader, the main points of which I report in my translation from Italian:
"...I have been puzzled by the question
why, speaking of God, we underline his peculiarities as a Father – figure,
while we don’t mention his maternal peculiarities. In the books of Prophets,
in particular, God is compared to a mother breast – feeding his children.
Sometimes he is referred to as “The Merciful”, the root of which “rachem”
is an obvious reminder of the uterus (rechem).
Another point that puzzles me is
the analysis of the fifth commandment, in which we are demanded to honor
both parents. Some commentators, including the Rambam, sustain that this
Commandment is so important, that it represents a guarantee to the other
nine. If the guarantee of the Law is a paternal role, would it not be enough
a Commandment demanding only to honor the father?"
My response has been as follows:
In the two monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam,
the image of the Mother has been forcefully repressed. When an emotion
charged with an intense energetic content is repressed, eventually presses
for recognition from behind the curtains.
In both religions, the Father God, previously severe
and cruel, assumes also some of the peculiarities that are maternal by
definition. As you have mentioned, Jahveh became Rachum, Merciful.
In a similar way, Allah, in Arabic, became Rachim.
Before the Babylonian exile, Jahveh had exclusively been
a warrior god, phallic symbol of the tribe of Judah, that brought him into
battle in order to be led by him. After the Exile, he condensed with El,
a god associated to the Northern kingdom of Israel and its tribes, and
became one god.
The idiom “Lord of the Hosts” is not to be interpreted
as an abstraction, but as a very concrete content. Abstractions are later
overlays of very concrete early realities. Before the First Exile, the
Hebrews worshipped, side by side with Jahveh, also the two Mother Goddesses
Astarte and Asherah. Therefore, at that time, God was exclusively a male
figure, and the two goddesses interpreted the maternal role.
After the return from the exile, the maternal image was
repressed and the Hebrews, now Jews, retrenched into an intolerant monotheism.
When a child loses one parent, in this case the mother,
he attaches even more to the remaining parent, in this case the father,
who becomes also a maternal image. The same happened to the Jews.
I have discussed the issue in Exodus and Intrauterine Regression. The Genealogy of Jewish Monotheism and in Exile and Monotheism .
It is not casual that in the Books of Prophets, in
particular, God is defined also with those maternal peculiarities that
you have mentioned. The Prophets were the ones who opposed the fertility
cults associated to Astarte and Asherah, and were pressing for the repression
of the maternal instance. If they wanted to impose on the people an instinct
renunciation directed at the Mother, they had to offer at least a partial
compensation, proposing a paternal instance that included some
of the maternal peculiarities now renounced. Specially, the most missed
ones, feeding – breasts and Rachamim (Mercy), with its Rechem
(uterus) connotation.
We are at the eve of the Exile, with its horrifying threat
of loss of the Land and the Temple, the two symbols of the maternal body.
As explicitly described by Jeremiah, at the beginning the Jews refused to give up the cult of the Mother Goddess:
Then all the men who knew that their wives burned incense to other gods, and all the women who stood by, a great assembly, even all the people who lived in the land of Egypt, in Pathros, answered Jeremiah, saying, As for the word that you have spoken to us in the name of Yahweh, we will not listen to you. But we will certainly perform every word that is gone forth out of our mouth, to burn incense to the queen of the sky, and to pour out drink-offerings to her, as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem; for then had we plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no evil. But since we left off burning incense to the queen of the sky, and pouring out drink-offerings to her, we have wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine (Jeremiah, 44, 15-18)."The Queen of the Skies" is the Babylonian Ishtar (Sumerian Inanna), equivalent to the Canaanite Astarte, which was a merciful Mother Mater Matuta and Nutrix, protecting her people from famine and from the sword. When she was forcefully removed from Jewish psyche, Jahveh assumed her peculiarities, and became the Rachum (the Merciful).
Islam was more successful in repressing the Mother image. However, there too, she emerges from the repression is some faint images of quasi - saints as Fatima and Mary herself.
As Herodotus reports, one thousands years before the implementation of Islam, the Arabs worshipped one main god and one main goddess:
They believe in no other gods except Dionysus and the Heavenly Aphrodite; and they say that they wear their hair as Dionysus does his, cutting it round the head and shaving the temples. They call Dionysus, Orotalt; and Aphrodite, Alilat. ( Hrdt.Hist. 3.8.3)"Alilat" is the feminine version of the Canaanite – Hebrew god El, associated to the Northern tribes of Israel. El - Allah - Alilat are male and female versions of the same Semitic god. When Alilat was removed, Allah assumed some of her maternal connotations. Therefore, the Arabs had been worshipping a sacred couple, Orotalt and Alilat, as the Hebrews had been worshipping Jahveh and Asherah in Judah, before the First Exile.
When the Mother in the sacred couple was removed, all what remained was the Father.
Concerning the second part of the question of the reader:
“Another point that puzzles me is the analysis of
the fifth commandment, in which we are demanded to honor both parents.
Some commentators, including the Rambam, sustain that this Commandment
is so important, that it represents a guarantee to the other nine. If the
guarantee of the Law is a paternal role, would it not be enough a Commandment
demanding only to honor the father?”
We must understand the latent, unconscious, significance
of the Commandment. “Honor your father and your mother” intends prohibiting
the libidinal discharge of energies on the original objects of the libido
of the child: the father and the mother.
Theodor Reik was the first to decode the events on Sinai
as an acting out of the totemic meal (“The Moses of Michelangelo and the
Events on Sinai”, supplement to “The Shofar”, in Ritual: Psycho - Analytic
Studies, Farrar & Straus, New York 1946). In another essay,
he also interpreted the Torah as a Mother Goddess ("The Re-Emerging Mother-Goddess"
in Pagan Rites in Judaism, Farrar & Straus, New York 1964, pp.
66 - 68.).
The Law, the Torah, being the Mother, unconsciously comes
from the Father. Moses climbed the sacred mountain in order to capture
her from the Father. She represents his extension and, therefore, she belongs to him. In
the biblical re – elaboration of the pre - historical events, she was granted
as a gift, but the unconscious content points to a violent act of abduction
that Moses, the delegate of the Brotherhood Horde, acts out on the behalf
of the group. The mnemonic traces of the real significance are encrypted
in the text itself. Moses descends the mountain, and “There
is a noise of war in the camp” (Ex. 32:17), and then: “And
the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play (Waiaqumu
Lezacheq)” (Ex. 32:6).
Rashi, in his commentary to this verse, says: “They committed
incest, and shed blood, because the word Zachoq has both meanings”.
These are the mnemonic traces of the totemic meal and orgy, while Moses
triumphantly raises the Tablets of the Law—the paternal penis and female
body.
The Law, the Torah, comes from the Father. Therefore,
she is his extension and part of his body: his erection. The same is the
Mother. Lacan grasped the issue when he said: “the mother is one of the
names of the father”. “Name” is an abstraction of the real thing: “the
penis”. Being a part of his body, we should say “the main part”, she must
be preserved and defended from the aggressive libidinal discharge of the
sons. As Theodor Reik has shown in Myth and Guilt, the original
taboo is the one of aggression against the paternal genital.
If we penetrate the latent sense of the text, we can
now understand also the interpretation of the Rambam: if the Father and
his Law (Mother – penis) are honored, the social order, ultimate aim of
every law, is preserved against those erotic – aggressive drives that undermine
its stability. The function of the Mother, at least in later Judaism, is
therefore interpreted as the articulation of the Father’s will.
"Hear, my son, your father’s
instruction, and reject not your mother’s Torah” (Proverbs,1:8).
In Hebrew poetry, the second part of the verse is always a synonym of the
first part. Namely, your father’s instruction
is your mother’s Torah.
The Torah – Mother representing an erotic object,
per se, and belonging to the Father, is to be honored and preserved.
Another latent level, which sucks from the primal layers
of peoples’ psychic life, condenses with these contents.
As Freud has shown, the primal deity was a mother – goddess,
then a son – god, and only later a father – god made his appearance in
the Pantheon of the peoples: the return from the repression of the assassinated
primal father (Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego,
1921, Postscript XII.B).
Judaism and Islam brought the process to conclusion,
repressing the image of the Mother and of the Son, and leaving the space
only for a sole omnipotent god. In Judaism, the mnemonic trace of a Son God - image emerge in the craving for the Messiah. In Islam, in the craving for the hidden Imam. In both religions, only a foggy nostalgia remained in the background, after that the two son - gods, leaders of the Brotherhood Horde, Moses and Mahomet, had been degraded to mortals, and transformed into Vicars of the Father. Christianity reached a compromise, in which
the son - god and the mother - goddess continued to have the prominence,
as it had been in the cults of the Greek - Roman world, in which it was
implemented.
However, the process of shifting the emphasis from Mother
to Father, which has its parallel in that stage of childish psychic evolution
in which the child begins harboring the feeling that the Father is the
one who created everything, had already been present, in embryo, in Greek mythology.
In one of the versions on the birth of Aphrodite, the
female – goddess
par excellence, associated to sexuality like her
Eastern counterparts Inanna - Ishtar - Astarte, and Asherah, we are told
that the goddess was born from the castrated penis of Ouranus, thrown into
the sea by his son Cronos.
The biblical story of Eve being born from Adam’s rib conceals – albeit in a more distorted way - the same unconscious concept of the woman as a man’s penis. As Theodor Reik has shown, Adam’s rib – from which Eve was born - is a displacement of the man's penis (The Creation of the Woman, Braziller, New York 1960, pp. 107-110).
Therefore, the Greeks, too, side by side with the archaic
myths of a world engendered from a female primal goddess, harbored the
perception, expressed in the myth of Aphrodite's birth, that the woman,
object of sexual desire, is the penis of the Father, she is its transformation,
and therefore is a part of his body. As such, she belongs to him. Sexual
desire directed at the woman becomes, in this way, an infraction against
the sacredness of the paternal penis. This is, indeed, the original taboo,
from which all taboos and interdictions derive.
As shown by Theodor Reik in Myth and Guilt, the
Original Sin, cause of the Fall, was not a sin of lust towards the female
body, but the cannibalistic aggression against the penis – body of the
god. Since the source of the sons’ aggressiveness towards the father is
in the inhibition that the latter represents against their instinctual
needs, the two, incest and patricide, are strongly associated. However,
the ancients limited the taboo to the penis – body of the god, and did
not extend that taboo to sexual desire per se.
The Jews, implementing monotheism after the Babylonian
exile, increased the restrictions towards sexuality, that had been, until
then, very scarce and almost non – existent (as it was in the midst of
other Semitic peoples) *. However, the taboo remained restricted to the body
of the Father.
Henceforth, also the interdiction of pronouncing the
name of God, because knowing and uttering the name of God is unconsciously
interpreted as an act of aggression directed at the divinity.
The Jews enlarged the concept of taboo of the paternal
penis to “your neighbor’s wife” (probably inspired by the Egyptians). However, sexual intercourse was never
considered sinful
per se. On the contrary, in Judaism, sexual intercourse
is a precept, retracing the customs of fertility cults and sacred orgies
peculiar to other Semitic peoples, as to the Hebrews before the Exile.
It is worth mentioning that, in Judaism, "adultery" refers only to
sexual intercourse with a woman who is married or engaged to another man.
Meaning, it is not the sex which is forbidden, but the possess of another
man's property. In this case, his property, his woman, is his penis, and
therefore, the sin of adultery is an aggression against the body of "the
neighbor". It is a sin of aggression, which disrupts social harmony, because it engenders hatred and desire of revenge. As is written:
Men don't despise a thief, If he steals to satisfy himself when he is hungry: But if he is found, he shall restore seven times. He shall give all the wealth of his house. He who commits adultery with a woman is void of understanding. He who does it destroys his own soul. He will get wounds and dishonor. His reproach will not be wiped away. For jealousy arouses the fury of the husband. He won't spare in the day of vengeance. He won't regard any ransom, Neither will he rest content, though you give many gifts. (Prov. 6:30-35)
At this point, we can better understand why, in every craving for another man's woman, there also is a component of latent homosexuality: lusting for the man's woman, means also lusting for the man's penis.
That the original taboo is associated to the man's penis (every aggressive content is also highly erotic), and not to sexual intercourse per se, is confirmed by the fact of the matter that in antiquity female homosexuality had never been considered a sin. In Judaism and early Christianity it is not even mentioned. The sin is erotic aggression versus a penis. All religious interdictions of mankind are intended to prevent that infraction, which is the original taboo.
On the other hand, Christianity shifted the burden of
sinfulness to sexual intercourse, even more, to "lust" itself. What had
originally been a sin of patricide aggression became a "sin of the flesh",
keeping only the mnemonic trace that "the flesh" had been that of the assassinated
and devoured Father.
Patricide was repressed and denied. However, the sense
of guilt did not disappear, but was displaced into sexuality per se.
It is a classic case of repression and displacement.
Now, we can better understand the latent meaning of the
Commandment: "Honor your father and your mother". They are both the
same thing: the Father and his penis, transfigured into Mother and Torah.
* As pointed by Freud in Totem and Taboo, in primitive tribes of savages there is a strong taboo related to marriages (exogamy). The same was probably true for our primitive ancestors. It seems that, with the progress of civilization, the peoples relaxed more and more sexual restrictions. As described by Robertson Smith, in the civilizations of the Semitic East, from Babylonia to Cyprus, orgies were custom, and with the participation of close relatives, too. Before the Babylonian exile, the Hebrews were not different from their neighbors. In this sense, Jewish monotheism represented a regression from sexual freedom to a new – old restrictive way of life in relation to sexual customs.
This is a comment on the brilliant article by L.M. Barré " El Defines Israel".
NOTE:
The Mother goddess in the First Temple
Links:
El, god of Israel--Yahweh, god of Judah
The Chariot of the Sun and the Messiah
Why Islamic Terror Now
Postscript
The missing organ
In my opinion, Judah was the one that, after the Exile, adopted the name Israel, and also adopted the traditions linked to Jacob and the Northern Tribes. Indeed, only the Northern Tribes had been previously calling themselves "Israel". After the Exile, the ones who had been only Judhaites assumed the identity of the missing part and called themselves "Israel".
Furthermore, there is no evidence that the clans of Judah and the Northern Tribes had ever been part of a United Kingdom. All the archaeological evidence points to the contrary. It seems that the version of a "United Kingdom" under the the rule of Saul, David and Salomon, has been a device invented by the post - Exile editor, to enhance the role of the House of David and the tribe of Judah. At this point, El and Yahweh condensed into a sole god.
I am inclined to agree with Ahmed Osman, who sustains that David's and Salomon's stories related to the United Kingdom refer to the Late Egyptian Kingdom of Tuthmosis III (David) and Amenhotep III (Salomon) ( Out of Egypt, Arrow, London 1999, Chapter seven).
After the Exile, Israel was the missing and missed part of the Hebrew conglomerate. In psychoanalysis, it is called the "phantom organ syndrome". When a person loses an arm or a leg, sometimes he continues behaving as if the missing organ were still there. It even aches or hurts. It happens when the patient is unable of successfully undergoing the proces of mourning.
The sudden disappearance of the kingdom of Israel, which had been the strongest part of the Hebrew tribes, was so traumatic, that could not be succesfully elaborated. As the prophet Jeremiah complains: "Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a darling child? for as often as I speak against him, I do earnestly remember him still: therefore my heart yearns for him"
(Jer. 31:20).
The disappearance of Israel was psychically denied through the assumption of the identity of the missing part. Now, Judah became Israel, and adopted also the Israelite sagas and mythology, related to the stories of the patriarchs.
Most interesting, even today the archaic mourning for the disappearance of Israel has not yet been overcome. When the Jews returned to the Land and founded a state, they did not call it "The State of Judah", as it would be suitable, but called it "The State of Israel". After all, we, the Israelis, are all Judahites, and not Israelites.
Link: El - The Bull