|
Reclaiming
Melech
by
Rabbi Marcia Prager
When
Achad Ha Am called for the revitalization of Hebrew as part
of a Jewish spiritual revival, he envisioned a renaissance
in which Hebrew would once again be the vehicle of our people's
creative spiritual expression. Hebrew is now once more a living
language, carrying as part of its inheritance a wealth of
religious vocabulary. Yet, I observe with distress, that even
for fluent native speakers and certainly for most of us whose
Hebrew is a product of religious school or secular universities,
Hebrew remains a spiritually opaque language.
With
the collapse of a fundamentally religious approach to the
totality of life, (a simultaneously sad and also valuable
legacy of modernity), the inclination to view language itself
as a repository of deep and profound teaching concerning the
nature of the sacred has been largely lost. Language functions
in the West predominantly as a utilitarian vehicle, each word
conveying a discrete and limited "byte" of information.
The lexicon is huge and communication rapid.
I
observe that Hebrew as a Lashon Kodesh, a sacred language,
derives from a vastly different orientation towards the function
of language. Sacred Hebrew is a depth language, the vehicle
of a spiritual project that understands language as embodying
the outpouring energies of Creation. The Holy One "speaks"
Creation into existence. Each letter and each word are resonant
with Divinity. Each word is a rich multi-layered brocade of
imagery, woven with care into a great tapestry of meaning.
As the meaning-threads of a Hebrew word are traced back, a
web of intricately twined imagery comes into view. Each part
inf orms the whole, so that no word can be fully comprehended
without the whole of its deep weave revealed. When we travel
into Hebrew as a sacred language we enter a kaleidoscopic
journey into our people's quest to know God. In that journey
we also meet God moving towards us.
For
this reason translation of sacred Hebrew is such a frustrating
enterprise. Whole paragraphs of English can be insufficient
to convey the meaning of a single Hebrew word. The lone translation
word generally conveys a sadly atrophied sense of the Hebrew.
Further compounding the damage has been a century of stiff
hymnal prose siddur translation style, which has left many
of us a legacy of theological distress. There are many Hebrew
words which we only know in the context of these translations,
or in the context of the general Western /Protestant worldview
that is their source.
Now,
at a time in which we are moving away from male and hierarchical
religious metaphors, we encounter this distress with even
greater poignancy. We survey our liturgy and scan a plethora
of male ruler-God words. This language, we feel, neither reflects
not evokes the God we know or seek. In my work I am confronted
nearly daily with the discomfort and dissonance that words
like Adonay (translated Lord), and Melech (translated King)
cause among Jewish seekers. In the Reconstructionist Movement,
in Jewish Renewal and in feminist Jewish women's circles there
has been a rising up of creative expression, a calling forth,
from Jewish tradition and from our own hearts, of other Names
for God(/ess). Yet, perhaps precisely because the discomfort
with Adonay and Melech have been so great, and because Shem
Ad'ni , the Name as Adonay, and the image of The Holy One
as Melech are so intrinsically woven into the fabric of Jewish
prayer language and theology I have felt called to do deeper
wrestling with these words.
If
we are to liberate ourselves from the images of Melech that
are the most limiting, one "pit-stop" in that journey
must necessarily be our own childhoods. Here we get to acknowledge
that, at least for many of us, our exposure to God-language
is an exposure to the way that language is taught in childhood.
The images and their meanings are simplistic, mirroring the
hierarchy of parent and child. The King has a long white beard,
is a Zeus-like figure, stern and powerful. It is actually
not my goal to displace that image or any of the other parental
"Papa/King" images, but rather to allow it its place
as important to a part of our soul. Here the problem that
I see is that for so many adult Jews, Melech has failed to
grow up and expand along with them. Thus, part of the work
of reclaiming Hebrew as our spiritual language is an acknowledgement
that had we grown up well with our tradition, we would be
working its vocabulary with the same sophistication that we
bring to our other fields of endeavor. The word Melech becomes
centrally important precisely because it is one of the most
frozen images, while also one of the most problematic images
in terms of gender and hierarchy. Facing the double-barrel
shotgun of a feminist and egalitarian critique, it is an easy
target. Reclaiming and maturing Melech requires not an "end-run"
around simplistic imagery, but a willingness to go deep.
The
streams we can sail to explore the "depth theology"
of any Hebrew sacred-word wind through sources like T'fillah,
Aggadah, Hasidut, and then descend to tap the deep well of
our people's mystical literature, which like a life-sustaining
aquifer irrigates the whole from below. A longer treatment
on this subject would bring in teachings from an array of
sources. Here I would like to share just one, which I have
found valuable.
With
many Hebrew sacred-words, the place I start is with the letters
themselves. Jewish teaching is very strong on viewing the
letters as embodiments of processes within Divinity through
which Creation was expressed. The spiritual energies expressed
through each letter combine in words which give us clues about
the unfolding of God into the world. Melech is K l m mem -lamed-chaf
, all very powerful letters. Chaf is hand as cupped vessel:"hand
cupped palm up", ready to receive, fill and then pour
the flow to the next outstreched chaf. ( In the word baruch
it is the closing letter of a word crafted only of letters
whose meaning is an expansion of the archtype-vessel: the
triad of letters beyt, chaf, reysh (2-20-200) which calls
us to become filling and flowing vessels for Divine blessing!)
In melech, that final chaf is preceded by two other letters:
mem and lamed. Interestingly, just as baruch is a triad of
letters that are in sequence (2-200-20) , in melech, the letters
are also in sequence: chaf 20 ...lamed 30...mem 40 . This
in itself contains a teaching . It can be, that when we approach
all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet as dynamically evolving
Divine energies, then we see chaf, lamed, and mem flowing
each from the preceding letter in an unmediated stream. They
flow as an unobstructed channel from God's center towards
us as chaf lamed mem k l m , and as we yearn back towards
God we experience them as mem lamed chaf k l m . The word
is like a ribbon unfurling towards us, inviting us to follow
it back to the Source. So what can Melech teach us about the
Source?
Melech
begins with MeM ...the letter of water..MayiM... ...the iMa,
the MaMa, the Maternal Waters of Creation, the Mother-Waters,
the great Womb of Creation, Waters above and Waters below,
the great primordial seas from which all of life birthed forth,
catalyst of life-giving power.... waters of fecundity and
creativity, generativity and re-generativity... teeming with
life...teeming with potentiality. MayiM and SheMayiM, waters
and "heavens" (sheh-MayiM: the fluid places). In
Hebrew the letter MeM speaks of all that is fluid. The Waters
and the Heavens as one fluid realm. (This can be further imaged
as the realm of Yetzira, the realm of Formation, of water
taking many shapes, fluid like our dreams. In Yetzirah, we
dream the dream of Creation as a great and ongoing birthing.).
We often think of water as it comes out the tap. The stream
is small, we are big, and so we fill our cup. And yet when
the Mississippi floods, or when we enter the ocean, we encounter
the enormous power of water, its great strength and resilience.
Water is the source of fecundity, and fertility, and is also
a place of Awesome Power. The true power of the waters is
beyond what we can fathom; not only its power to birth, but
its power to own itself. No matter how great the tempest at
the sea surface, fifteen feet below is utter calm. When we
know each letter as a middah, a quality of God, then as a
creature b'tzelem Elohim, in the Divine image, I seek that
quality within my self. It must be that no matter how great
the tempest about me, there is a place in my soul where I
can find the calm of deep MayiM, where the water is deep and
powerful, producing abundant creativity from within itself,
power from within itself. MeM.
Lamed
is the letter of guidance, of teaching. It is God-ness as
melamed, teacher and guide. A taLMiD is a student. The taLMuD,
our great repository of learning, aLaMDan, is a scholar. To
"Lamed " is to guide/teach and be guided/taught.
I have always thought it quite wonderful that Lamed is such
a crooked letter. Is there any life whose path is straight?
The emunah, the trust we are called to sustain is that each
time our life turns around the next bend, there will be guidance
for us. Lamed is a dynamic process through which God guides,
channels and urges forward the flow of God's own abundance.
So
let us take these letters: the Mem, the Source-of-Birthing,
the Maternal Waters of Creativity and Power; Lamed, channeled,
guided, urged onward to the Chaf, the Hand-that-is- open-to-receive-and-share.
It is funny that in contempo-"New Age" spirituality
jargon we hear so much talk about "channeling".
Everyone seems excited with the newness of this notion of
"channeling". There are courses on learning how
to, and best sellers by those who claim they can. It is humorous
to me because it seems to me that Melech is really quintessentially
about this. Melech is the actual channeling of Creation energy
through the Lamed to the Vessel as a true and deep manifestation
of God's Presence moving towards and within the world, not
as some fad.
That
vessel, is the world of matter infused with Divinity. WE are
that vessel, our souls, our Neshamas, our hearts, our awareness.
Melech is all around us, and within us. When our hearts open
with longing to fill our world and our souls with energy from
the Ever-Birthing Source, to channel that tremendous creative
power into our human domain in the service of Kedusha, the
Sacred, the facet of the Wholly One that turns to face us
is Melech.. How not surprising it is that Malchut is also
the most proximate of the Sefirot, the doorway of Divine energy's
entrance into materiality, the feminine portal of Divine and
Human interface, also called Shekhina.
|
The Wisdom of the Rabbis |
|
