lot of the statuettes dug up in modern Canaan were souvenirs as well, mass produced in clay molds, sold by vendors near all of our shrines and temples, and set up in our homes to remind us of our travels. Some of us believed that they were real, and others of us didn’t. If you look into the back and front yards of America you will find countless statues of the Virgin Mary mounted on cement, or standing in glass boxes under a tree or next to a rose bush. (Mary, Miriam actually, was a lovely woman, but more about her later.) Now some of the people who have those statues pray to them, and some don’t. Some think of her as the Mother of God, others see her image as nothing more than a comforting presence, while for others that statue is a tribal symbol. “My grandmother had one in her yard. My mother has one. I have one.” And some, a minority I believe, put her statue out there because they see her as kitsch, a word and concept that I am very fond of.
We, your ancestors of three thousand years ago, were exactly the same. For many of us those goddess statuettes were simply souvenirs—artistic, decorative objects that we kept on a special shelf in our homes that some might call an altar. Others of us used our goddess images as what today you call “visual meditation devices,” and some of us had those statues in our homes because everyone else did. Some had bigger statutes than everyone else, because they could afford to, and others had no statues at all and still believed in goddesses, or didn’t, just as you might.
I now live a half a block from the Pacific Ocean, in a four-room apartment in a very diverse complex. Across the courtyard from me live the Rodriguezes, a large Mexican family of four generations. They speak almost no English but my knowledge of Ladino is useful here. They’re fervent churchgoers and believe in a very literal interpretation of the Bible. Their crowded apartment is filled with images of Mary and numerous saints, with candles burning in front of them. They pray to them constantly, talk to them, invoke them. Upstairs from me is an old hippie couple. Bob teaches yoga, Shelley is a massage therapist. Their home is filled with paintings and statues from Tibet, of Buddhas and other deities. Although he is Jewish by birth and she a former Lutheran of German and Scandinavian background, they approach their Buddhas with the same devotion (if not the same mind- or heart-set) that the Rodriguezes have for their saints.
Then there’s old Mr. Rallway next door. He’s a fiery atheist socialist, in his late 80’s. His lesbian daughter Martine and her lover Patricia live around the corner. Their home is filled with images of goddesses from all over the world, including a museum reproduction of one by Kalyah. Martine’s father is always teasing “the girls” about them. The Tomlinsons across the way are Baha’i, Tina Phillips next door, and her mother Betty, are Fundamentalist Christians. The DeBecques are from Haiti and follow an Afro-Caribbean faith. The Rams family are Hindu, and I am—well, what am I? Einstein said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God.” Spinoza was a splendid man, the first truly modern secular Jew, and his God comes close for me too. But I tell you all of this so that you get a sense of the diversity of the present, with the hope that you will use it as a lens into the past.
Although we lived in a complex world, we didn’t have television or movies or radio. For us stories, especially the ones that were told at night around a fire, were our primary form of entertainment. Because we loved to hear and tell stories we always had multiple versions of them, and that didn’t bother us. In some ways it was like what happens to you when you compare a book with the movie made from it, the remake of that movie, and the opera that was created around them: multiple versions of the same story, some of which you like better than others.
I remember an experience I had when I had first moved to North America. Being fluent in several languages including English, I got a job teaching music in a private school in New York City. One day not too long after I arrived I was invited to the birthday party of one of my students, a sweet little girl named Lissy. Her father Bruce led all the children in a game that I had never heard of before—Telephone. There were more than a dozen boys and girls at the party, all seated in a circle on the living room floor. My student’s father whispered to his daughter a sentence that she then whispered to her neighbor, who passed it on and on around the circle. The sentence Bruce whispered to Lissy was, “My father’s new car is shiny and red.” Imagine my surprise when the final student said out loud what he’d heard: “My mother’s new dog was run over and killed dead.” Lissy burst into tears when she heard it, as a sweet little puppy has been her father’s birthday present to her. Well, scripture is sometimes like that, stories passed around a circle for hundreds and even thousands of years, changing and changing.
Am I making sense here? Are you following me? I hope so. Now let me get right down to our own history. You may have read those stories about how Abraham first discovered God, but even the redactors of the Torah didn’t think so. They had Adam and Eve talking to God, along with Enoch and Noah and all of Abraham’s ancestors. In their eyes monotheism came first and idolatry came later. In some ways the religion of your ancestors was more like Hinduism than what you think of as Judaism. In Hindu scriptures you will find the most exalted writings about the absolute unity of God, sometimes known as Brahman, alongside a great riotous conflagration of deities with the kinds of biographies that are found in all of the world’s mythologies. The religion of Sarah and Abraham was rather like that.
For eons all of humanity considered God, the Absolute, to be Female. But just as many of you, born as Jews or Christians, have become Buddhists like my neighbors, or are studying with Native American or Sufi or Wiccan teachers, my ancestors were also dabbling in new and trendy religions. God hadn’t become absolutely male yet, although that was the general direction in which things were going. Sarah and Abraham belonged to a fairly new syncretistic religion that worshipped an androgynous deity known as Shaddai or El Shaddai, which literally means, “God, My Breast,” and can be interpreted as God the Nurturer, or God the Sustainer. While they built altars to Shaddai, they didn’t make images of him, but they talked about him and thought of him as a man with woman’s breasts, rather like the Egyptian god of the Nile, Hapi, who will show up in our story later on. Given that Hebrew was and is dual-gendered it was difficult to talk about and write about a Being who is both female and male, or neither. Shaddai was their best attempt to do that, an androgynous being who was never shown in pictures or statues. The closest we came to thinking of him in form was as light. Not firelight or sunlight but the primal spiritual light of the universe, from which all other things emerged.
In our mythology Shaddai, the Absolute and Unknowable Unity of all that is, had two children, which he/she birthed without another parent. One child was female. Her name was Asherah and she was the chosen deity of our ancestors. The other child was male and we called him Yah, Yah-El, or Yahweh. They were the Yin/Yang of the ancient Hebrews, or like Shiva and Shakti in Hinduism. No one made images of them but they worshipped Asherah in sacred groves, and felt the presence of Yahweh manifest through certain big rocks. Both of these elements will reappear in my story so don’t forget them. Asherah and Yahweh were the creators of the physical world and the parents of all the other gods, of which we had many. We called them the Elohim, which means “the gods,” and we saw all of them as manifestations of Shaddai, the one ultimate Creator.
Now let’s get back to the heart of the Torah story of the near-sacrifice of Isaac. It’s a very moving story in some ways, and it’s maddeningly horrific in others. That it never happened should comfort you, and yet fiction is a marvelous mirror of the soul. Sometimes we can only tell the truth about human life though artifice, which you may have discovered yourself. So I ask you now, how many children, some in body and many more in spirit, have been done in by their parents? You perhaps are one of them.
Writing was still uncommon in my childhood, and it was even more rare in the days of Sarah and Abraham, except by scribes in temples. Stories about their lives were told by all of their descendants, but they were first written down about three hundred years after they died. So think about what you know of your ancestors from three hundred years ago. Most of you probably know nothing about them, not even their names, unless they came over on the Mayflower or were titled nobility, or if you’re Mormon or have done a lot of internet research on genealogical sites. Given that we didn’t yet have books, or radio, movies,
