Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Love of God:

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Insights

The Reverend Patrick J. Ryan, S.J. Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society

Fordham University

R E S P O N DE N T S

Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Theology, Fordham University

Amir Hussain, Ph.D. Professor of Theological Studies

Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles

TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 2019 | LINCOLN CENTER CAMPUS

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10, 2019 | ROSE HILL CAMPUS

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The American comic writer and cartoonist, James Thurber

(1894-1961), created a series of cartoons for The New Yorker

more than sixty years ago under the general title, “The Battle

of the Sexes.” It had no connection with later tennis games.

Thurber was gradually losing his eyesight at the time and

sometimes the cartoons arrived at their hilarious captions

because of mistakes he had made in draftsmanship. I liked

one in particular called “The Fight in the Grocery” which

showed men and women firing bottles and cans at each

other in the aisles of a small supermarket.

In the Mesopotamian valley 6000 years ago, the battle of the sexes was a struggle between male and female gods. In the Akkadian creation epic, Enuma elish, the ordered cosmos is imaged as the result of previous violent interactions within the assembly of divine cosmic forces.1 When the mother-chaos figure, Ti’amat, imaginatively associated with the salt sea, resents the noise made by the younger generation of gods, war ensues.

Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Love of God:

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Insights

The Reverend Patrick J. Ryan, S.J.

Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society Fordham University

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Ea, Ti’amat’s son but also her enemy, identified with the earth,defeats his mother’s ally, Apsu, a male god associated with the sweet waters that ever after remain below the earth.2 In the Babylonian recension of this creation story, the god of Babylon, Marduk, replaces his father, Ea. Marduk defeats the forces of chaos, achieving absolute royal power for himself over the other gods, whom Marduk dragoons into the construction of Babylon.3

The battle of the sexes is not the same thing as sexuality as a larger reality, or at least I hope not. There has been much discussion in recent years, at least in the countries around the North Atlantic, of gender theory, with some important voices questioning the distinction between male and female as anything more than a social construction. In the Global South, however, much more traditional views of sexuality and of what it is to be male an d what it is to be female still prevail. These views in the Global South reflect ancient patterns of thought that were once taken for granted in the North Atlantic community. Living as we do at a time when the Catholic Church is confronted, as are some other religious and secular institutions, with multiple problems connected with sexuality, and especially sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable adults, it is important to recognize that sexuality has a sacred meaning in the great monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

In what follows, I want to draw your attention to how very human forces, male and female, interact with each other in the imaginative creation of worlds of faith, worlds of spirituality. How, in particular, do our understandings of human sexuality color how those of us who are Jews, Christians, and Muslims think about God?

SEXUALITY, SPIRITUALITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD: JEWISH INSIGHTS

Before the Children of Israel existed—the progeny of Abraham and Sarah—the world existed. There are two accounts of the creation in the Book of Genesis, the first attributed to the so-called Priestly source (P) and the second to a combination of the Yahwist and Elohist sources (J &

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E). Both of these narratives have much to say about the human interaction of male and female from the dawn of creation. For the purpose of this lecture, I will concentrate only on the Priestly source. According to that source, humankind was created by a majestic decree. “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humankind in his image, / in the image of God he created them; / male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’” (Gen 1:26-28a).

The rabbis of the early centuries of the Common Era, whose late antique interpretations of the Book of Genesis are compiled in the fifth-century midrash called Bereshit Rabbah, speculate about what it meant for the human being—Adam—to be created both male and female. To Rabbi Samuel ben Nahman, one of the Amoraim of the third and fourth centuries CE, is ascribed the opinion that “When the Lord created Adam, He created him double-faced, then He split him and made him of two backs, one back on this side and one back on the other side.”4 This sounds a bit like Aristophanes’ explanation of love in Plato’s Symposium.5 One intriguing rabbinical speculation suggests that God created the human being (Adam) “with four attributes of the higher beings [i.e., angels] and four attributes of the lower beings [i.e., animals].”6 Like the higher beings, human beings stand upright, speak, understand, and see. Like the lower beings, human beings eat and drink, procreate, excrete, and die. Why were human beings so created? Rabbi Tifdai speaking on behalf of Rabbi Aha, another of the Amoraim, gives God’s reason for making human beings this way: “If I create him of the celestial elements he will live [forever] and not die, and if I create him of the terrestrial elements, he will die and not live [in a future life]. Therefore I will create him of the upper and the lower elements: if he sins he will die; while if he does not sin, he will live.”7 Note that both the higher attributes (including human spirituality) and

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the lower attributes (including human sexuality) all contribute to the whole nature of Adam as the image and likeness of God.

There is a great deal more written about sexuality and spirituality in the Hebrew Bible and its early Jewish commentaries, but the only book in the Bible totally dedicated to the subject of sexuality and spirituality is the Song of Songs (Shir ha-Shirim). Although some voices in the ancient rabbinic traditions disapproved of the Song of Songs, Rabbi Akiva, the most influential rabbi of the late first and early second centuries CE, defended it vigorously: “All the Scriptures are holy, but The Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies!”8 On the surface a series of love poems or epithalamia, these songs have served Jews for many centuries as metaphors for God’s love for Israel and Israel’s love for God.

Israel, the Lord’s bride, speaks the first words in the book: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!/ For your love is better than wine” (Song 1:2). The rabbis of the early centuries CE find the first two commandments of the Decalogue (in the Jewish counting of comandments) symbolized in this verse: “The whole Torah contains six hundred and thirteen precepts. The numerical value of [the letters in the alphabet of the Hebrew word] ‘Torah’ is six hundred and eleven, and these Moses communicated to us. But ‘I am’ and ‘Thou shalt not have’ we heard not from the mouth of Moses but from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He.”9 By asserting that the first two commandments come from the mouth of God and not from the mouth of Moses, these early rabbis were suggesting that the first two commandments are purely divine locutions. “I am the Lord your God...; you shall have no other gods before me” (Ex 20:2-3). In this reading of the Song of Songs, the sexual relationship between woman and man is intimately connected with and symbolic of Israel’s faith.

The groom in the Song of Songs proves equally passionate about his bride; his words also come in for symbolic interpretation involving the origins of Israel in the era of the patriarchs and matriarchs: “Arise, my love, my fair one, / and come away; / for now the winter is past, / the rain

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is over and gone” (Song 2:10b-11). The contributors to this midrash on the Song of Songs connect the command “Arise” (qumi), spoken by the groom to his bride in the Song, with the command, Lech lecha (“Get up”: Gen 12:1) spoken by the Lord to Abram in the Genesis account of his call to leave Haran and journey to the land of Promise. The rabbis authoring the midrash associate the groom’s next words with the binding of Isaac, his near sacrifice by Abraham: “My love, My fair one: O daughter of Isaac, who drew close to Me and glorified Me on the altar.” The succeeding words of the groom associate the bride with Jacob (Israel), the son of Isaac, who was sent back to Paddan-aram to seek a wife, rather than marry a local Canaanite. “And coMe away, O daughter of Jacob who listened to his father and his mother [and went away], as it says, And Jacob hearkened to his father and his mother, and went to Paddan-aram (Gen. xxviii, 7).”10 The words of the groom in the Song of Songs are coded, expressly identifying the Lord’s bride with the first ancestors of Israel—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. In such a coded reading, sexuality and marriage have serious implications for Israelites, the recipients of the covenant offered by the Lord. The lineage of their ancestors in faith continues and should continue through marriage, but only through marriage within God’s people. Sexuality and marriage outside God’s people leads to disaster.

Nothing is simple in the developing tradition of Israel. In the Spanish Jewish community of the thirteenth century CE, Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition handed down from generation to generation, reaches one of its most vibrant and complex developments. The Zohar, the Book of Enlightenment or Splendor, usually attributed in modern times to the authorship of Moses de Leon (d. 1305), enunciates a number of esoteric themes. The Zohar is fictively attributed to the authorship of Rabbi Shim’on ben Yohai, a Jewish scholar of the second century CE. The words attributed to Rabbi Shim’on offer homiletic commentary on passages from the Torah, especially from Genesis and Exodus; these passages of commentary claim to be Rabbi Shim’on’s own Mishnah, the heart of a new, mystical Talmud.

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Crucial to understanding the Zohar is a rudimentary understanding of its symbolic core, a complex vision of God combined with a complex vision of the human being created in the image and likeness of God. This vision of God discerns in the absolute oneness of God the interaction of ten divine characteristics (sefirot), some of them considered male and others female. All the ten sefirot emanate from God but also include God; the whole body of the sefirot is also a primordial Adam, created both complex and simple in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:27). The sefirot are figuratively represented as ten circles, vaguely suggesting a human figure. On the top in the center is Keter, the Crown, co-eternal with Ein Sof, the Unutterable and Infinite God, not symbolized by any circle. Placed like shoulders below the Crown are Hokhmah on the right and Binah on the left, Wisdom and Understanding. The next paired circles include Hesed, Love, as the right arm, and Gevurah, Power, as the left arm. On the next level down, only one circle at the center depicts the center of God, God’s belly or womb: Tif ’eret, also identified as Beauty or Mercy (Rahamim). Once again, another level down, circles appear on the right and the left, like right and left legs, Netzach (Endurance) and Hod (Majesty). On the same central line that descends from Keter through Tif ’eret is found a circle called Yesod, identified symbolically with the phallus of Adam, but also with Foundation and Covenant. Directly below that circle comes the last of the sefirot, Shekhinah, the divine presence or indwelling in the world, also identified with Malkhut, the majesty of God first symbolized by the Crown (Keter).11

Within the Zohar one very short portion dwells homiletically on two verses from the Priestly source in Genesis: “This is the book of the generations of Adam. On the day that God created Adam, in the likeness of God He created him; male and female He created them. He blessed them and called their name Adam on the day they were created” (Gen 5:1-2). Rabbi Shim’on meditates on this Torah passage, asking what it means to be created male and female “in the likeness of God.”

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‘Male and female He created them.’ From here we learn: Any image that does not embrace male and female Is not a high and true image. We have established this in the mystery of our Mishnah. Come and see: The Blessed One does not place His abode in any place where male and female are not found together. Blessings are found only in a place where male and female are found, as it is written: ‘He blessed them and called their name Adam on the day they were created.’ It is not written: ‘He blessed him and called his name Adam.’ A human being is only called Adam When male and female are as one.12

The complementarity of male and female, according to the Zohar, occurs not only in marriage but also within the humanity of each person, and also within the structure of all that exists—even in the complex unity of God. Sexuality is not alien from spirituality but an essential element in it. The love we have for God, or should have for God, and the love God certainly has for us, entails loving the fullness of what it is to be human, male and female. The Zohar goes beyond the complementarity of male and female images in Genesis and the Song of Songs, a complementarity supporting the inner coherence of Israel as the people of God. The Zohar suggests that all of humanity, all of reality in its complexity and complementarity, mirrors and magnifies the Lord God.

SEXUALITY, SPIRITUALITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD: CHRISTIAN INSIGHTS

My earliest theological opinion, I must admit, was not my best. The son of a widow, I had only one living grandparent, my mother’s mother. That

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was how, at the age of four, I came to the conclusion that Jesus, like myself, was the surviving son of a dead father and an even deader grandfather. At that time, you should understand, the Holy Spirit was usually known as the Holy Ghost. My mother, my first catechist, gently disabused me of my theological error.

As the years went by I saw how frequently Catholic traditions of piety have identified both the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary with the Hebrew Bible’s image of Wisdom. Catholics venerate Mary as the Seat of Wisdom, the woman who provides a maternal lap to the incarnate Wisdom of God. Much of this derives from the Hebrew Bible’s notion of a primordial feminine creation of God, God’s primary spokesperson or even co-worker in the process of creation, as in the Book of Proverbs. “The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, / the first of his acts of long ago. Ages ago I was set up, / at the first, before the beginning of the earth” (Proverbs 8:22-23). The deuterocanonical Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach continues in the same direction. “Wisdom praises herself, / and tells of her glory in the midst of her people. / In the assembly of the Most High she opens her mouth, / and in the presence of his hosts she tells of her glory” (Sir 24:1-2). Such scriptural motifs may well have contributed to the complex vision of God just described in the Zohar. Imagistically, the Spirit of God or the Holy Spirit is often identified with Wisdom, feminine in Hebrew (Hokhmah), Greek (Sophia), and Latin (Sapientia). In the Zohar, however, Hokhmah is considered masculine, despite its grammatical gender. The spirit of God or wind (ruach) from God in Genesis 1:2 is also feminine in Hebrew. In the Greek of the New Testament, however, the Father and the Son are imagistically and linguistically masculine; the Holy Spirit is linguistically neuter (to hagion pneuma).

God is neither male nor female, but in some analogical sense God is both, and, in another sense, neither, transcendent, beyond our human ken or gender categories. A contemporary Anglican theologian, Sarah Coakley, has started what promises to be a three-volume systematic theology with a substantial volume entitled God, Sexuality, and the Self:

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An Essay ‘On the Trinity’.13 Well-versed both in the Scriptures and in early Christian theological writing, Coakley proposes a doctrine of the Trinity that gives priority to God’s Spirit, for Coakley the feminine and maternal image of God. She privileges what she calls this prayer-based, ecstatic, or “incorporative trinitarianism”14 over the other New Testament image of the Trinity, which Coakley calls the “‘linear’ and ‘hierarchical’ model”15 of the Trinity. This linear or hierarchical model is that divine mystery as we invoke it in the formula of baptism “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mt 28:19). By naming the Son and the Spirit in second and third place, the baptismal formula—and creeds derived from it—may seem, as Coakley suggests, to demote the Son and the Spirit from equality with God the Father. Such subordination of the Word was the opinion of Arius deemed heretical at the Council of Nicaea (325), and subordination of the Holy Spirit was the opinion of the Pneumatomachians deemed heretical at the Council of Constantinople (381).

Coakley’s “incorporative trinitarianism” is reflected in several parts of the New Testament. In the Epistle to the Romans Paul presents the Trinity, as it were, inside out: the Spirit first, and then the Son in relationship with the Father. “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom 8:15-17). For Paul prayer is an utterance of God’s Spirit welling up within faithful Christians, assuring them that they are children of God—children precisely because they are adopted into Jesus, baptized into God’s unique Child. Mark’s account of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist gives a hint of the relationship to God that all baptism effects: “And just as [Jesus] was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven and said, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’”

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(Mk 1:10-11). Coakley also points out that in Luke’s account of the Annunciation the same incorporative model of the Trinity is suggested: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God” (Lk 1:35).

Whatever one may think of Coakley’s incorporative trinitarianism and her understanding of the Holy Spirit as in some analogical sense feminine, it cannot be denied that in the history of the Christian churches women have not played a very visible hierarchical role. In recent decades, however, many churches tracing their history to the sixteenth-century reformation have created a female ministry, even to the level of the episcopacy. Prominent voices among the Catholic laity, at least in this country, sometimes call for the same development in the Catholic Church.16 On the other hand, the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic traditions have preserved for many centuries the role of widows and consecrated virgins in Church life, women who may be subordinate in terms of hierarchical rank, but all-important in the exercise of prophetic roles, gifted with charisms not connected with sacramental ministry. Protestant separation from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions had for several centuries entailed a certain loss of this distinctive female ecclesial presence, whether as cloistered contemplative nuns or as active ministerial sisters. Such vowed religious women, undefined by linkage to husbands, have acted as prophets rather than as sacred officiants in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions. In this role they continue the prophetic ministries of Elizabeth and Mary, the mothers of John the Baptist and Jesus, as well the ministry of that habituée of the Jerusalem Temple in Luke’s Gospel, the “prophet Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher... [who] came [into the Temple] at that moment, and began to praise God and to speak about the child [Jesus] to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem” (Lk 2:35, 38).

In the Roman Catholic tradition, women religious have often spoken out prophetically. They have criticized and advised popes and have stood up,

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when necessary, to other male ecclesiastics. Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century, Catherine of Siena in the fourteenth century, Teresa of Avila in the sixteenth century, Mary MacKillop in the nineteenth century, and the nuns and their lay colleague raped and murdered in El Salvador in 1980: all exercised considerable prophetic influence on the Church, and especially on male ecclesiastics. In the last few months, a Nigerian Superior General of the Holy Child Sisters, Veronica Openibo, has spoken truth to male ecclesiastical power at the recent summit meeting in Rome on the Church’s problems with the sexual abuse of minors.

The spirituality of these female prophets sometimes has expressed itself in complex sexual imagery, notably so in the life of Teresa of Avila (1515-82). Born Teresa Sanchez de Cepeda y Ahumada in Avila in the Kingdom of Castile, Teresa was the granddaughter of a Castilian Jew, a man who had become a Catholic but was once accused of remaining a Marrano, a secret Jew. Teresa grew up in Catholic prosperity and piety. At the age of 20, Teresa joined other ladies of piety and leisure in the Carmel of the Incarnation at Avila. Over the next nineteen years it gradually dawned on her that this was not the life a Carmelite was supposed to lead. The story of her reform of Carmel convents is well known, as is the effect she had on the male Carmelites through her spiritual son, John of the Cross (1542-91).

The task of Carmelite reform was not easy and both Teresa and John suffered at the hands of religious and episcopal authorities. Teresa sometimes expressed her experience of God in the ecstatic language of love, and especially her experience of the “transverberation,” the angelic piercing of her heart with the spear of God’s love. Bernini’s statue of this experience in the Roman Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria is famous.

I would see beside me, on my left hand, an angel in bodily form—a type of vision which I am not in the habit of seeing, except very rarely...He was not tall, but short, and very beautiful, his face so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest types of angel who seem to be all afire... In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point

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of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, nor will one’s soul be content with anything less than God. It is not bodily pain, but spiritual, though the body has a share in it—indeed, a great share. So sweet are the colloquies of love which pass between the soul and God that if anyone thinks I am lying, I beseech God, in His goodness, to give him the same experience. 17

Teresa’s experience of the spousal love of God she communicated as well to John of the Cross, a man who felt no inhibitions about comparing his own soul to the bride in the Song of Songs. The very first stanza of John’s Spiritual Canticle speaks about the bride’s sense of abandonment by the groom, a sense of abandonment that John of the Cross recognized as his own:

Where have you hidden, Beloved, and left me moaning? You fled like the stag after wounding me. I went out calling you, but you were gone.18

Teresa of Jesus and John of the Cross in the sixteenth century were only two of the most eloquent Christian mystics and writers to express their spirituality, their deepest faith in God, in such passionate and even sexual imagery. God, the lover of souls—your soul and mine—can bring all of us into the realm of the Song of Songs. More could be said about the soul and God as ardent lovers, but time forbids. In any case, as you can see, I have come a long way from my childhood idea of the Trinity as Jesus, his dead father, and his deader grandfather. Suitably enough, it was a woman, my widowed mother, who first guided me down this path towards God.

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SEXUALITY, SPIRITUALITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD: MUSLIM INSIGHTS

Every surah of the Qur’an but one (Qur’an 9)19 begins with the basmalah, the phrase bi-’smi’llahi-r-rahmani-r-rahim: “In the name of God, Filled with Mercy, Ever Merciful.” Many activities performed in a Muslim setting begin with the same phrase, or a shorter version: bi-’smi’llahi: “In the name of God.” To speak the name (ism) of any human person in Arabic is to address him or her by the single part of longer Arabic nomenclature that denotes the person as such apart from any relationship of kinship, clanship, profession, nationality, or the like. Although there are traditionally ninety-nine “most beautiful names of God” (asma’ al-husna), Allah is the quintessential name of God. To begin worship “in the name of God” means that the person praying locates himself or herself spiritually in God’s Name, plunges himself or herself into the Reality of God.

In my somewhat clumsy translation (“Filled with Mercy, Ever Merciful”) of two of the “most beautiful names” of God that follow the opening words of the basmalah, I am striving to grasp the interrelatedness of these two words in Arabic. Both al-Rahman and al-Rahim derive from the triconsonantal root R-H-M. This root connoting mercy points physically to the womb (rahim or rihm). To connect the mercy of God with a feminine physical characteristic is to understand God’s perfection as including all that is most tender in created reality, including the generative and loving characteristics of mothers.

In the mystical or sufi traditions of Islam—too much disregarded today under the onslaught by neo-Hanbalite (“Wahhabi”) legalism emanating from Saudi Arabia—women have participated more actively in the ways that Muslims pray. As early as the eighth century, an extraordinary freedwoman of Basra in Iraq, Rabi‘ah al-‘Adawiyyah (ca. 713-801), was particularly famous in this regard. Her prayers and aphorisms are remembered to the present day. I quote only two of them, not entirely unlike some of the sentiments expressed by the bride to the groom in the Song of Songs:

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• Lord, the stars are shining and the eyes of men are closed and kings have shut their doors, and every lover is alone with his beloved, and here am I alone with Thee.

• O my Lord, if I worship Thee from fear of Hell, burn me therein, and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me thence, but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, then withhold not from me Thine Eternal Beauty. 20

Nearly four centuries after the lifetime of Rabi‘ah, there came to birth in the Islamic West (the Maghrib) a sufi named Muhyi’ al-Din ibn al-‘Arabi (1165-1240), usually known simply as Ibn ‘Arabi. As a youth Ibn ‘Arabi had once encountered the elderly philosopher and jurist, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), but it was not a happy meeting. What seems at first blush like an improper advance made by the philosopher on the youth may only symbolize the difference between philosophical and mystical perceptions of reality, dramatizing Ibn ‘Arabi’s rejection of Ibn Rushd’s rationalism.21

More important for his formation as a mystic was Ibn ‘Arabi’s youthful discipleship to two elderly Sufi shaykhas, female spiritual guides, Shams of Marchena and Fatimah bint al-Muthanna’ of Seville. Of the latter Ibn ‘Arabi wrote that she had miraculous powers because of her dedication to the first surah of the Qur’an, al-Fatihah (“The Opening”). She once told young Ibn ‘Arabi that “‘I was given ‘The Opening’ and I can wield its power in any matter I wish.’”22 Sayings like this tend to cross the border between mysticism and magic.

Ibn ‘Arabi eventually moved from west to east, dying in Damascus less than two decades before the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258. He propagated in prose and verse the mystical possibility of such intense union with God (wahdat al-wujud), that it seemed to abolish the absolute distinction between the mystic and the Divine Reality that absorbed the mystic’s whole attention. Ibn ‘Arabi envisioned the absolute reality of God as God’s dhat (essence). This noun, feminine in grammatical terms, encourages Ibn ‘Arabi to envision something approaching a feminine image of God.23

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One major work of Ibn ‘Arabi is called Fusus al-hikam, a title meaning something like the Gem Settings or Bezels for Various Types of Wisdom.24 These gem settings are twenty-seven symbolic frameworks for the jewels of wisdom that serve as seals or signet rings imprinting the deepest wisdom of Quranic prophets on the souls of their devotees. The fifteenth gem setting in this series is “the wisdom of prophecy in the word of Jesus,” and it weaves sinuously through Quranic and New Testament stories about Jesus. Some of the stories of Jesus are found both in the New Testament and the Qur’an (for example, Jesus raising the dead). Others are only known outside the Qur’an from sources like the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas (for example, Jesus as a child giving life to clay birds).

Time permits me to quote only my own translation of the poetic verses beginning this fifteenth gem setting. They communicate some sense of the mystical, even gnostic apprehension of Jesus in the thought of Ibn ‘Arabi. I will comment on the verses piecemeal. In these verses Ibn ‘Arabi plays with both Quranic and New Testament accounts of the conception and birth of Jesus. In Ibn ‘Arabi’s imagination Mary provides the human material, water (ma’), and Gabriel provides the divine creative breath (nafkhah) that in combination effect the conception of Jesus. The Qur’an refers to Jesus more than once as “a spirit [ruh] from [God]” (Qur’an 4:171), a spirit from God breathed into Mary (Qur’an 21:91). It also speaks of Jesus as one preserved from sin. Ibn ‘Arabi’s metaphor for sin is one of the Quranic names for hell as a prison, Sijjin. Ibn ‘Arabi condenses all of these motifs in the first four lines of verse:

From the water of Mary or from the breath of Gabriel, In the form of flesh made up of clay, The Spirit comes to exist in an Essence purified Of that Nature which is called the Prison of Hell.

To understand the next two lines one needs to realize that Muslims maintain that Jesus did not die on the cross, and will continue to live until the last judgment.25 Ibn ‘Arabi, living in the late sixth and early seventh Muslim centuries (the twelfth and thirteenth Christian centuries), thinks

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that the last judgment will take place only after at least a thousand years of Muslim history. He attributes the mortal longevity of Jesus to his sinlessness, his being “purified / Of that Nature which is called the Prison of Hell.”

Because of that, the stay [of Jesus on earth] was lengthened, Lasting by decree a thousand years.

Ibn ‘Arabi thus symbolically associates Jesus with the general resurrection of the dead. Just as Jesus as a child had given life to clay birds, so also he can give life to mortal human beings who have died. As a spirit (ruh) from God breathed into Mary (Qur’an 21:91), Jesus can transfer something of that same life-giving spirit from God to the dead:

A Spirit from God and not from other [than God], So that [Jesus] could enliven the dead and give life to birds made of clay.

Ibn ‘Arabi seems to go even further in his exaltation of Jesus in the following lines, but I do not believe he is falling into shirk, the quintessential sin of ascribing partners to God. What he is saying is that Jesus as a God-filled person surpasses nearly all other God-filled persons. He boldly connects Jesus with God’s creative power, suggesting that Jesus is something of a demiurge in the process of creation, not unlike Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs:

Truth authenticates a relationship between [Jesus] and his Lord Of which [Jesus] gave evidence both in exalted things and in lowly things. God purified [Jesus] in body and exalted him In the Spirit, making him like Himself in causing [things] to exist.

In the prose commentary on these verses, Ibn ‘Arabi suggests a theological anthropology of some subtlety. He makes important distinctions in the prose following these verses: “[T]he measure of life that pervades a creature is called divine, humanity being [preeminently] the locus in

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which the Spirit inheres. Thus humanity is called a spirit by virtue of that which inheres in it.”26 But although Jesus in the work of Ibn ‘Arabi speaks divine truth, he is not divine. “Gabriel was, in fact, transmitting God’s word to Mary, just as an apostle transmits [God’s] word to his community.”27 Gabriel, like the human apostles or messengers (rusal, plural of rasul)—Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, for instance—transmitted divine revelation but did not thereby become divine. The contact between God’s revealing Spirit, however, and those human beings who speak on God’s behalf is radically transformative of those human speakers.

The final gem setting of Fusus al-hikam dwells on the wisdom of singularity in the word of Muhammad. Ibn ‘Arabi pulls out all the stops in this meditation on words attributed to Muhammad: “Three things have been made beloved to me in this world of ours: women, perfume, and prayer.” His reflections play with the genders of the Arabic words in that saying of Muhammad.

Now, although [Muhammad] was an Arab, he is here giving special attention to the significance of the love enjoined on him, seeing that he himself did not choose that love. It was God Who taught him what he knew not, and God’s bounty on him was abundant. He therefore gave precedence to the feminine over the masculine by saying thalath [‘three’, a word that is feminine]. How knowledgeable was [Muhammad] concerning [spiritual] realities and how great was his concern for proper precedence. Furthermore, he made the final term [prayer: salat, in Arabic] correspond to the first [women: nisa’ in Arabic] in its femininity, placing the masculine term [perfume: tib in Arabic] between them. He begins with “women” and ends with “prayer,” both of which are feminine nouns, [the masculine noun] perfume coming in between them, as in the case with its existential being, since man is placed between the [Divine] Essence [dhat, a feminine noun] from which he is manifested, and woman who is

18

manifested from him. Thus he is between two feminine entities, the one substantively feminine, the other feminine in reality, women being feminine in reality, while prayer is not. Perfume is placed between them as Adam is situated between the Essence, which is the source of all existence, and Eve, whose existence stems from him.28

Ibn ‘Arabi has shocked many Muslim thinkers, right down to modern times.29 A man possessed of a deeply poetic mind who lived on the borders of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds of al-Andalus in the thirteenth century, he slowly journeyed east, away from a type of Islam less open to mysticism, away from the gradually gathering storm of the Reconquista. His imagination reached out to embrace a spiritual trialogue that even then was beginning to break down. The modern world, where there is all too much religious polarization, could do worse than study Ibn ‘Arabi again.

CONCLUSION

As a Catholic and a Jesuit, I always feel the need to go back to my particular spiritual heritage within Catholicism, the Ignatian tradition. Towards the end of the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius prefaces what is called the “Contemplation for Attaining Love” with two general rules about love that are true for human love of another human being and human love for God. And yes, perhaps they are also true, in some analogical sense, of God’s love for us and the love that is the inner life of God.

It will be good to notice two things at the start: (i) love ought to find its expression in deeds more than in words; (ii) love consists in mutual communication, i.e. the lover gives and communicates to the beloved whatever the lover has, or something of what the lover has or is able to give, and the beloved in turn does the same for the lover. Thus one who possesses knowledge will give it to the one without it, and similarly the possessor of honor or wealth shares with the one who lacks these, each giving to the other.30

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This is very different from the leitmotiv of Erich Segal’s popular novel of five decades ago, and the gooey movie that emerged from it, Love Story. Love actually means that you often have to say ‘sorry.’ Words, however, are cheap. All four Gospels detail how, on the eve of the crucifixion, Peter had said that he would never abandon Jesus, but he did. The anonymous beloved disciple in John’s Gospel, probably an ideal portrait of any faithful disciple, accompanies Jesus to the end in the company of three women named Mary: the mother of Jesus, her sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala (Jn 19:25-26). The beloved disciple and the three Marys at the foot of the cross express their love in deeds more than in words.

The inner life of God expressed in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions of mysticism is a life of mutual communication, mutual gift-giving. Mutual gift-giving is an inadequate human image for what happens within God, but it gives us hints and guesses of what lies beyond our comprehension. “The lover gives and communicates to the beloved whatever the lover has, or something of what the lover has or is able to give.” Human love is limited in what it can give, but divine love is limitless by definition. The ten sefirot in Kabbalah mutually enrich each other, interacting in ways that human beings can only stammer. The perichoresis or circumincession of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity in Christian theology lies beyond total human comprehension, but gives us hints and guesses of what God is all about. The unity of God in the Islamic tradition as al-Rahman and al-Rahim, Filled with Mercy, Ever Merciful, spills over like a fountain that slakes our thirst and still provokes even deeper thirst. Human beings created in the image and likeness of God—a theme common to the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions of faith—have much to learn from God, and especially much to learn from God about how to love.

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NOTES1 Thorkild Jacobsen, “Mesopotamia,” in Before Philosophy: the Intellectual Journey of

Ancient Man, ed. Henri and H.A. Frankfort (Harmonsdsworth, UK: Penguin, 1951), 182.

2 See “Akkadian Myths and Epics” (tr. E. A. Speiser), Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testamenti, 3rd ed., ed. J. B, Pritchard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 61.

3 Ibid., 64.

4 Midrash Rabbah: Genesis, tr. H. Friedman, 3rd ed. (London/New York: The Soncino Press, 1983), 54. Henceforth this text will be referred to as Midrash Rabbah: Genesis, with the page specified.

5 Plato, Symposium, 189c-193c.

6 Midrash Rabbah: Genesis, 61.

7 Ibid., 62.

8 See Mishnah Yadaim 3, link: https://sefaria.org/Mishah_Yadaim.4?lang=bi

9 See Midrash Rabbah: Song of Songs, 3rd ed. Ed. H. Freedman and Maurice Simon, tr. Maurice Simon (London/New York: Soncino Press, 1983), 23.

10 Ibid., 121-122.

11 See Zohar: the Book of Enlightenment, tr. Daniel Chanan Matt (New York: Paulist Press, 1983), 33-39.

12 Ibid., 55-56.

13 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

14 Ibid., 133.

15 Ibid., 134.

16 Alice McDermott, “Why the Priesthood Needs Women,” The New York Times (February 23, 2019) available online at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/opinion/sunday/women-catholic-priests.html

17 Teresa of Jesus, The Autobiography of Teresa of Avila, tr. and ed., E. Allison Peers (New York: Image Books/Doubleday, 1960), 274-75.

18 Translation by Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D., John of the Cross: Doctor of Light and Love (New York: Crossroad, 1999), 15.

19 Why Qur’an 9 does not begin with the basmalah is a matter of much speculation.

20 M. Smith [& C.Pellat], “Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya al-Kaisiyya,” The New Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden; Brill, 1960-2011), 8:354-356.

21 See Ibn ‘Arabi, Sufis of Andalusia: The Ruh al-quds and al-Durrat al-fakhirah of Ibn ‘Arabi, tr. R.W. J. Austin (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 23.

21

22 Ibid., 143.

23 Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 431.

24 See Ibn al-‘Arabi, The Bezels of Wisdom¸ tr. R.W. J. Austin (New York: Paulist Press, 1980). I substitute for Austin’s translation of the verse that follows my own translation, but I do use his translation of prose from this work. Henceforth this work will be cited as Bezels of Wisdom with the page number specified.

25 The text of the Qur’an denies that the Jews triumphed over Jesus in the crucifixion: “They neither killed him nor crucified him but it seemed like that to them” (Qur’an 4:157). All Muslims understand these Quranic words to mean that Jesus did not die on the cross.

26 Bezels of Wisdom, 175.

27 Ibid.

28 Ibid., 277.

29 Fazlur Rahman, Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed., 1979), 145-146.

30 “The Spiritual Exercises,” ## 230-31, in Saint Ignatius of Loyola: Personal Writings, tr. Joseph A. Munitiz and Philip Endean (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1996), 329.

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I would like to examine the themes of sexuality, spirituality,

and love of God through a single metaphor: the metaphor of

God and Israel as lovers who find themselves in an intimate

– romantic and sexual – partnership with one another. This

metaphor is developed in biblical sources and expanded in

various directions in subsequent Jewish traditions (rabbinic,

kabbalistic, and philosophical). As I hope to demonstrate,

this metaphor has the potential to be empowering,

beautiful, and comforting, but it also has the potential

to be disempowering, abusive, and distressing – just like

intimate human relationships. Holding these potentialities

together, recognizing their simultaneous utility and danger,

acknowledging the metaphor’s potential benefits as well as

its potential devastation, is important for understanding the

work that this metaphor does theologically and practically,

both for human-divine partnerships and for human-human

Jewish Response to the

Annual Spring McGinley Lecture

Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ph.D

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partnerships, of whatever gender. It might also help us

understand the ways in which the link between sexuality and

spirituality, developed in various religious traditions, can

be harnessed in creative ways, for example to conceptualize

spiritual vocations, or to include partnerships that have

long been excluded from or marked as unacceptable within

religious communities. But it serves simultaneously as

a caution and a call to continually and critically examine

this link between sexuality and spirituality so that it is not

abused or used to suppress, oppress, or silence.

WE ARE YOUR DEAR ONES, YOU ARE OUR BELOVED

The liturgy for the Jewish high holidays includes a poem that lists the many different ways in which the relationship between God and Israel can be characterized. It begins: “ki anu amecha, ve-atah eloheynu – for we are your nation, and you are our God.”1 It then continues with a series of metaphors: “we are your children, you are our father; we are your slaves, you are our master; we are your congregation, you are our portion; we are your legacy, you are our fate; we are your flock, you are our shepherd; we are your vineyard, you are our keeper…”. Among the dozen metaphors is one that stands out: “anu ra‘ayatecha, ve-ata dodenu – we are your dear ones, you are our beloved.” This poem is sung during Yom Kippur services, the holiest day of the Jewish liturgical calendar. It is the day on which God is said to judge each individual and seal their fate for the year ahead. Throughout the day’s services, congregants acknowledge their sins and beseech God to forgive them and seal for them a positive future fate. It is in this context, as a refrain within the long Yom Kippur services, that the congregants remind God and themselves, through this liturgical

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poem, of the many facets of the human-divine relationship, including the idea that God and Israel are bound in bonds of love – as lovers.

The Hebrew term used to describe God as “our beloved” is dodenu. The term dod is variably translated as friend, lover, or beloved. The term dod is masculine, whereas the Hebrew term used to describe Israel in this liturgical poem is ra‘aya, its feminine counterpart, though we ought not limit our reflections about sexuality and spirituality to heterosexual relationships. Both terms appear frequently in the Song of Songs, always with an erotic dimension (and indeed, the liturgical poem for Yom Kippur draws its metaphors from the imagery of the Song of Songs).2 Consider for example these opening passages of the book:

“The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, For your loving (dodecha) is better than wine… Let us extol your loving (dodecha) beyond wine… To my mare among Pharaoh’s chariots I likened you, my friend (ra‘ayati) A sachet of myrrh is my lover (dodi) to me, all night between my breasts. A cluster of henna, my lover (dodi) to me, In the vineyards of Ein Gedi. O you are fair, my friend (ra‘ayati), O you are fair, your eyes are doves… O you are fair, my lover (dodi), you are sweet…”3

The term dod in particular is used five times in the book’s opening chapter, and frequently in the subsequent chapters as well. Most well-known, however, is a passage from chapter 6: “ani le-dodi ve-dodi li – I am my lover’s and my lover is mine.”4 This phrase was applied, in later historical periods, to the lunar month of Elul, which precedes the high holidays, as the first letters of each word in the phrase (alef, lamed, vav, lamed) form the acronym elul. Thus the month of Elul is conceptualized as a time of rekindling an intimate relationship with the divine through

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repentance and contemplation in advance of the New Year and the Day of Atonement. As with the liturgical poem, this play on letters constructs God and God’s people as lovers. Autumn is not the only season when this human-divine relationship is invoked in the synagogue or in liturgical worship. The Song of Songs is also read liturgically in the spring season, during Passover. Then, too, it serves as a reminder that after God redeemed Israel from enslavement in Egypt, a deep relationship of love and partnership formed between them.

SONG OF SONGS

Though it was originally written as a series of love poems, the Song of Songs was interpreted, already in Jewish antiquity, as metaphorically describing God’s relationship with Israel (and, in Christian tradition, as a metaphor for Christ’s relationship with the Church).5 In both Jewish and Christian readings, the Song of Songs gives voice to an erotic relationship between partners longing for one another. The text begins with a series of kisses, love described as sweeter than wine, fragrant oils, and secluded chambers. In one line, the narrator beseeches: “Tell me, whom I love so, where you pasture your flock at noon, lest I go straying after the flocks of your companions… I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valley – like a lily among thorns, so is my friend among the young women.”6 Another passage states that “Your cheeks are lovely with looped earrings, your neck with beads. Earrings of gold we will make for you with silver filigree.”7

The relationship, for the most part, is portrayed positively, as true lovers, head over heels, pursuing one another. The text alternates between two narrators, the two partners in the relationship. The theme of the poem, its emphasis not only on descriptions of female beauty but also of the male body, and its repeated references to maternal figures and to female companions, struck the historian and biblical scholar S.D. Goitein as so unusual that, in 1957, he posited that the text was not only primarily narrated by a woman character but even authored by a historical woman. Though most critical scholars argue that the text is comprised of various different lyric love poems combined into a single narrative (and thus the

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text does not have a single author), Goitein’s suggestion highlights an important dimension of the text’s tone, if not the identity of its composer. Goitein argues that the Song of Songs can be read as a feminine answer to the curses of Eve articulated in Genesis’ creation account: in this version, the woman’s desires are not subjugated to those of her husband; she is, rather, desired by her lover.8 Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible has even more broadly interpreted the text as having an “anti-patriarchal bent.”9 She notes, for example, how the erotic encounter in the garden of the Song of Songs, in which the partners confidently revel in their beautiful nakedness, offers an alternative to the feelings of shame and betrayal experienced by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: “they are naked without shame; they are equal without duplication.”10 “In the pages of the Song,” Goitein writes, “we encounter a new relationship between the two sexes, a relationship of equality and amicable mutuality.”11

EZEKIEL 16

I would like to juxtapose these romantic descriptions from the Song of Songs with another biblical text that also imagines the relationship between God and Israel through the metaphor of lovers.12 In this case, though, the relationship is not a healthy one; it is, rather, an abusive relationship.

Ezekiel 16 describes God’s vexed relationship with Jerusalem; in this text, Jerusalem represents the people of Israel.13 The chapter begins with a prophecy: “The word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, make known to Jerusalem her abominations…”.14 In this opening line, we learn that the purpose of this narrative is to communicate to Jerusalem in the clearest of terms how horrible she has been – how ungrateful and unfaithful she has been to the one who has saved her. This is not a song or an ode. It is a rant and a warning.

The text then turns to the story of Jerusalem’s origins, describing her birth in the land of Canaan:

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On the day you were born, your navel cord was not cut, nor were you washed with water to cleanse you, nor rubbed with salt, nor wrapped in cloth… you were thrown out in the open field, for you were abhorred on the day you were born. I passed by you, and saw you flailing about in your blood.15

Rather than pursued in the flower-and-tree filled fields as the lovers in the Song of Songs, here Jerusalem, as a newborn, has been abandoned in an open frightening field, hated and rejected. When God finds Jerusalem, she is miserable, still in the blood of her after-birth, unbathed. As Havilah Dharamraj writes:

For no reason other than the fact of her existence, the baby is found loathsome. So repugnant is she that she is literally ejected from womb to wasteland, snarled in umbilical cord and placenta, covered in her birth fluid and her mother’s blood. This is the only action performed upon her, to be flung out instantly into the field, where she would not have lasted more than a few hours. Rather than inhabit the security of a home, she lies exposed in the open…16

Contrast this image with an allusion to the lover’s birth in the Song of Songs: “I held him and did not let go until I brought him to my mother’s house, and to the chamber of her who conceived me.”17

Jerusalem is then repeatedly reminded, in Ezekiel’s narrative, that God saved her from a miserable fate of abandonment:

As you lay in your blood, I said to you, “Live! and grow up like a plant of the field. You grew up and became tall and arrived at full womanhood; your breasts were formed, and your hair had grown; yet you were naked and bare. I passed by you again and looked on you; you were at the age for love. I spread the edge of my cloak over you, and covered your nakedness: I pledged myself to you and entered into a covenant with you, says the Lord God, and you became mine…”18

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As Jerusalem grows, she becomes a beautiful yet vulnerable woman with fully formed breasts.19 The Song of Songs, too, describes breasts as erotic symbols of empowered womanhood in several passages, including these: “your two breasts are like two fauns, twins of a gazelle, that graze among the lilies,” and “your stature was like a palm tree, and your breasts were like the clusters.”20

God then covers Jerusalem, bathes Jerusalem, anoints her with oil, makes her his, clothes and feeds Jerusalem:

Then I bathed you with water and washed off the blood from you, and anointed you with oil. I clothed you with embroidered cloth and with sandals of fine leather; I bound you in fine linen and covered you with rich fabric. I adorned you with ornaments: I put bracelets on your arms, a chain on your neck, a ring on your nose, earrings in your ears, and a beautiful crown upon your head. You were adorned with gold and silver, while your clothing was of fine linen, rich fabric, and embroidered cloth. You had choice flour and honey and oil for food. You grew exceedingly beautiful, fit to be a queen. 21

This passage, too, is reminiscent of the Song of Songs, in which the beloved is lathered in oil, wears earrings and necklaces of gold and silver, tastes honey, and delights in delicacies.22 Moreover, in Ezekiel 16, Jerusalem is characterized first as an abandoned daughter, and then as God’s female partner. Similarly, the Song of Songs repeatedly evokes the “daughters of Jerusalem,” and suggests that the female lover is one such “daughter of Jerusalem.”

Unlike the romantic relationship in the Song of Songs, which sustains itself and grows more affectionate over time, the relationship in Ezekiel quickly unravels. Jerusalem is accused of being unfaithful and becoming a prostitute. She slowly sheds the many gifts bestowed upon her by God so that she ends, as she began, naked and hungry: “You took some of your garments, and made for yourself colorful shrines…,” God accuses Jerusalem.23 “Also my bread that I gave you—I fed you with choice

30

flour and oil and honey—you set it before them as a pleasing odor.”24 The text goes so far as to accuse Jerusalem of taking such pleasure in her prostitution that she did not even request payment for her services, beckoning to every man who passed her by, even those who did not solicit her. Worse still, Jerusalem forgets the misery of her infancy, the abuse and nakedness and suffering and loneliness from which her partner had saved her, and yet she eventually returns to it – as is, so often, the case with abuse.

Out of frustration with Jerusalem’s forgetfulness and a desire for retribution, God threatens Jerusalem to gather up all of Jerusalem’s illicit lovers to attack her. The biblical verses use brutal language. They don’t mince words: “I will deliver you into their hands, and they shall throw down your platform and break down your lofty places; they shall strip you of your clothes and take your beautiful objects and leave you naked and bare. They shall bring up a mob against you, and they shall stone you and cut you to pieces with their swords.”25 The text describes how Jerusalem will be dragged down, forcefully undressed, attacked by a mob (and presumably raped), violently harmed, and eventually killed. All this is threatened out of jealously and a perceived lack of gratitude: “So I will satisfy my fury on you, and my jealousy shall turn away from you; I will be calm, and will be angry no longer. Because you have not remembered the days of your youth, but have enraged me with all these things; therefore, I have returned your deeds upon your head, says the Lord God.”26

This chapter in Ezekiel seeks to narrate the story of Israel’s origins: born among the nations, saved by God from slavery, clothed and fed and adorned in the land of Israel, the people did not remain faithful to their God, pursuing other interests and nations, abandoning proper worship and turning to idolatry (figured in the text as adultery).27 As a result, God threatens, through the words of the prophet, to send the surrounding nations to destroy Jerusalem and return her to her original state of helplessness; this threat is meant to keep Jerusalem in line, faithful once more to God. As Tamar Kamionkowski notes, this narrative contains

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“classic patterns of domestic violence: jealous husband, husband beats up wife, husband feels contrition and brings a peace offering and then it begins all over again.”28

In the Song of Songs, the lover is asked, for fear that the loving passion is too great, to “turn away your eyes from me, for they have overwhelmed me.”29 In Ezekiel 16, in contrast, God accuses Jerusalem of turning away in prostitution and declares, instead, that “I will satisfy my fury on you, and my jealousy shall turn away from you.”30 In the Song of Songs, the birth of the beloved is celebrated: “Just one is my dove, my pure one, just one to her mother, dazzling to her who bore her.”31 In Ezekiel 16, the umbilical cord has not even been cut, “you were abhorred on the day you were born,” and “no eye pitied you.”32 Whereas the Song of Songs evokes images of bathing in milk (e.g. 5:12), Ezekiel 16 describes pools of blood. Ezekiel 16 ends when God reinstates his covenant with Jerusalem; in the narrative’s final monologue; however, God berates Jerusalem to keep silent forever: “never open your mouth again because of your shame.”33 What a contrast to the Song of Songs, in which the beloved is beckoned to speak and assured that she will be heard: “let me hear your voice, for your voice is sweet,” and again, at the book’s conclusion: “You who dwell in the garden, friends listen for your voice. Let me hear it.”34

CONCLUSION

The intersections between sexuality, spirituality, and love of God, contain many possibilities: loving and abusive, healthy and manipulative. These two texts, both understood by later readers to conceptualize God’s relationship with Israel through the metaphor of romantic partnership, could not be more different. They are, though, both based on and informed by human experiences and relationships, which are then projected onto the divine-human bond. These metaphors, however, are not only reflections of different human realities. They also construct those realities through the examples that they set and the ways that they are invoked. The authors necessarily drew from their own ideas and experiences in composing these texts, and listeners and readers, then and

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now, learn from them and construct their ideas and worlds informed by such metaphors and images. It is for this reason that I chose to explore not only the positive but also the negative, not only the benevolent but also the malevolent, to highlight the empowering dimensions of religious texts but also to acknowledge those parts of our traditions that are most problematic: so that we can imagine and construct together models of partnership, human and divine, that are based on mutual love and consent, rather than abuse of power and violation of dignity.

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NOTES1 The poem, an anonymous piyyut found in the Ashkenazi tradition, is based on the

rabbinic midrash Song of Songs Rabbah 2:45 and exists in various different forms in a number of manuscripts, on which see the brief explanation on the website of the National Library of Israel: http://web.nli.org.il/sites/nlis/he/song/pages/song.aspx?songid=571#3,138,4954,1360.

2 Based, as it is, on the rabbinic midrash Song of Songs Rabbah 2:45.

3 Song of Songs 1:1-2, 1:4, 1:9, 1:13-15, 1:16. All translations of Song of Songs are from Robert Alter, Strong as Death is Love: The Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther, Jonah, and Daniel, A Translation with Commentary (New York: Norton, 2015).

4 Song of Songs 6:3 (trans. Alter).

5 Alter, Strong as Death is Love, 3-6; see also Jonathan Kaplan, My Perfect One: Typology and Early Rabbinic Interpretation of Song of Songs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Karl Shuve, The Song of Songs and the Fashioning of Identity in Early Latin Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

6 Song of Songs 1:7, 2:1 (trans. Alter).

7 Song of Songs 1:10-11 (trans. Alter).

8 S.D. Goitein, “The Song of Songs: A Female Composition,” in The Feminist. Companion to the Bible (ed. Atalya Brenner; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), 58-66, reprinted from S.D. Goitein, Studies in the Bible (Tel Aviv: Yavneh Press, 1957), 301-307, 316-317, translated by Atalya Brenner.

9 Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1978), 144-165. Regarding the reasons for the text’s canonization within the Hebrew Bible, which was debated through the early rabbinic period, Ilana Pardes suggests that “the antipatriarchal model of love in the Song could be made to function as a countervoice to the misogynist prophetic degradation of the nation. It could offer an inspiring consolation in its emphasis on reciprocity. For once the relationship of God and His bride relies on mutual courting, mutual attraction, and mutual admiration, there is more room for hope that redemption is within reach,” in Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 127. Though Pardes agrees with Trible’s overall reading, she notes that the text is not entirely depatriarchalized: the egalitarian relationship narrated in the Song of Songs is set within a patriarchal context filled with aggressive and dangerous watchmen and brothers who seek to undermine the egalitarian-erotic paradigm that the Song of Songs proposes (128).

10 Phyllis Trible, “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 41.1 (1973): 30-28, at 47.

11 Goitein, “The Song of Songs,” 59.

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12 These two texts are also read intertextually in Pardes, Countertraditions in the Bible, 134-137; Havilah Dharamraj, Altogether Lovely: A Thematic and Intertextual Reading of the Song of Songs (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2018), 109-144.

13 On Ezekiel 16, see Julie Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel: The City as Yahweh’s Wife (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992); S. Tamar Kamionkowski, Gender Reversal and Cosmic Chaos: A Study on the Book of Ezekiel (Sheffield Academic Press, 2003).

14 Ezekiel 16:1-2 (NRSV).

15 Ezekiel 16:4-6 (NRSV).

16 Dharamraj, Altogether Lovely, 111.

17 Song of Songs 3:4 (trans. Alter).

18 Ezekiel 16:6-8 (NRSV).

19 Ezekiel 16:7.

20 Song of Songs 1:13, 4:5, 7:4, 7:8-9, 8:10.

21 Ezekiel 16:9-13 (NRSV).

22 While both texts seem to describe these actions as motivated by love, the passages in Ezekiel suggest that God does so to save Jerusalem from misery, whereas in the Song of Songs gifts are bestowed out of affection and pursuit.

23 Ezekiel 16:16 (NRSV).

24 Ezekiel 16:19 (NRSV).

25 Ezekiel 16:39-40 (NRSV).

26 Ezekiel 16:42-43 (NRSV).

27 Commenting on Ezekiel 16, David Biale notes that “Sexuality was a central issue in Israel’s self-conception, with adultery and fidelity the dominant metaphors both for Israel’s relationship to God and for national identity… Sexual anxiety is thus at the very heart of the struggle with this ambiguous identity,” in Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 12.

28 S. Tamar Kamionkowski, “One Jewish Feminist’s Lifelong Companion with a Misogynist,” Zeek (21 October 2011): http://zeek.forward.com/articles/117369/. Elsewhere, Kamionkowski has argued that the text was composed during a particular historical moment in which, due to political and cultural circumstances, men felt “an overwhelming sense of powerlessness” and emasculation. The text thus turns to a “more accessible ‘other,’” the woman, and presents her in masculine terms and then blames her for feelings not only of male shame but also of gendered upheaval (Gender Reversal and Cosmic Chaos, 150-151).

29 Song of Songs 6:5 (trans. Alter).

30 Ezekiel 16:42 (NRSV).

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31 Song of Songs 6:9 (trans. Alter).

32 Ezekiel 16:5 (NRSV).

33 Ezekiel 16:63 (NRSV).

34 Song of Songs 2:14, 8:13 (trans. Alter); Alter notes that the very last phrase of this verse might not be original (Strong as Death is Love, 53).

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Al-salaamu alaikum. Greetings and good evening. My thanks

to Father Patrick Ryan for inviting me back here to Fordham

to be with you again to give a brief response to his wonderful

McGinley Lecture. My thanks also to Patricia Bellucci for her

help with the arrangements, to Professors Anne Hoffman

and Judith Kubicki for moderating our conversations, and to

Professor Sarit Kattan Gribetz for her response. My thanks

to all of you who are reading this printed version of the

lecture and responses. As I was preparing to come to New

York City, I got the news that my friend and colleague, LMU

New Testament scholar David Sanchez, had passed away

suddenly and unexpectedly on Saturday, April 6 from a heart

attack. David did his Ph.D. at Union Theological Seminary,

and so although he was an Angeleno, New York City was

an important place for him. I offer my remarks to you in

memory of my friend, and I would ask those of you who pray

to remember David and his daughters Isabella and Maya in

Muslim Response to the Annual Spring McGinley Lecture

Amir Hussain, Ph.D.

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your prayers. “Ring the bells that still can ring,” Rabbi Eliezer

taught us in his incarnation as the blessed Leonard Cohen

through his song “Anthem,” “forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”As is usual with Father Ryan, his lecture is magisterial. It brought me back to the last conference paper I gave as a graduate student, in 1994, a few years before I moved from Toronto to Los Angeles. It was entitled “Hubb, Wadda and Rahmah in North American Islam,” and presented at a conference in honour of two of my mentors, William C. Chittick and Sachiko Murata who teach at SUNY Stony Brook on Long Island. Hubb, Wadda, and Rahmah are the three terms used in the Qur’an for “love”. Father Ryan focused on the term “Rahmah,” and I will return to that. It is important to focus on love, especially in a world where so many people do not associate that term with Islam or Muslims.

I particularly appreciated his opening section on the spirituality of the Zohar, and the connection of that to the mystical traditions within Islam. And in the section on Christianity, his discussion of God being neither male nor female echoes the Qur’an and Islamic thought. Surat al-Ikhlas, the 112th chapter of the Qur’an, begins with the line “qul: huwa Allahu ahad”, or “Say: God is one,” which of course echoes the first line of the Shema. And the short chapter ends with the 4th verse, “wa lam yakun lahu kufuwan ahad,” “No one is comparable to God.”

In the discussion of Islamic mysticism, I was reminded of Father Ryan’s teacher, the blessed Annemarie Schimmel. I met her only once, almost 30 years ago, in June of 1990 for a conference at Hartford Seminary in honor of the retirement of Willem Bijlefeld. There she gave a paper on her beloved Rumi, “Jesus and Mary as Poetical Images in Rumu’s Verse,” which was included in the collection of papers edited by Yvonne and Wadi Haddad entitled Christian-Muslim Encounters. In her talk, Prof. Schimmel mentioned a story from Rumi’s masterpiece, the Mathnawi, concerning “the answer Jesus gave to someone who asked him: ‘What is the heaviest

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thing in the world?’ He answered: ‘God’s wrath.’ Asked how to find rescue from this Divine wrath he replied: ‘Suppress your own wrath and oppress your own anger.’”1 I think about that more and more these days, when anger seems to have become our national emotion in this country.

And although Father Ryan does not mention it, I think it important to talk about homosexuality as well as heterosexuality. Again in our current climate, we are in a dangerous place for those who are not heterosexual. I think of Muslim psychologists who worry about losing their license if they are anything but heteronormative, and I wonder how we got to that place where we can hate people for the love that God has put between them. I was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto during the Plague Years, where I went to too many funerals of my beautiful friends who died of HIV/AIDS. We have to speak out when our gay, lesbian, queer, trans, and bisexual brothers and sisters are threatened. We have to lift up the work and voices of LGBTQ scholars and activists such as Scott Kugle at Emory University, who reminds us of the inherent dignity of all of us, regardless of our sexuality. Here, I think again of Rumi, this time writing one of his most famous ghazals in the Diwan. This is written in Farsi, not Arabic, so the gender cues aren’t explicit in the text. One doesn’t know if this is a male speaking to a male, to a female, or if it is a female speaker. It’s a poem that Jack Miles quotes in his new book, God in the Qur’an, which comes to the surprising conclusion that in some stories of the prophets that are shared by Jews, Muslims, and Christians, God is sometimes more merciful in the Qur’an than God is in the Bible. It’s the mercy that Fr. Ryan spoke of as God’s rahmah in the Qur’an, where the names most used for God are Al-Rahman and Al-Rahim, the Merciful and the Compassionate. Both words have their root in the Arabic word rahm or womb. The analogy is clear, what could be more merciful than the mother’s womb, which shelters her child for nine months. It is also a delightful and surprising feminine image of the divine.

I close with Rumi’s ghazal, translated by William Chittick, who is my favorite translator of Rumi. It is a perfect representation of love, and the

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power of love, in the Islamic tradition. In it, Rumi tells the Quranic stories of Jesus and of Joseph (one of the sons of Jacob), specifically some of the miracles of Jesus, and how the scent of Joseph on his cloak gives eyesight back to his father, Jacob, who has been blinded with grief from weeping for the son he thinks is lost forever:

If anyone asks you about houris [heavenly lovers], show your face and say, “Like this.” If anyone speaks to you about the moon, rise up beyond the roof and say, “Like this.” When someone looks for a fairy princess, show your face to him. When someone talks of musk, let loose your tresses and say, “Like this.” If someone says to you, “How do clouds part from the moon?” Undo your robe, button by button, and say, “Like this.” If he asks you about the Messiah, “How could he bring the dead to life?” Kiss my lips before him and say, “Like this.” When someone says, “Tell me, what does it mean to be killed by love?” Show my soul to him and say, “Like this.” If someone in concern asks you about my state, Show him your eyebrow, bent over double, and say, “Like this.” The spirit breaks away from the body, then again it enters within. Come, show the deniers, enter the house and say, “Like this.” In whatever direction you hear the complaint of a lover, That is my story, all of it, by God, like this. I am the house of every angel, my breast has turned blue like the sky— Lift up your eyes and look with joy at heaven, like this. I told the secret of union with the Beloved to the east wind alone. Then, through the purity of its own mystery, the east wind whispered, “Like this.”

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Those are blind who say, “How can the servant reach God?” Place the candle of purity in the hand of each and say, “Like this.” I said, “How can the fragrance of Joseph go from one city to the next?” The fragrance of God blew from the world of his Essence and said, “Like this.” I said, “How can the fragrance of Joseph give sight back to the blind?” Your breeze came and gave light to my eye: “Like this.” Perhaps Shams al-Din in Tabriz will show his generosity, and in his kindness display his good faith, like this.2

Thank you!

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NOTES1 Annemarie Schimmel, “Jesus and Mary as Poetical Images in Rumu’s Verse”, in

Christian-Muslim Encounters, edited by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Wadi Zaidan Haddad (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), 143-144.

2 Jalal al-Din Rumi, Diwan, ghazal #1826, trans. by William C. Chittick in Sufism: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Oneworld, 2000), 72-73.

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PATRICK J. RYAN, S.J.

Patrick J. Ryan, S. J., is the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham University. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English language and literature at Fordham, and a Ph.D. in the comparative history of religion from Harvard University (with a specialization in Arabic and Islamic studies).

Father Ryan lived and worked in West Africa for twenty-six years, principally in Nigeria and Ghana, where he taught Islamic studies and comparative religion at both the University of Ghana and the University of Cape Coast. He also taught for briefer periods at Fordham, Hekima College in Nairobi, Kenya, and at the Gregorian University in Rome. From 1999 to 2005 Father Ryan was the president of Loyola Jesuit College in Abuja, Nigeria. In March 2014, he had a Fulbright Specialist Award to teach in Arrupe College in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Father Ryan has held numerous positions at Fordham before becoming the McGinley Professor in 2009. He taught Middle East Studies, held the Loyola Chair in the Humanities, and served as Fordham’s Vice President for University Mission and Ministry. His latest book, Amen: Jews, Christians, and Muslims Keep Faith with God was just published by the Catholic University of America Press.

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SARIT KATTAN GRIBETZ, PH.D.

Sarit Kattan Gribetz received her A.B. and Ph.D. in religion and Jewish Studies from Princeton University. She spent a year studying Talmud and archaeology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, held post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard University and the Jewish Theological Seminary, and taught at the University of Toronto and the Andover Newton Theological School.

Dr. Gribetz studies the history of Jews and Christians in late antiquity and the early medieval period, with a focus on rabbinic literature, calendars and time, gender and motherhood, and interreligious polemics. She is now an Assistant Professor in the Theology Department at Fordham University, where she teaches courses on Jewish texts, religion in the ancient Mediterranean, the history of Jerusalem, rabbinic literature, and the Greco-Roman world.

Her latest article, “A Matter of Time: Writing Jewish Memory into Jewish History,” was published by the Association for Jewish Studies Review in April 2016. She has also published articles on the history of the Shema prayer, narratives about the Sabbath in midrashic texts, the Toledot Yeshu manuscripts, and metaphors of time in ancient Jewish sources. She has co-edited three collections of essays and is currently working on a book titled Time and Difference in Ancient Judaism.

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AMIR HUSSAIN, PH.D.

Amir Hussain is a professor in the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, where he teaches courses on world religions. His specialty is the study of Islam, focusing on contemporary Muslim societies.

A native of Pakistan, Hussain immigrated to Canada when he was 4 years old. He earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees at the University of Toronto, where he received a number of awards, including the university’s highest honor for alumni service. His doctoral dissertation was on Muslim communities in Toronto. Since September 11, 2001, he has appeared on the History Channel numerous times and has provided insight into Islam for many newspapers and magazines in both the United States and Canada.

Dr. Hussain was the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and serves on the editorial board of many journals, including Comparative Islamic Studies; The Journal of Religion, Conflict, and Peace; and Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life.

He also is part of the research network for the Islam and Human Rights Fellowship Program at Emory University. His latest publication is the textbook World Religions: Western Traditions, third edition for (Oxford University Press).