God and Goddess Emerging

Abstract

God is all that is, was, and ever will be, and more. God is also all that makes possible the transformation from “that which is” to “that which can and ought to be.” That “can and ought to be” includes a world based on love; caring; kindness; generosity; joyful cele bration with awe, wonder, and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe; social and economic justice; peace and nonviolence; living in harmony with the earth and each other; and playfully celebrating our freedom and the development of our understanding of ourselves and our world.But that is not the whole story of God, only the most uniquely Jewish and revolutionary aspect. When Judaism came into existence, it did not have to invent the notion of the world as sacred — that was already common knowledge. Judaism focused on bringing to the world a revelation about an aspect of God that was not adequately known or appreciated: God as the Force that makes transformation and a world based on love, generosity, and justice possible. It took the elohim (the various forces that had been understood to be sacred) and recognized them as one unified Force, a Force whose essence was freedom, love, justice, transcendence, and compassion: YHVH.So long as humans are trapped in material scarcity, class societies, patriarchy, and other systems in which some human beings dominate and misrecognize others, the YHVH aspect of God (God as the Force of transformation) is badly needed. As I’ve described in Spirit Matters and in The Left Hand of God, these systems of domination result in a spiritual crisis worldwide. In the face of this crisis, the YHVH aspect of God provides a ground for hope that a fundamental healing and transformation of the world (tikkun olam) is possible.When patriarchy and class oppression have been transcended and human beings are able to live together in accord with the basic injunctions of Torah (e.g., loving the stranger, seeking justice, pursuing peace, protecting the earth, sharing and replenishing the resources of the planet, and treating everyone with kindness and openhearted generosity), other aspects of God’s reality may become more relevant to humanity. This Jewish conception of God as YHVH — the Force that makes possible this transformation to a world of love and social justice — will then be less significant. But in the current historical moment, YHVH is badly needed, though this conception or face of God needs to be infused with what contemporary Jewish feminists call the Goddess.This idea of God being seen differently in different circumstances is reflected in the Torah text itself. God’s name (and the conception the name points to) changes from Genesis to Exodus. God tells Moses that “[I] appeared unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, as El Shaddai, but by My name YHVH I made Me not known to them” (Exod. 6:3). El Shaddai — the Breasted God — may well have been a more feminine conception of God that the Jews had available to them in Canaan. Perhaps this conception later seemed less appropriate for the harshness the Israelites faced when enslaved in Egypt, so God’s liberatory face was revealed. The idea of YHVH was a different way for Jews to represent this God to themselves, a face of God that sustained us through long periods of powerlessness and oppression, keeping hope alive.In my view, the current moment of struggle to change the world requires a reclaiming of this El Shaddai feminine conception, which is most needed to overcome the internali zation of capitalist values by much of humanity in the twenty-first century. Some Hasidic masters point to Shaddai as deriving from the Hebrew words sheh dai (literally “that is enough”) rather than from shadayim (breasts). My gloss: the first human experience of enoughness is at the mother’s breast, and in a historical moment in which capitalist materialism pushes us to believe that we must have more and more things so that “the economy” can expand endlessly — meanwhile destroying the earth and threatening the future survivability of human and animal life on this planet — it is precisely this God of “enoughness” and of loving motherly energy that is badly needed to counter the internalized demands of the capitalist order. So in this historical moment, El Shaddai must be wedded to YHVH in order to transform our economic and political system to ensure the survival of life on this planet.It’s not uncommon for many people today who are otherwise sophisticated to think that they are rejecting the Jewish God when they tell you that they can’t believe in some all-powerful, all-knowing, Unmoved Mover who sits in heaven and sends down blessings or curses according to his mood and who can be influenced by prayers or sacrifices. It is true that Jewish prayers sometimes reflect this notion of God, but it is not true that it is the only Jewish way of thinking about God. Indeed, all the Abrahamic religions have had a multitude of ways of understanding God, often influenced by the dominant worldviews of the society in which their adherents have lived.As Babylonian, then Persian, then Greek, and then Roman imperialists conquered Judea, Jews began to understand YHVH within the discourse of the then-dominant Hellenistic culture. Some Jewish thinkers sought to adapt our conception of God to “reality” as then experienced in a patriarchal world in which “power over others” defined the way the elites and those whom they employed as teachers, soldiers, scribes, and priests of religion actually lived. Two thousand years ago the Jewish philosopher Philo sought to reconceive God in terms that would fit the dominant Hellenistic paradigms of Greek philosophy, with its notion of God as the Unmoved Mover, the all-powerful and all-knowing. Medieval Jewish philosophers, including Maimonides, continued in that same direction. The notion of omnipotence or omniscience comes from Hellenistic cultures and their conception of the universe, in which the highest good is to be a spirit abstracted from need, emotion, and body. Perfection is to be totally un-needy, independent, and self-caused. This may well fit the spirit of primitive or even more evolved commercial or capitalist environments, but it’s not the only possible conception of the highest good.Abraham Joshua Heschel demonstrated in his book The Prophets that this notion of an all-powerful, all-knowing, emotionless God is not the biblical conception of God. The God of the Bible is emotional, passionate, and in need of human beings as partners in the process of tikkun — the repair and transformation of the world. To the Greeks, this was a scandal. God had to be complete, perfect, and unchanging, transcending the vicissitudes of history. Eventually many Jews were influenced by Hellenistic thought, and elements of Hellenistic beliefs found their ways into the prayers, the philosophy, and even the folklore of the Jewish people.Similarly, in later periods, Christian conceptions (themselves influenced by both Hellenistic thought and the Persia-based Mithra religion) were taken up by both popular and high Jewish culture. In patriarchal cultures, the ideal was the all-powerful male, supposedly the embodiment of the God who needs nothing and is self-contained, while women were denigrated because of their perceived neediness (as expressed through their emotionality). Moreover, the conception of God as more powerful than the dominant rulers of the world gave Jews, as a then powerless and subordinated people, a measure of hope that this God could eventually help us overcome the oppressive realities of the world in which we lived. So no wonder it was appealing to embrace the notion of an all-powerful God.Yet in the Aleynu prayer, said three times daily and enshrined in the Mishnah some eighteen hundred years ago, the goal we sought was le’takeyn olam be’malchut Shaddai (translatable as “transform the world under the rule of the breasted one”). We were aspiring for the female energy (also referred to elsewhere as Shechinah) of love, kindness, and compassion (rachamim, from the Hebrew word rechem, meaning “womb”) to become the shaping force in reality. And that energy is not self-contained but rather is always seeking a partner, always in relationship, always in need of the other. Heschel talks of God’s need for humanity as part of the path to finish the work of creation and redemption. And though he doesn’t name it as such, I believe that Heschel’s God is YHVH merged with El Shaddai — that is, the transformative power now understood as seeking a world of love and generosity, and seeking to be in loving partnership with all humanity.With this reintegration of the feminine and masculine energies of God, which I believe to be so badly needed today, YHVH becomes the Force of transformation that makes possible a world based on love and generosity. But that Force does not act with force; it acts through love. The Shechinah or feminine presence of God is the face of God that is needed again, and becomes explicit in the Kabbalistic tradition, particularly in the Zohar; gets expression in some strands of Hasidism; and is now desperately needed in all the religious traditions of humanity. For a starter, God is not just Father but also Mother. This God contracts Herself in order to make space for an “other,” human beings, who will eventually become partners with God in tikkun, the healing and transformation of the world.What would a Mother God be like? A mother who sees her children growing up and making mistakes adopts mothering approaches appropriate to her child’s developmental stage. When the child is in infancy and early childhood, she will act to protect the child, correct its mistakes, and teach the child her own wisdom about what will bring that child safety and happiness. But as the child becomes older and reaches adolescence and beyond, the mother recognizes that respect for the child’s dignity and freedom requires that she no longer interfere in the child’s life, even when she is certain that the child is making wrong or even disastrous choices. She can continue to put out her teachings, but she can no longer stop the adolescent or adult child from making choices she knows will be harmful. She may cry as she witnesses the destructive consequences of the grown child’s choices, but she will not try to interfere, because even if it were possible, doing so would in effect eliminate that child’s freedom and self-determination, infantilizing and thereby undermining the freedom of the child, created in the image of God, to make its own choices.The partner God seeks in humanity is one that embodies God’s freedom and hence must be allowed to make its own mistakes. What God can do is simply to continue to put out into the world her message of the kind of world she/he/it wants to see. This message is received in many different ways by humanity, depending on the psychological, intellectual, and spiritual frameworks that various segments of humanity have developed — these varying frameworks influence how different communities hear God’s voice.One reason many smart and sensitive people have trouble thinking about God is that they imagine God to be a Being who could and should have intervened to lessen the sufferings of the Jews and others during the Holocaust, and in other instances of unacceptable and horrific human suffering, but didn’t. Although they know that they don’t really believe in this god of miracles intervening in human history, they are angry at “him” for not existing and so won’t allow themselves to know the God that does exist.There’s every reason to be angry that the world has been so full of hatred, evil, and unredeemable suffering (experienced not just by Jews but by much of humanity). To the extent that one wants to conceptualize God as a big spirit in the sky that could have intervened and didn’t, there’s every reason to be angry at this god.I believe that anyone who wants to give the actually existing, living God a chance needs to first engage in a certain amount of rage at the god they wish existed and who has let them down. By expressing our anger and disappointment that God is not some big patriarch in heaven who kindly intervenes in human life, we can get beyond that vision; then we can be open to acknowledging the God who does exist, a god who will not intervene and undermine human freedom, a God who at this stage in the evolution of the consciousness of the human race will only repeat her/his/its message calling for a world of love and justice and compassion and stewardship of the earth to anyone who will listen.On one hand, God is everything in the universe (or multi-verse) that makes possible the transformation of that which is to that which can and ought to be, and the Force in the universe that we can experience as calling us to become her/ his/its partner in healing and transforming the world in accord with its potential to be loving, caring, generous, just, etc. This is an account of how God manifests in our lives. But it doesn’t answer the ontological questions: What is this Being? Is it a separate being from us, or is it simply a way of describing an aspect of the natural world? I’m committed to saying it is something more, but how do I explain what that “more” is?I’m sure my answer (like any answer) is likely to be at least as misleading as it is accurate, because our language has developed to describe and re-identify experiences we have in daily life, whereas God is a reality that transcends daily life and its categories and hence cannot be fully described in everyday language. I can point to my own experience of overwhelming joy and awe at the mystery and magnificence of the universe, my encounter with God through daily prayer and meditation, and my radical amazement as I rejoice in nature and hear the still small voice of God’s revelation. I can even in my role as rabbi show you the Jewish path to having similar mystical experiences to mine, but none of my words are sufficient to do more than point in the direction of this experience. Just as I can neither fully explain mystical, meditative, aesthetic, psychedelic, and love-related experiences, nor recapture in language what is so deeply moving and exciting in these experiences, I’m unable to really reach through language to the dimension of the holy, sacred, awesome, and unique experience of God. All the less so, then, can I tell you what God really is in her/his/its essence. All that I can do is tell you two stories that try to capture in human terms what occasionally helps me to think about what I’m in relationship with when I’m in relationship to God — a Being that transcends our categories.God is the consciousness of all possible universes and more. All the actual and possible universes are in this consciousness in the same way that my thoughts are in my body but not reducible to any part of my body. My body swims in a field of consciousness that both permeates every part of my body and extends beyond it. In a similar way, the actual and possible universes swim in the consciousness that is God.But consciousness is not some ghostly reality separate from the physical world, for one important reason: the whole notion of a physical world, like the notion of consciousness, is a human construct. Our language necessarily dichotomizes and separates reality into distinct elements, but the real world — the universe and all its dimensions — is never broken into distinct elements. The entirety of all that is has always been in relationship to all the rest of what is. The universe is a field of interacting realities that can never be separated from each other except in human categories. As Continental philosophers have tried to teach us for a long time, in dissecting reality with those categories we also kill it. Our categories give us access to the dead universe, but rarely — except in poetry, music, art, and spiritual, religious, mystical, and psychedelic experience — do we get an inkling of what a universe of relationships is really like. Rarely do we get an inkling of what it means to proclaim, as we Jews do several times a day, the oneness of all being and all reality, and then to say that in the end of time, when tikkun has come about and the world has been transformed, fixed, repaired, and mended, not only will God be One (as she/he/it already is), but her name will be “One.”Describing God as the consciousness of the universe, and thereby trying to explain God by using a familiar category, gives us an idea of who God is — or so we think, until we realize that this consciousness is actually a mystery as well. And though for a long time scientists have been promising that they will soon be able to explain what consciousness really is, they are still only grasping at the physical correlates of consciousness. They will never be able to explain the inner subjective experience of it. Though sometimes we are encouraged by our dualistic language to say that we have experiences, the fuller reality is that we are our experiences, which are taking place in and around us in our physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual unity, which we call “me” or “I.” And this “me” or “I” is intrinsically part of an infinity of other physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual unities that together constitute the life force of the universe (or multiverse).The case for a universe that is intrinsically teleological, not a product of blind physical forces that collide and combine by accident, has recently been bolstered by Thomas Nagel, for whom I served as a teaching assistant at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid- 1960s. In his book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Nagel argues for “a cosmic predisposition to the formation of life, consciousness, and the value that is inseparable from them.”Nagel himself wants to steer away from the notion of a preexisting God that makes all this happen, so he goes on to say that “the tendency for life to form may be a basic feature of the natural order, not explained by the non-teleological laws of physics and chemistry.” Nagel goes on to argue:Once there are beings who can respond to value, the rather different teleology of intentional action becomes part of the historical picture, resulting in the creation of new value. The universe has become not only conscious and aware of itself but capable in some respects of choosing its path into the future — though all three, the consciousness, the knowledge and the choice, are dispersed over a vast crowd of beings, acting both individually and collectively.Nagel does us a real service by reminding us that “it is too easy to forget how radical is the difference between the subjective and the objective, and to fall into the error of thinking about the mental in terms taken from our ideas of physical events and processes.”So one approach we might take is to say that this preexisting teleological tendency of life to form and to develop consciousness, intentionality, and an awareness of the need to build an ethical world is simply a central part of what we mean by saying God is running the universe and directing its evolution in a particular way. Or we can avoid the potentially scary (to some) similarity of that claim to the claims of “creationists” by saying that God evolved as part of this process. My teacher Zalman Schachter-Shalomi alludes to this kind of evolution of God when he says that God was “a young God” when she/he/it was involved in the mistakes that God made in dealing with humans in the Torah. God is developing along with human beings, and although God was part of the universe from the start, God is becoming self-conscious through us. Or to put it another way, we (and all other self-conscious beings) are the elements in the universe through which God is becoming self-conscious.But the evolution of God in this way is not an accident — it is not a product of the accidental collision of material elements in the cosmic stew. Rather, it is the manifestation of the tendencies of the universe, no matter how many billions of years it may have taken to get here and how many billions more it may take, for the consciousness of the universe to actually find companionship in a self-conscious being (whether human or nonhuman) capable of being spiritually, ethically, emotionally, and intellectually God’s partner and hence the true fulfillment of being “created in the image of God.”We are not separate from this process of God’s evolution; God is everything that ever was, is, and will be. We are in God, though God is in us too, as God is in all being.God is in constant contact with us. Perhaps it would be helpful to imagine our relation to God through the analogy of a liver cell’s relation to a human’s conscious mind. Let’s talk about the liver first. Liver cells, when isolated and put under a microscope and attended to from the standpoint of empirical science, function according to certain biochemical “laws.” Yet they are also alive in a very different way than science can describe — they, like all cells in our bodies, are constituent elements of a living, conscious entity and thereby have consciousness, albeit the consciousness of a liver cell. They receive and emit messages that are processed by the central nervous system and the brain, and ultimately their messages reach our conscious minds. Normally we don’t pay much attention to our liver cells, but when there is deep trouble there (e.g., pain caused by cancer), we become aware of this part of our bodies. Once aware, we can send different messages to the liver. We can, for example, visualize the liver as healthy and functioning, or visualize ourselves as sending healing energy to the liver. Sometimes we can even get empirical proof that this visualization has had a healing impact on the liver — some scientists say that the exact biochemical changes that are caused by such visualization will eventually be discovered.The liver cell is part of the liver, which is part of the entire body. It is conscious of the totality of which it is part, but only in the limited way that a liver cell can be conscious. It is part of something larger, it “knows” and responds to that larger something, and it is absolutely dependent on that larger totality. Eventually, like every cell of the body, it will die and be replaced by other cells that have similar functions in relationship with the larger body.Human beings stand in similar relationship with God. God is the totality of all Being and all existence that ever was, is, or will be, and more. At any given moment we are part of God, and God is part of us. But we are not all there is to God, nor is God simply the sum of all physically existing things in the infinite universe. That is also part of God, just as a given moment of our conscious experience is a part of who we are at that moment, though not all of who we are at that moment and certainly not all of who we are in our totality. When the totality of all that was, is, and will be pulsates through our being and constitutes our being, we receive messages from it. But we only notice those messages that we can process given our receptors and our particular level of consciousness.Just like the liver cell, we intuit and “know” that we are part of some larger totality, that we are serving a purpose in a larger story. But just like the liver cell, we have only a very limited vocabulary for describing what the larger story is, even though we can feel it in every ounce of our being, at least when we are not deflected from knowing so by certain poisons within our system.So we are alive in a world that is alive, and so too is all of being. The notion of matter as something dead and acted on by other dead objects misses too much of the reality of the universe. In the past hundred years we have learned that at the very heart of what we once had thought to be inanimate matter there lies a set of atoms made up of tiny electrons that move around a nucleus held together by its own energy. Yet when the smaller particles in the nucleus were examined, it became increasingly difficult to talk of particles as anything more than energy fields in which energy “events” seem to happen and in which particles emerge and disappear back into energy (see my interview with John Cobb in this issue of Tikkun for more about this). Everything that once seemed dead, quiescent, or dormant is in fact in some sense alive. The whole way we view the universe, in terms of objects, is a function of the level of complexity of our receptors, which are unable to see at the microscopic level and to reveal the way in which these so-called objects are themselves complex arrangements of energy fields.We get a fuller picture of reality when we see ourselves as composed of millions of these complex energy fields that are coming into existence and dying, and standing in relationship with trillions of other such energy fields. When the mystics talk about God breathing us and the breath of God traveling through our every pore, we hear language that tries to say there is no radical division between the dancer and the dance, between the outer and the inner, between that which is object and that which apprehends and categorizes objects. The solidity of objects is merely a particular way for a particular being, us, with our limited sensory apparatus, to arrange the flux of energies for the sake of certain survival tasks.“Wait a second,” you may object. “Energy fields themselves are categories of physical science. So if that’s what consciousness is, then it is still wholly physical and within the scientific paradigm.” Unfortunately, this kind of analysis, no matter how frequently repeated, cannot account for our subjectivity and the inner experience that we have, which is not reducible to energy fields.What many human beings have discovered but have been unable to fully articulate using a language developed to describe the empirically observable, is that the universe is pulsating with a spiritual energy as well, and that every ounce of Being is an extension of that spiritual energy. Just as our sensory apparatus is inadequate for capturing the energy forces at play in the nuclei of the cells that constitute the visually observable objects of the world, so too our conceptual apparatus provides us with inadequate tools or means to apprehend the rich web of spiritual reality in which we and all of Being are embodied.Yet we have hints that most human beings through most of history have been aware of this dimension of reality and have sought to respond to it. We respond through awe, wonder, radical amazement, and celebration — even as we may bemoan our inability to describe it adequately or persuasively to those whose spiritual sensors have been shut off in some way (often because of the crude or coercive ways that spirituality or religion has been introduced to them by parents or oppressive religious practices).Now let us for a moment imagine that the entirety of all that has been, all that is, and all that will be is filled with a spiritual energy and consciousness of which our own consciousness and our own experience of spirituality are but bare hints, like the intuition or “knowing” that a liver cell might have about the totality of the being from which it receives its tasks and messages and of which it is a constituent part. When we know in this way, Jews are inclined to respond to what we know by addressing a “Thou.” And this “Thou” has feelings, upsets, and needs.Is it anything more than a peculiarly human presumption to address that larger totality as a Thou, to imagine it as having personality and emotions?For a Greek imperialist or a male chauvinist, a god with feelings and needs must be a lesser god. Greek and Roman imperialism may have felt the need to develop a conception of perfection in which the full being was one that had no needs or emotions, and the Roman centurion may have been trained to distance himself from feelings and needs in order to become the perfect mechanism for world conquest. But why should that influence my concept of God, inspired as it is in part by El Shaddai, the female energy of the universe, which understands humans’ relational needs as part of the dignity and magnificence of what it is to be a human being?From the standpoint of the Bible, to be human is both to be created in the image of God and to be in relationship with God, yearning for and needing God. And for Jewish mysticism, it is also true that God is in relationship with human beings — God needs us, cares about us, and is in a not yet completed process in which human beings have a partnership role. We are not equal partners, but we are needed partners nevertheless. So being in loving, conscious, freely chosen, joyous relationship and needing to be recognized and responded to is a fundamental ontological reality of the universe, and God is, among other things, that aspect of the universe. Why? No reason. That’s just how it is. Had we been around at the time of the Big Bang, we probably wouldn’t have been aware of this aspect of reality, but the universe that evolved us as conscious, loving, freely choosing beings who wish to be in relationship with the ultimate God of the universe is neither a cosmic blunder nor a random act of chance. Rather, this is the outcome of the process of the evolution of a universe that has always had this potential in it.From the standpoint of contemporary capitalist mentality (the continua tion of Hellenistic thought in the modern period), this relational idea of God is heretical. To be whole and to be healthy is to be able to stand alone. So certainly the spiritual Force that governs, shapes, and creates the universe cannot be a force that stands in need of something else or somebody else!But what if the fundamental Force shaping the universe, the Force that makes for the possibility of transformation from that which is to that which ought to be, not only makes such transformation possible but also needs it and feels pain of a sort when that transformation is not accomplished? What if this Force sheds tears for the universe that is still in pain and feels anger at the ways in which unnecessary pain persists? What if this Force feels outrage at the ways in which pain and oppression are ontologized and blamed on God, and compassion for those parts of creation that cannot yet heal themselves?I understand full well that in talking about spiritual reality in this way I may be seen as merely imposing a particular, limited human reality on the universe and God. “The human hunger for family and parenting,” you might argue, “is shaping religious people’s desire to inscribe into the structure of necessity our sad human condition and neediness.” Perhaps you pity those of us who have such a need rather than the ability to “look reality coldly in the face, recognize its silence, and cope with that.” I understand this response.But seeing the universe as cold and unresponsive, or seeing the world as a mechanistic place governed by impersonal energy systems that have no particular knowledge or caring for us — these too are just human constructs, ways of cutting up reality based on one orientation and one set of desires and values. They do not contain an “objectively” more compelling argument, although they correspond more closely to the ruling paradigms of our historical epoch.Here is another way to put it: the richness of human emotions, the wealth of nuance and excitement that can be generated by human neediness, and the depth of love that can be generated by human relationships — these magnificent aspects of reality are likely to be aspects of God as well. Why should God be any less wonderful than human beings?If one rejects the notions of perfection that come from Hellenistic (and now contemporary patriarchal) thought and affirms the loving, caring, and compassionate energy (often essentialized as “feminine”), then one can easily see that attributing emotions, personality, feelings, and caring to the spiritual Being that permeates all reality is not a put-down or a belittling but rather a celebration in God of what we can and ought to honor in human beings. Here, feminist theory and biblical insight dovetail nicely.So although talking about a consciousness of the universe or the consciousness of human beings as existing in God may make it sound as if I’m embracing a rather rationalist version of panentheism, in some respects akin to the ideas of Jewish theologian Mordecai Kaplan, I’m simultaneously affirming the mystical and love-filled dimension of God that I learned from Abraham Joshua Heschel: God as the caring, loving being who needs and stands in relationship with all that is and who contracted in order to give space to our freedom. And while the language I use seems to suggest that God had a preexisting plan that was being followed, I actually think that God has been developing and evolving with us and with whatever other self-conscious beings God has also created in other galaxies, since they too are part of God. And if this is only one of a zillion universes, then God has been developing along with all of them too, and they are also inside God and made possible by the same loving Force that needed to contract in order to give creation the freedom to develop in unpredictable ways. This contraction by God to give space to humans to develop freely, even while going astray and developing in unpredictable ways, is possible because this God is a Goddess of womb-like rachamim — compassion and mercy. Thus the second revelation of God in Torah: “YHVH, YHVH, God of compassion and mercy, slow to anger, abounding in loving-kindness and truth, carrying mercy to the thousands.” The idea that compassion is a fundamental aspect of the spiritual energy pervading the universe makes the God we are talking about also the God of the Jews and the other Abrahamic religions as well. And since here I’m reclaiming El Shaddai and merging her with YHVH, it’s time for affirmative action in theology, which would require that we also refer to God from now on as the Goddess!