“There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting,” says translator of Greek myths, Robert Graves. Rewriting is not merely crafting a flowing sentence or copy-editing a well-structured paragraph for your reader’s pleasure. It’s also drawing from the well of the ancient stories of our subterranean past to offer them anew with an interpretation relevant to our times. And we Jews have deep wells to draw from. From the ancient aquifers of the origin stories of Genesis, to the rolling streams of rabbinic midrashim, to the tide pools of Shalom Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Isaac Babel and the Fools of Chelm.[i] Thus, the future of Jewish storytelling is a retelling of old stories from a new state of consciousness.
It’s not by chance that the metaphor I invoke for Jewish stories is that of water, the sea and the depths. This metaphor draws us directly to the opening verses of the Torah — the very first story of our people, which in itself is a rewriting of ancient Mesopotamian stories, particularly the Babylonian Enuma Elish. When we read Genesis, we are told that even before the very first day of creation, the spirit of God moved on the face of the oceanic depths. The Hebrew word for “deep” is tehom, and the word in Genesis is an allusion to Tiamat, the ancient Mesopotamian primordial goddess who was the personification of the sea and the mother of all the gods. The biblical narrative continues with, “and the earth was without form and void and darkness covered the face of the deep.” (Genesis 1:2). The expressions “form” (tohu) and “void” (bohu) evoke the yin yang of Tiamat and Apsu or Tehom and Elohim: forever opposites that complete each other.
In the Enuma Elish, Tiamat was vanquished in the great battle between the creator deity and the deep-sea goddess and in the Genesis story the same battle is alluded to in the verse: the “wind from God swept over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2), a reference to the mother-waters, a universal Mother of all of creation. Despite her defeat in these very first verses of the Torah, she remains a recurring character in the Biblical text, returning in the form of the threatening sea dragon — the Tannin — and the Leviathan, or sometimes just the “sea” in the poetry of the Torah. Her story, which urgently needs to be resurrected and retold, is that of the primordial mother, whose existence preceded and complemented Elohim, the male Creator god.
We have become so used to accepting a father God — the male creator and judge who is sometimes chastising and sometimes benevolent — that we have forgotten that in order to create the world, indeed, in order to create all life, we need both the male and female principles. The great storyteller Mark Twain says,
There is no such thing as a new idea. … We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages. ― Mark Twain[ii]
It is time to give the kaleidoscope a new shake because the ancient story of our original mother has been obscured in the twisting and shaking of refracted prisms and the world is in need of her wise and nurturing energy.
As mentioned, the mother goddess is often associated with sea creatures and leviathans but also with serpents. So, a retelling of the story of the Garden of Eden would be one which sees the serpent associated with the feminine as a positive character, thus changing the meaning of the Eden story. At the urging of the serpent, Eve — the symbolic figure of the mother goddess — breaks the prohibition issued by the male God against eating from the Tree of Knowledge and with this action, rebels against the patriarchal ban. The kaleidoscope is spun again, and the pieces of glass reveal a further iteration of the struggle between the ancient cult of the mother goddess and the cult of the male father god. Eating from the Tree (the tree itself is a feminine symbol) became a grave sin committed against the patriarchal religion that Elohim represents and suggested a struggle between god the father and the mother goddess. In the past, women in certain societies in ancient times were honored because of their fertility and their power of procreation, which put them in a natural biological relationship with the Divine but were now, as the story goes, being punished for it. As a rebuke for the rebellion against the father god, or perhaps as a means of controlling her power, the woman has now become subordinate to man. This denotes a significant turning point in the history of consciousness.
We are left wondering: What could possibly have caused such a conflict between our ancient parents? Is the rivalry between two divinities — one feminine and the other masculine — necessary? The quarrel not only led to the expulsion from Eden but also set the feminine figure at odds against her own feminine nature. For those of us who see the Divine as eternal, infinite, ineffable and omnipotent, the split between male and female makes no sense. Can we tell new stories which reunite these seeming opposites? Can we tell stories that reconcile the split and return the female to equal footing with the male? Perhaps a retelling of these stories would heal some of the patriarchal darkness that has been inflicted on the world casting a shadow on both women and men. Perhaps a new respect for the feminine in society would restore the feminine Divine to her rightful place alongside and with equal status to the male deity.[iii]
The idea of the primordial goddess resurfaces over and over in biblical times with different names such as: Asherah, Astarte, Anat, Ishtar, Esther, Isis, Innana and more. The conflict and struggle between the male god and the female goddess are again represented in the Torah in later stories portraying the much-persecuted cult of the Asherah — the name of the goddess — and her asherahs, which are her nature-based places of worship, upon every hilltop and under every tree. We know that over the course of their troubled history, the Israelite people, in contact with and often in conflict with neighboring tribes of Canaan, will be torn between fidelity to the father god and the temptation to worship the mother goddess.
Although she is repeatedly demeaned and defeated, the mother goddess returns again in Kabbalistic mysticism under the names of Shekhinah (the in-dwelling Divine), the Sabbath kallah (“bride”) and binah (“wisdom”). Wisdom is often associated with the feminine deity known as Sophia in Greek gnostic tradition, Athena in Greek mythology, Minerva in the Roman pantheon, and Saraswati as the Hindu goddess of knowledge and creativity. Audre Lorde echoes Graves and Twain when she writes: “There are no new ideas … only new ways of making them felt.” Can we again feel the power of the goddess of the beginnings who never completely disappears, neither from the story nor from the archetypes of the collective?
Returning to the biblical stories, we find echoes of the same conflict everywhere. Could Miriam’s revolt against Yahweh, for which she was punished with leprosy, be an attempt at a return to the worship of the mother goddess? And what of another Miriam, also known as Mary of Magdala — a controversial figure in the New Testament — the holy woman from the Galilee whose “prostitution” might have been in fact a service or a form of worship of the mother goddess. Considered scandalous by some, she is sometimes seen as a priestess in disguise. These stories need to be and are already being retold. Rewriting, recombining and re-feeling are all modes of retelling ancient tales that exist as archetypes residing deep in our collective human consciousness.
Another related tale to be retold and re-felt is the story of Abraham’s rift with his father Terakh and mother Amathlai. Terakh, we are told, is ninth in descent from Noah; he was a Chaldean priest of Ur in Mesopotamia and an adherent of the cult of the Moon, which was the national religion in all of Babylonia. In another erasure of the feminine, Abraham’s mother is not mentioned in the Torah; not even appearing in the story of Abraham’s birth (Genesis 11:26), but her name is told to us later in the Talmud (Baba Batra 91a). Abraham leaves the city of Ur of the Chaldees,[iv] which was the center of worship of Nannar or Sin, two names of the moon God. (Sin is evoked again later as Sinai where Moses receives the tablets from the father God.) The Moon as a deity in its ancient form is male, but its male nature complements the natural moon-related cycle of female fertility, and the moon goddess’s names are Ningal or Nikkal. Abraham leaves the cult of the moon to worship a patriarchal god, who is considered a tribal patron rather than a cosmic god of all. Only much later in history does Yahweh become elevated to a global monotheistic deity. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, there is a tendency to see Yahweh as intrinsically superior to the idolized deities of polytheism, but in a sense the ancient so-called “primitive” traditions capture in “archetypal form realities towards which our modern scientific society is only now converging after a long period of imbalance and confusion.”[v] Abraham lived at a time when the nomads were being replaced by settled agriculturalists and he himself, far from being an innovator, represents a conservative current that persists in being nomadic, and refuses agriculture and all the changes such a transition brings.
From a psychological perspective, when a son rebels against and rejects and repudiates his father like Abraham did, it leaves a scar. As must all young people, Abraham sets out on a hero’s journey, but in his case, he never completes the journey with a return to his people. Without a return, there is no resolution or reconciliation with parents, tribe and community. Thus, a wound is formed. A healthy relationship with our parents does not always mean that we must wholeheartedly accept their opinions or their traditions, but we can have a loving relationship with them even without embracing all their teachings. Abraham becomes a wanderer, a man of doubt, never whole, always uncertain, who later goes up the mountain to sacrifice his child but is prevented from doing so by the angel of conscience. Is it possible that we — the descendants of Abraham — have been sacrificing our children in wars ever since because of this unhealed wound? Another story that needs to be told.
Abraham and his father never reconcile; he never returns to Haran, the city in which Terakh settled after leaving Ur of the Chaldees (Kasdim). The family has broken apart, never to be healed in their lifetime or in the generations that follow. I’m sure his mother was heartbroken. We Jews need to heal our ancestral wound that started with Abraham’s rejection of his parents and denial of their worship of nature beings with their inherent earth-connectedness. The disconnect from our pagan roots means losing touch with the indigenous kinship worldview, which acknowledges the interbeing of humans and the natural world. We have forgotten our roots. Perhaps a new story of healing of the rift with our ancient parents and repairing our original ancestral wound might sooth our inner turmoil. Perhaps our pagan grandmother and grandfather might have something to teach us if only we are willing to listen. Perhaps we can tell a new story of healing these ancestral wounds by reconnecting to nature.
This new story does not need to be one of conquest and destruction of land; it does not need to be about nation- building or a drawing of borders, keeping some people out and others in. It does not need to be about planting a stake in the ground and claiming ownership. Instead, it needs to be one of forming a connection to the nature beings of the land, of feeling once again the music of the mountains and the song of the sea. It is not a story of politics or patriotism. It is a story of oneness, of harmony, of unity with the web of life.[vi]
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The future of Jewish storytelling is to bring back the ancient stories — particularly, the stories of the mother goddess — and find our way to a happier ending. Embracing the Divine feminine is about healing, deep listening, compassion and connectedness in facing modern crises such as climate change, global conflict and social justice. By reconnecting with the Mother Goddess, we can tap into our authenticity and resilience, and shift the energy of war on the planet, which is an overabundance of male energy, and rebalance with female maternal compassion. These impulses exist within all of us whether male or female, men or women. Wars will not end on this planet until we find ourselves looking at each other, saying with bewilderment “What are we doing?” and spontaneously and in unison lay down our weapons. Only then will we embrace one another as one humanity, one people, eschewing divisions and false separations, and seeing the humanity in those that would be the other. The return of the Divine feminine is a re-envisioning of a more perfect world on this planet. For those who see this as a naïve dream, I say to you: Dare to dream a new dream, feel a new emotion and tell a new story.
[i] In recent decades, a slew of authors, like Anita Diamant, Yochi Brandes, Anna Solomon, have reinvented the biblical stories for a modern audience.)
[ii] Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review.
[iii] See Jean Markle, The Great Goddess: Reverence of the Divine Feminine from the Paleolithic to the Present.
[iv] Robert Briffault, The Mothers, 3:79 (Edinburgh: Bishop and Sons, 1927.
[v] https://www.dhushara.com/book/orsin/origsin.htm. Retrieved March 2024.
[vi] Markle.
