What do we teach about how power works?
What do we teach about how a Higher Power works?
Terrible events in the U.S. have brought the concept of “white privilege” center stage.
Political philosophers Naomi Zack and George Yancy offer a definition: having privilege means you are more likely to have the opportunity to exercise your legal rights (New York Times, Nov 5, 2014).
Privilege is a theme of last week’s Torah reading, the story of Tamar and her father-in-law Judah. Judah exercises male privilege. In the language of Biblical law, which speaks of obligations rather than rights, Judah believes he can ignore his obligations but hold Tamar to hers.
Judah has a legal obligation to offer Tamar his son Shela’s hand in marriage, so that she can have children if she chooses. But, fearing the loss of his youngest son, Judah fails to offer Tamar what belongs to her. (Shela, in Hebrew, literally means “hers.”)
Tamar masquerades as a veiled prostitute, waiting at Petach Eynayim to solicit the lonely widowed Judah. She negotiates a fee she knows he does not have with him, takes the equivalent of all his ID cards as collateral, and fails to show up to receive payment.
When Judah learns that Tamar is pregnant, he criticizes her for failing to fulfill her obligation to wait for Shela. Angrily, he calls for legal punishment: Tamar’s execution. When he realizes that he collaborated in her pregnancy, he says, tzadkah mimeni: justice is on her side, not on mine.
Judah’s eyes open to new insights: Responsibility is mutual. Justice is only possible when everyone fulfills their obligations; when all adults are persons in the eyes of the law. (Petach Eynayim, in Hebrew, literally means “eye-opening.”)
This is a profound religious teaching.
Relentless social messages teach us to view others as objects. Corporations large and small get rich off schemes that displace people. Government agencies hang on to invested funds as long as they can, while people with disabilities fight for the few pennies due them. Propagandists reduce cultural groups to one-dimensional caricatures who should be swept out of existence.
Spiritual teachers should resist this objectifying trend. We have power to shape people’s sense of being in the world. We should use it.
Many of us teach that relationship with God is important. But are we mindful of how we speak about God?
Forty years ago, feminist theologian Mary Daly said that constant talk about “God the Father” teaches reverence for men at the expense of women. We really should speak about God, she said, using a variety of metaphors.
Ten years ago, eco-theologian Sallie McFague began to speak of the world as God’s body, an image she hoped would increase reverence for the land, water, and air around us.
Just last week, my students objected to calling God “King,” evoking for them a capricious, corrupt politician.
Last week’s Haftorah (prophetic) reading deepens the Torah’s critique of absolute power. God’s power, teaches Amos, is interactive.
Can two walk together without having met? Does a lion roar in the forest when he has no prey? Does a trap spring up from the ground if it has not caught something? (Amos 3:3-5, NJPS Translation)
Even the Highest Power is in relationship. God is not a judge raging or righting from heaven. God responds to the needs and behaviours of human beings. Our needs and behaviours evoke our experience of the Divine.
The Zohar affirms this, as it reveals the secret hidden in Torah’s first few words: Bereisheet bara Elohim. Often these words are translated, “In a beginning, God created.” But the Zohar explores an alternative, equally literal option: “With beginning, God was created.” God came into being at the beginning of creation. Before creation, God was infinite potential. Such an abstract reality, so all encompassing that nothing was differentiated within it, cannot really be known. God that can be known came into being only when something could come to know God.
As it is with God, so it is with us. We come into being through relationship. We are individuals embedded in social networks. We become ourselves when we recognize others, and when they recognize us.
Imagine if we spiritual types spoke about God as coming into being through relationship. Imagine if we spoke of other people in this same engaged way.
Of course this discourse would not immediately end all exploitation and objectification. But it could begin to reshape our sense of who we are in the world, and call us, as spiritual messengers, to challenge the kind of privilege that gains advantage by denying the rights of others.
Image: Goddess of Justice, Vancouver Law Courts. vancouversun.com. Or maybe: the veiled Tamar righting injustice.
Very powerful article. So many things that you have written, I resonate with. I will have to read it again
and possibly comment on particular statements. No doubt, it is not o.k. to deny the rights of another.
Thank you for sharing!
Wonder full post. As long as we see “Ggod” as this singular entity defined by our paradigm of what “Ggod,” is, we will continue to support the social structure that can co-opt that idea for control, whether it be political, economical, social and/or even legal control of people and how they operate in the world. We, the Western World, have used the term God, to justify just about anything. We have used it to wipe out whole races of people or strip them of their uniqueness so much that they have no choice but to assimilate.
But our economic and social hierarchy needs an “other,” so we have gotten used to and still do use God, to keep us in the place of privilege.
However, the projection we do in the name of God, may just be a part of a necessary process for us to walk through to get to the place where we start realizing that we are ALL in this together. As a history student, I dont hold out much hope as long as the projection we do continues.
Thank you, Shoe1000! The human world is a diverse place and we may never have that shared universal mystical experience. But perhaps we could at least strengthen the voice in favour of it by teaching what you describe above.