Episode 14 - Rabbi Mark Sameth and The Dual-Gendered Name for God

Anni talks with Rabbi Mark Sameth about his book The Name: A History of the Dual-Gendered Hebrew Name for God and what this means for us.

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Transcript

Hello, welcome to Barely Christian, Fully Christian. This is Anni Ponder. This podcast explores loving Jesus, being repulsed by much of Christianity, and relating to the Holy Spirit as the divine feminine, or as I prefer to call her, Mama God.

You might be able to imagine my delight when I came across a book called The Name by Rabbi Mark Sameth. The subtitle is A History of the Dual-Gendered Hebrew Name for God. Today he joins me on this podcast as we discuss how God’s name in the Hebrew Scriptures can be read as He-She, and what this means for us all. Welcome.

Well, welcome Rabbi Mark Sameth. I'm so pleased that you've joined me today here on this podcast to discuss your very invigorating book. Let me just tell our listeners a little bit about you. Rabbi Mark Sameth is the author of The Name, a history of the dual-gendered Hebrew name for God.

Rabbi Sameth was named one of America's most inspiring rabbis by the landmark Jewish periodical The Forward and his articles and editorials have appeared in such national publications as the New York Times. Featured in the book God, 48 famous and fascinating minds talk about God by Byrne and Blechman. I hope I've said that right. Links to some of his articles and an excerpt from his book are available on his website, RabbiMarkSameth.com.

Welcome, welcome, welcome Rabbi. I'm so pleased to have you here.

I'm so pleased to be here and Anni let me just start by saying that as someone who's fully Jewish and respectful of but barely conversant in Christianity, it really means a lot to me.

I'm honored that you invited me on and I gotta say we just, Anni and I for your listeners, Anni and I just had, you know, the great bonding experience that people of all religions have had, and I'm so all faiths, all walks and backgrounds have these days, which is overcoming a tech issue. And that brings us all together. So I'm going to say that was actually kind of a blessing in disguise.

Agreed. It makes us realize we're all one on this organism we call home and earth, and we all experience Zoom failures and mics and cameras not working.

So it's the great equalizer. It really is. It really is. Well, I don't know, you and I had an email conversation about this, but one of my, the women that I most look up to in all this world, author Carol Lynn Pearson, is the one who clued me into your work.

And she writes from the Mormon corner of the world, and she highlights in particular the feminine aspect of the divine. And she's a brilliant theologian. I consider her a saint, and so when she told me, there's this book by this rabbi, you must read it, I ordered it immediately, and then of course reached out to you.

So I know you said in one of our conversations, how did you hear about me? I mostly speak with the Jewish community. Well, word is getting out.

Well, thanks to her, and yeah, I've mostly spoken to Jewish audiences. I did one presentation, an interfaith presentation, and I'm delighted that people are paying attention to it.

Absolutely, especially, and we'll just skip to the end of your book, which is where you said I should focus on, but I did read the whole thing actually, which is where you talk about how this realization, this recognition of the dual gendered nature of God's name can help all religions be... What were some of your words? I won't put your words in your mouth, I'll let you speak for yourself, but something along the lines of helping all religions be kinder?

Yeah, the last at the end of the book, and this was the chapter that I didn't want to write. I really actually thought it might be presumptuous for me to speak about my interpretation of the dual gendered aspect of God's name, and my editor, and I thank her for this, my editor really said, you have to include that.

If you're going to be writing this book, you're going to have to include... It can be your interpretation, but say what, and how, and why it's important to you. And so the book is really a history, as best I could piece it together.

It's a history of this name, of God. And then at the end of the book, I do suggest ways that envisioning God as not masculine, but a unity of masculine and feminine and yet one at the same time, one, that this can be potentially helpful to people.

And so I think the areas that I talked about at the end of the book was that not seeing God as masculine, but as seeing God as, you know, in some way, feminine, that this approach could be one way of trying to make religion more reasonable.

In other words, that We look around us, we see male and female everywhere. And it seems more reasonable. It seems more reasonable. And rather than saying this is, we'll leave it at that, but more reasonable.

A second was helping enfranchise girls and women. I mean, there I was really talking about how if we envision God as male, but not female, and I think this was Mary Daley's. It was Mary Daly.

It was Mary Daly.

You know, that is dishonoring, to put it mildly, half the world's population. How is that even possible that men would be created in God's image, and women would not be created in God's image? So there's a sense of being reasonable.

There's a sense of trying to better enfranchise women and girls, supporting the gender revolution, which is to say that the understanding of gender today, different than sexual orientation, different than biological sex, but the understanding of gender is that it exists across a spectrum, like everything else.

We're all somewhere on any number of spectrums. And when we talk about gender, somebody can be present very traditionally masculine, very traditionally feminine, somewhere in the middle, neither, both.

I mean, these are, this should be obvious to a certain extent, because we've been observing it for thousands and thousands. of years. And so the gender revolution is not a revolution. In fact, it's really a revolution in understanding and acceptance of the way the world is built.

You know, I think I cite, and this was surprising to me, but I think in my studies, I learned that 1% of the human population is intersex. That means that they are biologically male and female, unusual to say the least, but 1% of the world's population is not a small amount.

And so when we say that we have to figure all of this complexity and nuance into our understanding, the fourth area that I cite in that in that chapter that you're referencing is bettering the prospects for world peace, which sounds audacious.

I mean, how can this possibly have anything to do with world peace? And yet one of the studies that I read, it shows without question that nation states where women and girls are enfranchised have a markedly better chance of being at peace with their neighbors than countries where women and girls are not enfranchised.

It's demonstrable, it's empirical, it's significant. And so that actually has an impact when we when we fully enfranchise women and girls, and we see all of us as images of the divine, that this is not just an academic exercise, this has real world consequences.

And then the last area that I talked about was I think something I was calling the new modernity, it's not my term, which is to say modernity was this idea that everything is atomized, everything can be seen as discrete, quanta, and separate from everything else.

And that's great in terms of individuation. What does it do for communion? I mean, we're talking about agency and community. Okay, that's great that we're all, each of us really, really well defined individuals. How do we come together as a community? How do we come together as a world community? And so trying to envision a way to understand all of us as being discrete, do, respect, and at the same time, role one, that's the work of the New Modernity.

So those are the areas that I was talking about in that last chapter that you're citing.

Absolutely. And I just wanted to add to that. I think it is nearly impossible to overstate the benefit to the world when we talk about recognizing the dual gendered nature of God's identity or name, which may be a nuance there that you could splice for u.

As a woman, I can certainly attest to the second thing you've talked about, recognizing and this is a new realization for me, only in the last little bit of my journey have I recognized the that the truth hidden like you have so beautifully shown throughout the book, there are references to this in scripture.

And even in my English reading, I can see some of them. For instance, in Genesis 1:27, when God says, let us make them male and female in our image. So discovering, oh, I am also made in God's image.

It's not just the other half of the planet, but we too are image-bearers of the divine. That's been world-changing game. Everything is different for me because of that. And I do see how when we, I like to talk about who's your North star. What is your ultimate truth? If our North star as a species can encompass all genders, as you've written about the rabbis recognizing kind of six different genders, and certainly I do affirm the spectrum idea. If we can see the divine as encompassing and all genders deriving from the divine, then everything else below takes on new meaning. We cannot any longer be divided, be affirm our tribalism in that way, because we are all coming from the divine. And so I don't think it's possible to overstate the benefits to humanity, to our planet, to our animal friends, what this understanding will bring us. So I wonder what's that?

From your mouth, Anni, yes.

If you didn't already know, I'm pretty passionate about this. I talk about it all the time. So I'm curious if maybe for folks who haven't read your book, which I hope everyone now will grab a copy as soon as they hear about this, if you could give us just a short introduction to what do you mean by God's name denoting dual gender? How do you get that? Where did you find that, etc?

Yeah. So where did I find it? So it wasn't in my English copy of the Bible, that's for sure. And the short response is that when I entered seminary and I started to really study the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew, it was really confusing. It just didn't make any sense. I kept stumbling across stuff that just, it couldn't be. And and yet I kept stumbling and stumbling and stumbling and stumbling and I would just take notes. I had a little notebook and I was writing all of this down because I was sure somebody could explain it and I was never able to get it.

I'll give you some examples. So first is that Adam is referred to as them. Adam is referred to as them and that you know and then the explanation was oh well Adam can also mean humanity. Yeah but Adam is referred to as them. Eve is referred to as he. After the flood Noah repairs to her tent. Mordecai is said to have been Esther's nursing father. The word is omen in Hebrew. Isaiah prophecies that the future kings of Israel will be nursing kings.

Okay you know you might say well that that it just means nurturing. In other words you can you can try to explain all these things but then if you go ahead further in the book of Isaiah it says explicitly King's breasts you shall suck.

Okay so that's not a metaphor. God address is addressed by Moses not only in the in the you masculine atah in Hebrew but also as at which is you feminine. Moses is addressing God in the feminine in Hebrew and then and then you get to you know some of the things that you can actually see in any English Bible which is in the book of Deuteronomy where God is said to endure labor pains, give birth, and suckle.

But the gender-bending of the Hebrew is really set me back on my heel. I just could not imagine what all this was trying to get to. And we're used to hearing. We're also used to hearing God referred to spoken of in the masculine, the word, the term the Lord we hear God referred to as the Lord.

And again, my comments, I'm really talking about the Hebrew Bible. But that is in the heat when we hear when we hear the term the Lord in the Hebrew Bible, that's really a euphemism. The it's a substitution.

If you look in the Hebrew almost all the time, I mean, the term the Lord does come up, but almost all the time where we hear that the the honorific, the Lord, what the Hebrew is presenting is not anything like that.

It's presenting a four letter name of God, which by tradition, Jews don't pronounce. This is what's the so-called ineffable name. And if, you know, as you, as, as you Anni read in the book, I'm not going to belabor the point right now to your, for your listeners, but how I got there. But if you read those letters backwards, they, they can be pronounced as the Hebrew pronouns, he and she. And that was when the bell went off. And it still wasn't this positive to me. I still didn't, I still didn't feel like I had enough other than this really, really now chock full notebook of gender-bending and all that.

And I took 10 years after that, after I graduated from seminary to research it. And then in 2008, I presented my first paper on it. And then 2020, you know, came, came, came the book. But that's the, that's the short answer, the, the, the, the name of God. I think, I think it may come as a surprise to many people that, that in the Hebrew Bible, God even has a personal name. I mean, we have personal names. When we think of the ancient Greek gods, Roman gods, Zeus and Jupiter, they all have names, but we don't think of God in the Bible as in the Hebrew Bible as having a name.

It's all honorifics. But that would have been unusual for that. That would have been completely unusual for the time. All the gods had names and the names were kept. They were not, they were not bandied about. They were kept respectfully by the priests. I'm talking about Egyptian priests, Sumerian priests, and the ancient Israelite priests, because this story that I'm telling in the book, and it's only, I think, I don't know, it's 150 pages, something like that, with the footnotes more, maybe 160, something like that.

But the story, I mean, we're going back the name that we're talking about in this book, the name of God, the archaeologists have found the first inscription of this name is about 3,400 years ago. So this is 400 years before David moves the monarchy from Hebron to Jerusalem. This is a really, really long time ago. It's before the Bible. It's before the Bible. And there it is carved into a pillar in a temple in what's now Sudan. And so it's a really, really ancient, ancient name.

Wow. It seems to me that, well, I have lots of questions. I'll wait for what it seems to me. Could you please talk about something that you mentioned in the book that I think will maybe help us wrap our minds around? Because to suggest that God might have a dual gendered name to some folks, yes, makes perfect sense. And to many other folks, this is mind-boggling and we can't quite understand. But something I think that would be very helpful is if you could talk about your, you mentioned about Adam having not his rib removed, but his side being split. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Sure. So there were two creation stories. And if we wanna look at them side by side, was the human being created before the vegetation? Did the vegetation come first? I mean, there's different, so we've got two different creation stories. The Genesis 1:27, which is the one that you cited where God creates the human being in the image of God, male and female. So this begs the question, what happened next? And so the rabbis, when they look at this, they say, well, this is clearly one human being. There's Adam, and then there's the Adam. And those are, those are under- stood differently. They mean different things.

Adam, the name Adam, comes from the word Adamah, from the earth, from the red clay. So it gets very subtle, but the rabbis are noticing that I'll try to use an analogy, which I don't use in the book. It's as if the Bible says that God took the clay and formed the clay. We understand what the clay is. It's the reddish earth, and God is creating a human being, the clay. And then a little further in the story, it's now clay with a capital C.

His name is Clay. That's what's going on. It's the Adam or it's Adam. It's not, they're not the same. It's very, very subtle shift. But that's what the text is, is doing. So the rabbis say, what happened to what happened to the clay, how did it become Clay and Eve, you know, how did it become Adam and Eve.

And they have all these speculative stories about how, how that first androgynous human being, and again, we're talking myth. This, this is, I have to, I have to put my theological cards on the table. This is sacred myth. I accept the scientific understanding of human beings and how, how the earth was populated. How human beings were created and how the earth is populated. I'm, I'm looking at this as sacred myth, both. And it is sacred, but it's also a myth. And so how does this story come, how do we make sense of this story mythologically and religiously. The second story. And now that of the creation is that, that Adam, that God took a rib from Adam and from that rib created Eve.

That's a second. That's a second story and why they both exist. We could spend.

You could probably write a doctoral thesis on that.

Exactly. Exactly. But, but what the, what the rabbis, some of the rabbis note is that this term cella. Yes, it means it can mean rib, but it can also mean side and there it goes back to their, their understanding of the original human being as an androgynous human being. dual gendered being, now what we're saying is that the original human being dual gendered in our myth is now going to be separated and the feminine side of this original human being is going to be Eve and the masculine side will now be the character named Adam that we know as Adam and now you have these two separate beings whose origin is one being and that has a lot of resonance in terms of how we understand a Jewish understanding of God that different aspects are manifest in different ways at different times but that ultimately really we're talking about the most profound, ineffable unity, we can't even begin to speak about. Maimonides said, uniquely one in a way that is incomparable to any other oneness. And there we go.

And there we go. It reminds me, someone told me that, and you'll have to let me know if this is correct, that within Jewish thought there is this idea of God being a multifaceted gem that we turn and see different sides of and might be tempted to think, oh, I see this facet of God, that's who God is, but someone from a different angle is turning the gem differently and experiencing a different reality.

Yeah. It reminds me of the Hindu story of the 10 blind men and the elephant. Oh, I know the elephant is this long skinny thing. Oh no, the elephant is this broad, this thin broad fin, feeling the ear and the other. No, no, no. I felt that it's like a tree trunk. We're all experiencing a bit. Hopefully we're experiencing a bit and it's when we come together and we share our experiences. What's your experience? What's my experience? What other experiences have we heard? And then we begin to approximate a more holistic understanding. Always beyond our grasp, obviously, but that's how we do it. We do it in community. We do it with each other. We do it by comparing notes. We do it in conversation. We do it in respectful and loving and holy dialogue.

Yes. And we do it in community. Absolutely. And that's what seems to me as I have my ear to this conversation in so many places, I'm noticing from vast corners of the earth, the theme is being, it's resounding, God is one, we are all part of this organism together, we are not, it's not us and them, it's all collective. And you're right, the Hindus have seen this for a long time with the elephant, a lot of Native American spirituality gets at this, certainly within Buddhism. And I was speaking with a man yesterday who is Baha'i. And I was telling him about your book, and he said, of course, that makes perfect sense to us. We see God as transcendent of gender, but encompassing all. And I said, I think we're all saying the same thing. Those of us who are listening to one another, we're realizing we're all singing the same song.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

So there you are, a student of seminary, and you have a notebook, and you're noting weird anomalies in Scripture where he is she and she is he, and you're keeping this in... Are you raising your hand in class and saying, I've noticed this? Are people responding? What's that like for you as as you're beginning to have this awareness?

I was talking about this theory. I was raising the question about gender and why is it? And I was playing with certain ideas. And one technique that I hit on that allowed me to do the work that I felt that I really wanted to do was when I often when I would turn in papers in Bible class, we had different classes and we had one on Bible and I mean an ongoing class of Bible, obviously. And so I would get we would have assignments, the professor would assign us certain work to do and I would always do my I would do my papers in two parts. Part one was the assignment and part two was I wasn't looking for extra credit but my but part two was it was an opportunity for me to stretch out and kind of like do a little bit more speculative thinking about writing about the topic.

And so I wasn't so I was noticing things like palindromes like there's a lot of palindromes. There are different there are different ways of spelling David's name but one of the one of the names, uh, the oldest way of spelling David's name is a palindrome.

It is, it's like D V D. Okay, so you can read it either way. Nathan, in Hebrew is N T N. It's another palindrome, you know, there's all these palindromes and I'm going like, what, why are there, this was part two of one of my Bible papers, but I'm going, why are there all of these palindromes?

I mean, is this a coincidence? What's going on with this? Why are we being encouraged to read backward and forward, which is what a palindrome encourage you to do, wants you to do. And at some point, I, the name Moses is not a palindrome, but I was, you know, what happens when you hit an idea. And you're just, you know, so I'm going everywhere with this thing, you know, well, what happens if we spell Moses backwards? So Moses in Hebrew, when you spell Moses backwards in Hebrew, you get, you get the name.

Moses spelled backwards is Hashem, which means The Name. And I'm going, okay, that can't be a coincidence. I mean, maybe, maybe it is, maybe it is. But all of this stuff backwards and forwards. And that's when I. So what happens if you spell the four letter name of God backwards? What if we take these four letters and spell them backwards? And that's when I saw that it's spelled he, she. And as I say, that's when the kind of light bulb went off. And so I wasn't really, I didn't feel like I was ready to talk about it, because I hadn't kind of stress tested yet. And I hadn't done enough research. What did other rabbis have to say about this? And that's when I started.

And that was a very, very, very really decades long process, where I'm looking at this medieval rabbi and that medieval rabbi. And so I came across one rabbi. And every time he sees a phrase in the Hebrew Bible, in which the first four letters, the four letters that that begin that phrase, if you put those letters together, spells God's name backwards, he makes note of it. He doesn't tell you why he's doing it. It doesn't make any sense. It's like, why would he be doing it?

Well, he highlights it. What's that? But he highlights it for you.

He highlights it exactly. So you know, it's important to him. And then on and on. More and more, I saw that the rabbis were speaking about this, but were speaking discreetly about it.

And that's a major theme that I found in your book, that for millennia, this has not been a total secret that the learned have known and kept it carefully guarded. Do you want to say just a few words about why they would guard this so so preciously?

They don't write a lot about, I mean the rabbis are writing a lot about a lot of things, but they don't write a lot about personal experience and so forth. But Maimonides, who was is probably the most influential rabbi, medieval rabbi and philosopher, came from Spain and then resettled in Egypt. And at one point in the Guide for the Perplexed, he says, he doesn't want people to misunderstand. He thinks that if he says outright what he knows, and he says this was not information that was passed to him. It was information that he figured out from his own reading, his own closer reading of the Bible. And he was concerned that people would take it literally. He's not saying that Jews ever believed that God was literally male and female. That would no way have been something that Maimonides would ever have affirmed. He was affirming that God is absolutely unique and can't be likened to a human being. So Maimonides was concerned that people would take it literally. And so Maimonides is giving us all kinds of analogies.

So for instance, yes, Adam and Eve were two, but in another respect, they were one, he said. He doesn't want people to believe that God is anything but one. And this affirming the importance of Judaism's monotheism. So that was his problem with the Kabbalah. The Kabbalah will say, that he just thought it was way too distracting to say, the Kabbalists will look at these aspects of God, they'll talk about 10 aspects of God which overflow. This is a whole, this is now, now we're into the medieval era. And I was really, the story really begins in the ancient world 3,400 years ago. But if we fast forward into the medieval period, the rabbis are talking about God as being ultimate endlessness. Ultimate endlessness. And then at the same time, they talk about God's presence. God is very present to us. God, if we're... If we allow God to be within us, God is within us, or God is within us. But if we allow the awareness of the imminent God to be present to us, we can experience that as well.

So here we have ultimate transcendence, and at the same time, this deep presence, this deep immanence. How do we get from there to here, the rabbis wonder? And so they have this speculative notion that this somethingness, but attributes of mercy and just always counterbalancing each other, mercy, justice, rigor, compassion, all of this. And yet they unify and then ultimately become present to us in this realm. The problem that Maimonides had with that is that people would take it literally that these aspects, these 10 aspects, are we talking about polytheism? Absolutely not. Are we talking about any anything real? Well, I once heard someone, these aspects are called in Hebrew or to the Kabbalists, they're called the sphere rote. You can think of them as spheres.

So here's a way of imagining it. God is this endlessness, ultimate endlessness, and this endlessness overflows into, imagine these glass globes, these receptacles, these spheres, and all of this godliness overflows into these spheres, and from there they overflow into these other glass spheres below them, and then glass spheres below them, and this invisible godly presence is overflowing from one sphere to another.

Okay, got it? That's the problem. Now imagine that all of this, but without the glass spheres. So it's completely invisible, it's real, but it's not any thing. It's not any thing. And it's touching on the aspect of God which is beyond any thing, because things are useful. Things are objective, you know, we can objectify, we use the utilitarian. What happens when we think about the aspect of reality, which simply is, and we stand in awe of it, and appreciate it, and hopefully maybe that inspires us to then have a more godly interaction with the next person we encounter.

That's, I think, what they were getting at. That was the the reticence about being too explicit about this tradition, because they would think that we'd say, oh, I get it, I get it, but, you know.

When the fallacy of looking at God and explaining God in any sort of metaphor, always, if we don't hold that with the understanding, yes, God is transcendent, God is not contained in any one metaphor, or in any number of metaphors that we can come up with, they're simply helpful, but not to be taken literally. Much like the creation myth, and I'm so glad to hear you call it that, because I too see the the holes in the story, as it were, and have big questions, especially if we're talking about biblical literalists who take creation as, you know, six thousand years ago, and here's how it happened. Well, then I have some questions, but if we can hold this as sacred myth explaining some of the aspects of our origin, then the burden is lifted, I find, if we can hold this, hold this gently.

Yeah, yeah.

One thing I was so interested and enlivened to find in your book, and there are many, many points. I wish you could see how I've dog-eared and underlined and drawn in your book here, is in Exodus 20 when God says, remember the Sabbath, and then in Deuteronomy, the verb changes to keep the Sabbath, or in some translations, observe the Sabbath. So in my home, we light two candles to invite the Sabbath in. We light one for remember and one for observe. And I was delighted to find here spelled out that that denotes the male and female aspects of God. Would you please talk about that for a little bit?

So yeah, so the So the tradition, you know, out of which I'm coming, Judaism is a very is an interpretive tradition. So what that means is that there's no There is no There's no sense in Judaism that the Bible can be understood literally. I want to start with that. Because then the rabbis get very, very creative and very playful. And I love what they do. And what they encourage all readers to do with the text and I'll talk about the two candles.

But you know, I've heard you speak about the notion of the Spirit of God being on the water at the beginning of Genesis, and which is a beautiful way of understanding that verse in, you know, opening verse in the Bible. The word that you are Translating as a spirit, the Spirit of God is Ruach, as you know. And the word Ruach, depending on the context where we is either, clearly is either spirit. When we talk about God's spirit being within someone the Spirit of God. But it also means wind in certain places. God was not in the wind it says and clearly there it doesn't mean breath and clearly there it doesn't mean spirits talking about the wind. Whether it was the breath of God that was on the water or the spirit of God that was on the water or the wind of God that was on the water, I don't see how someone has a literalist can possibly say that this is what the Bible means literally just in that one verse. I don't believe you can. I think that's a interpretive choice. How those interpretations have guided, how we come, how various people, religious leaders, religious people, spiritual people come to their understandings about what those words mean to them or to their community, it's going to vary, but I don't understand how the Bible can be read literally, because all of these words are open, so many of these words are open to legitimate interpretation and mean different things in different places. So that's kind of a long background to the answer to your question, which is what do the rabbis mean when they an interpretation of those words means to guard Shamora can be understood as relating to the feminine. And Sahor, remember, in Hebrew, that word can be related to the masculine. And so whether that in any way was what the original intent was, the reason that we have these two different versions where you have remember the Sabbath and observe the Sabbath, whether that was the original reason or it's not the original reason, that becomes an interpretation which gets kind of, you know, when we read our commentaries on the Bible, there are, you know, we're in conversation with rabbis from, you know, from a thousand years ago, and you know, we go back many, many generations with different interpretations and they all stand side by side. And it's not which interpretation in my community, it's not which interpretation wins out. It's what can we learn from this interpretation that we can't learn from that interpretation. That's the way that When we come to different Jewish communities, come to different understandings, and that's why we have different Jewish communities.

But the approach is the same, which is to say, let's understand that this is the word of the living God, and that is the word of the living God. These different interpretations are there to teach us and to expand our understanding and deepen our appreciation. And they exist side by side.

Both and. Both and. Which is another theme I keep hearing. Paradox exists. You can have two truths that seem to contradict one another, that. that that exists. And so opening our minds to that. And of course, as I'm sure you know, in my tradition, there has long been a history of, you know, the powers that be saying, no, there is one way to interpret the Scripture. There is one way to view the word of the Lord. And if you're interpreting it differently, you know, you're a heretic, or there's something vastly wrong with you. And what I'm enjoying now is many spiritual leaders within the Christian tradition saying, Oh, you know what, we've got this, we've now realized that Christianity was never meant to be monolithic in the first place. There's room for different interpretations, lots of questions. And coming from different angles leads to possibly different conclusions. And yet we have the freedom then to differ and both and recognize that we're all part of the same narrative anyway.

Yes. We are indeed. We are indeed.

Which is something I really love to talk about, particularly when we're coming up on an election in this country. It seems there is so much division and so much, well, I think this way. And if you don't, then you're out and we can't even be friends. And I don't think that's the way forward. And this all goes back to if God is one and we are made in God's image, can we find our way back to some sort of unity, which does not mean agreeing on all points. It does not mean saying, I think you are right. And I've come to the same conclusion, but it means realizing we're all in the same narrative. And we don't we don't need to make any more space for division.

So there I like to go to the image of, you know, the Daoist image, the yin and the yang image, and because it's so dynamic. Martin Bu, one of the one of the great Jewish thinkers of the 20th century, Martin Ubu was completely taken by Daoism and spent a lot of time translating and commenting. And, you know, what you have in the Taichitsu, the the yin and yang symbol is it's a very, it's very dynamic. And there were places where it looks like it's almost all dark, almost all shade, and other places where it looks like it's almost all white, almost all of the sunny side. And they have their own interpretations of feminine and masculine side and so forth, and the sunny side of the mountain and the dark side of the mountain. But there's always at least a bit of dark within the, within the light and always a bit of light within the dark. And it's not about what you don't have is it's not a circle of gray. It's not a circle of gray. It's not like, okay, we're just gonna like meet in the middle, average it all out. And there's no difference.

Because that's not, that's not our lived experience. Our lived experience is an experience, is an experience of, of difference, hopefully respectful difference. And then Ecclesiastes says, you know, to everything there's a season. So there's, there's a time, like in the yin yang symbol, there's a, there were points where things are going to be more imbalanced. And there are going to be points when things are much less imbalanced, there are going to be times that we're going to have to be, it's, it's easier to find middle ground. And there are times when it's more important that we, that we make wise choices, and see that those choices are, that those beneficial, that beneficial choices are, come to, come to fruition. So yeah, I think, you know, in so many ways, in so many ways right now, we are, we're at an inflection, another inflection point. And I just, you know, I bless us all that we should make wise choices, really, really wise choices and consider those choices and, and, and understand the implications of our choices and where we're going to be putting our energies so that, not that this team wins or that team wins or our team wins or our people or our group, our tribe, but that we're really, really smart about the choices that we're about to make. That would be my blessing for all of us.

Yes, yes. and that we would grow out of the notion that, I love what you mentioned about the yin and yang, for so long I was taught to believe that means there's good and there's evil, right? There's this dualistic expression of, and we want to be on the good side, and for much of my upbringing that was associating the color white with good and black with bad, and very much us and them again, our team winning, their team being defeated and perhaps taught a lesson, and then maybe they'll be converted over to our team and they'll see how right we were this whole time, which is just such a distortion of this beautiful metaphor of it all being part of the same circle to begin with. And I love how you hint at, you don't go into too much here, but you hint at at least one of the rabbis, I'm forgetting where it is in here, wondering if there is redemption even for the demonic forces that we would, you know, so readily denounce as evil, and that in the Kingdom of God or whatever, I don't remember the the verbiage there, but there is room for redemption. Could you just say a word about that before we close?

So that was an interpretation of Rabbi Kalanima Shapira of blessed memory, who died in the Warsaw ghetto and the Holocaust, and he was trying to, in the midst of just unimaginable suffering, trying to hold to this vision. This vision being an interpretation of the tradition that I'm presenting in my book, but an interpretation that was passed to him by the founder of the Hasidic movement, known as the Ba'al Shem Tov, which is to say that there's redemption for everyone. The tradition in the Hasidic movement is called sweetening, where rather than taking this terrible thing and destroying it, or this terrible group, this terrible idea, and destroying it. What if we took it and we sweetened it? What if we found, okay, so you've got all of this energy, you've got all of this anger inside you. How about if you turn that energy and anger, you got a lot of that, somebody else doesn't have as much. You know what? There's a lot of places where, what if we were angry about the climate? What if we were angry about poverty? What if we were angry about and we take that and we sweeten it and use it to use that, that's who you are. We're not going to be able to say that's not, you want to suppress that, you want to deny it, you want to say that that's not part of your makeup. That's how you're wired. How do we best use that in a positive way? Then if we can do that without denying our authentic selves, but using them more skillful, using who we are more skillfully, and maybe all of this and all of us can find redemption.

That has me in full body chills. It reminds me of Anne Frank's philosophy, where she talks about at the heart of everyone there is still light, or something like that. I don't remember her exact words, but that hope for redemption for everyone. Beautiful, beautiful. Well, I just am so grateful first for you following this or digging for the treasure that you have. For it seems like your whole career you've been digging here and following this thread. Because as I said before, it's so, so important to me personally, and also I think for world that we open our minds and hearts to this idea. And it just puts such a smile on my face to know you're out there doing this work and saying these things, writing these things. And I just really am grateful for this book, for this conversation, and for you.

Thank you, Anni. And I, for you, blessings to you, blessings to your family, blessings to your listeners and your communities. And thank you again for the very kind invitation.

Thank you. Thank you. Well, until next time.

Until next time.

Thanks so much for joining me today. If you’d like to get ahold of me for any reason, you can find me at barelychristianfullychristian.com. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this particular topic or anything else that’s on your mind and heart.

The artwork for Barely Christian, Fully Christian was lovingly created by Lauren Leith of Little Moon Market. You can find her on Instagram if you'd like a beautiful moon of your own. This gorgeous song by Wyn Doran and Paul Craig is called “Banks of Massachusetts.” Enjoy.