Beyond gender: The secret name of God as a clue to the divine androgyne and the union of opposites

Judaism is a non-dual religion. However, many people believe that the deity of the Hebrew Bible is masculine rather than beyond gender — inclusive of both male and female and thus both and neither. Rabbi Mark Sameth is advancing an interesting theory about the Tetragrammaton, the Hebrew 4 letter name of God that is never spoken. 

Rabbi Sameth says that the four-letter Hebrew name for God should actually be read in reverse. When the four letters are turned around he says, the new name makes the sounds of the Hebrew words for "he" and "she."

This makes God a dual-gendered deity. And after all, if as the myth says, we are made in God's image, and "male and female created he them," then clearly God is male and female even if Hebrew, as a gendered language, is incapable of expressing that directly.

Katherine Kurs, a religion scholar who teaches at New School University, who edited the amazing "Searching for Your Soul" and who is an associate minister at West-Park (Presbyterian) Church in Manhattan, was interviewed by LoHud.com, where this story first broke. And she captured it perfectly when she said: "This God is not a male or even a female but a male-female or female-male, a God that holds tension and paradox, a full-spectrum bandwidth God."

To look at it another traditionally mystic way, the divine Ayn Sof is boundless, boundaryless and thus includes all. This is not your grandfather's hairy thunderer in the sky.

Rabbi Irwin Kula wrote once that at a dinner party when challenged by an atheist about that rather punishing parental god, he said "I don't believe in the God you don't believe in either."

But a deity that transcends, includes and unifies? Beyond gender and personality? That's an expression of the divine worthy of prayer — and for me, prayer is simply singing love songs to the divine, filled with gratitude for creation. And while not a psalm, there are no finer words to express this for me than e.e cummings poem:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
wich is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

Comments

[Rachel]

"In G-d's image" speaks to humankind's kinship with G-d's spiritual essence, not humankind's physicality. Mankind got that from the physical universe. Hence, the Bible quotes G-d as saying "We" shall make Man in "Our" image. He is ONE, but he is speaking to the universe which is responsible for half of humankind's nature. This explanation is discussed by our sages. Likewise, the "male and female" ---gender--- has a divine character. G-d transcends gender.

[Dr. Daniel MUFFOLETTO ND]

The sacred name can not be pronounced.

It can be heard, and it can be seen.

It is light on on the subatomic level, which moves and produces the celestial music of the speres.

This name goes by many names, by different religions, LOGS by the CHristians, ANcient of Days by the JEWS, AKASH BANI, Sultan el Sultan, Udgit, NAAM, NAD,Sonorous Light, and many more.

All religions say the same thing on the inner level.

MEET the MEssiah within.