Suckling at My Mother's Breasts

Ellen Davina Haskell

Description

One of Kabbalah's most distinctive images of the feminine divine is that of a motherly, breastfeeding God. Suckling at My Mother's Breasts traces this idea from its origins in ancient rabbinic literature through its flourishing in the medieval classic Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Splendor). Taking the position that kabbalistic images provide specific, detailed models for understanding the relationship between God and human beings, Ellen Davina Haskell connects divine nursing theology to Jewish ideals regarding motherhood, breastfeeding, and family life from medieval France and Spain, where Kabbalah originated. Haskell's approach allows for a new evaluation of Kabbalah's feminine divine, one centered on culture and context, rather than gender philosophy or psychoanalysis. As this work demonstrates, the image of the nursing divine is intended to cultivate a direct emotional response to God rooted in nurture, love, and reliance, rather than knowledge, sexuality, or authority.
Contents

Hebrew and Aramaic Transliterations

Introduction: Kabbalistic Images, Relationality, and a Breastfeeding God

1. Breastfeeding and Religious Transmission in Rabbinic Literature

2. Suckling the Divine Overflow in Early Kabbalah

3. God as a Nursing Mother in Sefer ha-Zohar

4. Concluding Thoughts on the Nursing Divine

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Mysticism
• Theology
• Judaism
• History of religions

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 06 novembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438443829
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 5 Mo

Extrait

SUNY SERIES IN W ESTERN E SOTERIC T RADITIONS
David Appelbaum, editor

Suckling at My Mother's Breasts
The Image of a Nursing God in Jewish Mysticism
ELLEN DAVINA HASKELL

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Kelli Williams LeRoux Marketing by Kate McDonnell
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haskell, Ellen Davina.
Suckling at my mother's breasts : the image of a nursing God in Jewish mysticism / Ellen Davina Haskell.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in Western esoteric traditions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4381-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Cabala—History. 2. God (Judaism)—Love. 3. Mysticism—Judaism. 4. Rabbinical literature—History and criticism. 5. Bible. O.T.—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.
BM526.H388 2012
296.8'33—dc23
2011045769
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my parents, with love .
H EBREW AND A RAMAIC T RANSLITERATIONS
In order to make my material accessible to nonspecialists, I have adopted the following simplified transliteration system. In cases where common words like “Kabbalah” do not match this system, I retain the common usage.
Consonants
‘: Alef (except at beginning of words, where absent)
b: Bet
g: Gimel
d: Dalet
h: He ‘
v: Vav
z: Zayin
ḥ: Ḥet
t: Tet
y: Yud
k/kh: Kaf
l: Lamed
m: Mem
n: Nun
s: Samekh
‘: Ayin (except at beginning of words, where absent)
p/f: Pe ‘
tz: Tzade
q: Quf
r: Resh
sh/s: Shin
t: Tav
Vowels
a: Qamatz , Pataḥ , Ḥataf pataḥ
e: Sheva ‘ (silent sheva ‘ is unmarked), Tzereh , Tzereh yud , Segol , Ḥataf segol
i: Ḥiriq , Ḥiriq yud
o: Ḥolam , Ḥolam vav , Ḥataf qamatz
u: Shuruq, Qubutz
I NTRODUCTION
Kabbalistic Images, Relationality, and a Breastfeeding God
This is the Shekhinah who was in the Temple and all the children of the world used to suckle from her…. And the Shekhinah rested upon them in the Temple, like a mother covering over her children. And all the faces used to shine while blessings were found above and below, and there was not a day on which blessings and rejoicings were not found. And Israel rested in safety in the land, and all the world used to be nourished because of them.
—Sefer ha-Zohar 1:203a 1

A Divine Nursing Mother
As the kabbalists developed their theology in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they experimented with new ways to understand the relationships between God, themselves, and the world around them. While earlier Jewish devotion focused on male anthropomorphisms that described God as King, Father, and Judge, the kabbalists expressed their divine relationships through a broader variety of images. Perceiving the divine as a dynamic complex of ten aspects known as sefirot , these mystics boldly incorporated feminine figures, natural images, and even cultural artifacts into their literature, significantly expanding their available models for approaching deity. Each image complemented and corrected the others, generating a poetic theology whose distinctive metaphors allowed the kabbalists to ground their understanding of a distant and abstract divinity in the language of daily life and experience. 2
One of the most unusual of these images was the depiction of God as a nursing mother. Identifying two of the sefirot (the third and the tenth) as feminine to establish gender balance within divinity was one of Kabbalah's most innovative theological choices. In their formative writings, the mystics present God as a protective mother covering her children, as a pregnant being who births and nurses spiritual infants, as a breastfeeding mother whose healing milk spreads mercy through the divine world, and even as a breasted patriarch continuously suckling the universe with supernal love. These vivid images all convey the kabbalistic principle that both the sefirot and the human world are sustained by an overflow of divine energy. 3 While the kabbalists often use the term suckling ( yeniqah ) to describe divine energy's transmission, the term can occur without feminine context, applying equally to a child suckling milk from its mother and to the action by which young plants draw moisture from the earth. Depicting God as a nursing mother refines divine suckling by appealing to a distinctive set of social, physical, and emotional experiences surrounding motherhood and the parent-child relationship.
The textual excerpt that begins this introduction, Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Splendor) 1:203a, demonstrates some of the ways in which nursing imagery encourages an intimate and emotionally nuanced relationship with God. In this late thirteenth-century text, a feminine aspect of God interacts with all the world's inhabitants during an idealized Jewish past. This feminine aspect of God, Shekhinah (Divine Presence), is the aspect of God closest to human experience. She is shown residing in the ancient Temple before its destruction, engendering a perfected world in which divine energy flows out from the Temple to the Israelite people and ultimately into “all the children of the world.” Although this passage makes a theological statement about ideal world order and its dependence on God's Presence abiding in Jerusalem, it also provides social and emotional nuance for its teaching. By depicting God as a nursing mother who nourishes the world, the passage reminds its reader that human beings are utterly dependent on the divine for their well-being. God is the source of blessings, nourishment, nurture, and safety. Humanity rejoices in its dependence, and a child's love for its mother illuminates the faces of those who exist in this ideal relationship. Motherly love is ascribed to Shekhinah as She protectively covers Her Israelite children. The passage's divine overflow theology is nuanced by engaging sociocultural implications of the love between mothers and infants to construct an emotionally positive relationship of nurture and reliance between God and human beings. This preliminary look at Zohar 1:203a demonstrates mothering imagery's potential for developing complex relationships between God and humanity. ( Chapter 3 contains a broader look at this interesting text.)
Divine nursing imagery's most distinguishing feature is its intensive engagement with relationality—by which I mean a focus on the connections, associations, and relationships that occur between human beings and the things that exist in our perceived environment. These things may include other human beings, the divine, and even plants and inanimate objects. The nursing metaphor foregrounds and asserts the quality of relation because it never deals exclusively with an individual, speaking instead to the connection between its participants: the mother who breastfeeds and the child who suckles from her. It is predominantly a social image, providing an engaging model for the kabbalist who wishes to enter into a specifically defined relationship with God. This model establishes an intimate, familial bond between divinity and humanity, redefining the relationship between the two in terms of tenderness, rather than dominion. In this sense, the image of God as a suckling mother serves not only as a tool for theological teaching, but also as a unique entrée into a direct and emotional response to God.

Suckling, Nursing and Breastfeeding
At this point, it may be helpful to offer some observations about the term suckling and explain how it will be used in this study. English, Hebrew, and Aramaic all make grammatical distinctions between the action of a child who suckles and the action of a woman who gives suck to a child. English speakers tend to avoid the term give suck when speaking of human beings, reserving the term for animals (when we use it at all). To say that a woman “gives suck” sounds archaic and even vulgar in contemporary English usage, in which “expressing milk” has become the most common phrase associated with a woman passing milk from her breasts. However, “expressing milk” is not a helpful phrase for my purposes, since milk's presence or absence in relation to suckling language is an important marker for tracing the nursing divine's development over time. For these reasons (and to avoid redundancy), I have chosen to incorporate words like nursing and breastfeeding into my translations and analyses—using the term suckle in a general sense that encompasses both the causative hif'il and the active pa'al forms of the root y.n.q . (suckle). The identities of suckling's givers and receivers should remain clear from context. 4

Project Goals and Considerations
This project examines the image of a breastfeeding God in three phases of Jewish literature: the classical rabbinic writings of the fifth through the twelfth centuries, the early kabbalistic literature of the late twelfth through the early thirteenth centuries, and the late thirteenth-century mystical classic Sefer ha-Zohar . Through close reading of these texts in relation to their cultural and historical contexts, I will support the following claims: 1) that