Marcia Falk is committed to erasing hierarchical and patriarchal references from every Jewish prayer.
Even the Sh’ma.
Her poetic and sometimes provocative rewritings of traditional liturgy — in both Hebrew and English — are found in her just-published “The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival.”
The 529-page prayerbook is free of any references to God as male, as king, as father, as lord, or as master. It also tosses out the use of yud-hay-vav-hay, the ineffable name of God that Falk said can no longer be separated from the “oppressive history” of uttering “Adonai” or “My Lord” in its place.
But this Berkeley scholar, whose work has been used in Reconstructionist prayerbooks and feminist rituals across the country, doesn’t replace deity references with gender-neutral or feminine equivalents.
In fact, she makes no references to any anthropomorphic or supernatural being in her blessings.
Abandoning human imagery altogether, Falk instead embraces “the divine, the sacred” within everything. To express this concept, she uses such phrases as “Eyn Hachayim,” or “Source of Life.”
“The sacred, the divine resides in the world to me,” she said last month. “My work is trying to celebrate the divine inherent in all of our experiences — not as a deity `out there’….There is something beyond us in a sense. My blessings are an attempt to heighten our awareness of it.”
Rewriting liturgy in both Hebrew and English has become popular in recent years, especially outside the mainstream Jewish movements.
While the majority of her book is filled with simply elegant poetry, meditations and prayers, even Falk knows she has crossed a line with some of the material. She has done so willfully.
Falk takes a sip of tea as she sits near a window overlooking the lush garden outside her sunny home south of U.C. Berkeley’s campus. She has black, wire-framed glasses that cannot hide her clear bluish-gray eyes. She wears her dark, but graying hair straight and just past her chin.
Though she is a respected poet and translator, she is now braced for criticism and what she considers misinterpretation of her ideas.
The latest issue of Hadassah magazine arrives during the interview. A book review inside labels her work a “remarkable antidote to the spiritual dissonance created by the traditional prayerbook.”
But not all media coverage has been as glowing. The Forward, a weekly Jewish newspaper in New York, recently tagged her work “pantheistic.”
Falk insists her work, including her Sh’ma, is inherently and entirely within the realm of monotheism.
“It’s just saying that the many ways in which we experience the divine, the many aspects of human experience, the many kinds of human beings, the incredible diversity of life, of creation — all of that is a reflection of a single source,” she said. “We’re part of the same web.”
The Sh’ma, which has been recited by millions of Jews for thousands of years, is typically translated as “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”
Falk has rewritten this tenet to state: “Hear, O Israel–/ divinity has thousands of faces,/ the fullness of the world is its presence,/ the multiplicity of its faces is One.”
She presents a shorter, more poetic translation as well: “Hear, O Israel — The divine abounds everywhere and dwells in everything; the many are One.”
Falk has repeatedly been asked how she could fathom rewriting the Sh’ma, the age-old creed of Judaism that affirms God’s unity.
“I have no answer to this question — beyond the raison d’être of this book,” she said. “I feel I’ve honored the essence of what the Sh’ma is about….I thought: What does this really mean, on the deepest level to me as a Jew? That’s what it meant — the unity of creation.”
The book contains other blessings that will be warmly welcomed by some and demonized by others.
Within the Friday night home ritual, her “Blessing the Beloved” contains three versions in Hebrew adapted from the Song of Songs: one for male to female; one for male to male; and one for female to female.
“How fine you are, my love, how fine you are./ How fine you are, my love, what joy is ours./ Of all pleasure, how sweet is the taste of love,” the English translation reads.
“I can’t imagine any reason why lesbian and gay couples wouldn’t want to [recite] it as much as heterosexual couples,” she said.
She also has replaced the traditional Mourner’s Kaddish with a poem adapted from “Each of Us Has a Name” by the Hebrew poet Zelda Mishkovsky.
Falk is currently working on more volumes of blessings for the festivals, High Holy Days and Passover Haggadah.
She believes a unique combination of qualities has allowed her to take on such projects. She is a scholar, poet, Hebraicist and feminist.
This fortysomething writer comes from a traditional Conservative home in Long Island, though she now aligns herself with classic Reconstructionist thought. She earned a doctorate in English and comparative literature at Stanford; she was a Fulbright scholar and postdoctoral fellow at Hebrew University, where she studied Bible and Hebrew literature.
This is her fifth book. Falk has published two collections of her own poetry. She has translated the biblical Song of Songs and the works of Yiddish poet Malka Heifetz Tussman.
The seed for “The Book of Blessings” germinated in the early 1980s. Back then, Falk felt out of touch with Jewish liturgy. But it never occurred to her to sit down and rewrite the blessings that left her feeling alienated.
Then at an interdenominational gathering in the early 1980s, Renewal movement leader Arthur Waskow asked Falk to write some appropriate poetry for the havdallah service that marks the end of Shabbat.
Falk told him she could no longer use the traditional blessings. Waskow suggested she write her own.
“They’ll stone me,” she recalled telling him. Waskow assured her it wouldn’t happen. He was right.
“Nobody even flinched,” she said.
Falk went on to write new blessings for such acts as the sanctification of bread and of wine. Then about a decade ago, she signed a book contract.
The book took years longer than expected. But Falk takes this in stride, noting that little had changed in liturgy for hundreds of years.
“This book required a gestation period,” she said. “I wrote each blessing as a poem.”