Reply to Episcopal diocese of Washington to drop male pronouns for God

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If people need a pronoun to feel loved by and included in Christ, they have much bigger issues with their faith.  (By this I mean that I think this change is absolutely ridiculous, not that the change is warranted.)

Left ECUSA years ago and have never looked back.  Too much throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  And I say this as a woman who supports gay marriage, ordination of women, etc.[/quote]

You get used to it. Faster than you might think. Changes to the liturgy that you know and feel connected to can feel like a part of yourself being torn up and thrown away.

But before you know it, the new liturgy becomes associated with everything you feel connected to.

I hated it when they modernized the language in our prayer books [b](all the "Thee"s and "Thy"s gone) [/b]because it felt like the poetry had been drained away. And I didn't like the move to gender-neutral language. [b]But because I'm Jewish,[/b] I didn't have a million other options for congregations, and now I don't even notice it.[/quote]

You do realize, of course, that the Hebrew second person singular does NOT have the overtones of formality that "thee" and "thou" have come to have (they did not have that originally either, which is why the King James translators used them).   Biblical Hebrew, though more "poetical" than Mishnaic Hebrew, is still pretty direct and blunt - the overtones are even more so if you first learned Hebrew by learning modern Israeli Hebrew, and have an ear for Israeli speech.  I once knew an Israeli who translated Shma Israel as "Listen Israel!" and he was not far off.

I am NOT fluent in any variety of Hebrew, but try to read scriptures/taanach and prayers in Hebrew as much as I can, as I find the actual flow of the actual Hebrew words to be both beautiful (well usually, not all of the liturgy) and to provide a more direct experience of Jewish spirituality, unmediated by the traditions of English language translation, or the (mostly gentile) cultural baggage of the English language.  The Hebrew bible, especially works like Psalms (Tehillim) and prophets (Neviim) are among the first great products of our civilization.[/quote]

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