Love in Jewish feminist theology: a maternalist intervention

• In Event: Ethics and Theology

Abstract

In this paper, I examine how Jewish feminist theological texts treat the theological and anthropological dimensions of love with the aim of staging an intervention in the feminist ideal of love as mutual. Feminist correctives to traditions of hierarchy that we find in classic texts of Jewish theology (e.g., Rachel Adler and Judith Plaskow) idealize mutual, erotic love between adults, and often use such relationships as a source of insight into the nature of the relationship the community of Israel might experience with the divine. These thinkers’ suspicion toward hierarchical relationships thus extends to the nature of the divine/human relationship, leading feminist thinkers to challenge the hierarchical relationship between God and humans and even to reconceive the divine such that the potential for hierarchy is undone (e.g., Falk).
In this context, I argue, theological conversation about the nature of love, and indeed about relationships as a whole, becomes circumscribed. My paper shows the limitations of an insistence on both mutuality and adult eroticism as the SINE QUA NON of human love and aims to expand the theological conversation. I do so by focusing on the problems and possibilities that a specific hierarchical model of human love, that between mothers (and parents generally) and children, presents for feminist theology. Against some secular feminist philosophers of maternity, I argue for the necessity of a theological vocabulary for love to adequately articulate the often overwhelming, debilitating, and transformative love for and of one’s child. I suggest that this theological vocabulary necessarily includes hierarchical relationships, while not fetishizing hierarchy itself. Finally, I suggest that some rabbinic conceptions of love as practical devotion and loyalty can help articulate a more expansive feminist conception of love, one that has a greater capacity to conceive relationships between human beings and between humans and God.

author

• Mara Benjamin, St. Olaf College