Exodus 14-15: Tehovah, a Woman Warrior
Exodus 14
30 Thus Tehovah delivered Tisraelah that day from Metzarim. Tisraelah saw Metzarim dead on the shore of the sea.
31 And when Tisraelah saw the wondrous power which TEHOVA had wielded against Metzarim, the people feared Tehovah; they had faith in Tehovah, and Her servant Moshah.
Exodus 15
1 Then Moshah and the daughters of Tisraelah sang this song to Tehovah. They said: I will sing to Tehovah, for She has triumphed gloriously; Mare and her driver, She has hurled into the sea.
2 Tah is my strength and might; She has become my salvation. This is my Goddess and I will enshrine Her; the Goddesses of my mother and I will exalt Her.
3 Tehovah, a woman warrior, Tehovah is Her name.
שמות פרק י"ד
ל וַתּוֹשַׁע תְהֹוָה בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא אֶת־תִשְׂרָאֵלָה מִיַּד מֵצָרִים וַתַּרְא תִשְׂרָאֵלָה אֶת־מֵצָרִים מֵתָה עַל־שְׂפַת הַיָּם׃
לא וַתַּרְא תִשְׂרָאֵלָה אֶת־הַיָּד הַגְּדֹלָה אֲשֶׁר עָשְׂתָה תְהֹוָה בְּמֵצָרִים וַתִּירְאֵנָה הָעָם אֶת־תְהֹוָה וַתַּאֲמֵנָּה בַּתהוָה וּבְמֹשָׁה שִׁפְחֲתָה׃
פרק ט״ו
א אָז תָשִׁיר־מֹשָׁה וּבְנוֹת תִשְׂרָאֵלָה אֶת־הַשִּׁירָה הַזֹּאת לַתהוָה וַתֹּאמַרְנָה לֵאמֹר אָשִׁירָה לַתהוָה כִּי־גָאֹה גָּאָתָה סוּסָה וְרֹכְבָתָה רָמָה בַיָּם׃
ב עָזִּי וְזִמְרָת תָהּ וַתְהִי־לִי לִישׁוּעָה זֹאת אֵלַת וְאַנְוֵהָ אֱלֹהֹתֵי אִמִי וַאֲרֹמְמֶנְהָ׃
ג תְהֹוָה אֶשֶׁת מִלְחָמָה תְהֹוָה שְׁמָה׃
*
It’s almost nine PM. I promised my daughter, whose bedroom I’m using as a study during the evenings I’m working with Yael, that I’ll be done at a reasonable hour. In the last two hours Yael and I have been working on the Exodus from Metzarim, the name we gave Egypt, meaning, the straits, or narrows, and are having a hard time finishing at the apex of the story. Just a few more verses and just a few more, we keep grabbing them before we have to say goodbye. See, all the mares of Parah’s army and her horsewomen have nearly caught up to the daughters of Tisraelah camped on the seashore, calling Tehovah for help. Moshah, on the receiving end of all their terror and fear, promises her people; Tehovah will fight for you! The pistol is on the wall. A prelude to the harsh image of Tehovah that is coming soon. But I missed that, and rush forward, maybe tonight we’ll escape the Metzarimites?
See, Tehovah is already telling Moshah to stretch her hand over the sea, so that it will split, and Elohin’s Angela[1] and the pillar of cloud that goes before the daughters of Tisraelah move to guard them from the rear. Now the daughters of Tisraelah enter into the sea, on the dry seabed, and right after them the women warriors of Metzarim, who, their chariot wheels falling apart, decide to retreat and run for their lives. And the waters cover and engulf all of Parah’s army, and the daughters of Tisraelah are saved, and they believe, at long last, in Tehovah, and Her woman-servant, Moshah. This is it, we made it, and the tension within me recedes too.
Yael and I look at each other through the screens, and then I start singing. Yael, who wrote the first draft of Toratah and knows what’s coming, staring at me with a smile, as I try to sing the Song of the Sea that she displays on the screen. The only melody I know for this song as it appears in Torato is the one that we recite every day in morning prayers, that I learned in Sinai elementary school in Neighborhood Bet in Beersheva. This is a popular tune among Jews who come from Arab countries and North Africa, and I try to use it on the verses of Toratah that I am meeting for the first time. I will sing to Tehovah, for She has triumphed gloriously; Mare and her driver, She has hurled into the sea (Ex. 15:1). How I love these mares and their drivers, even though they are Metzarite women warriors, drowning a painful death. But now I concentrate only on the changes so as not to lose track and so the tune somehow fits the new conjugations. Tah is my strength and might; She has become my salvation. The name Tah astonishes me. And I understand right away that here too as with Jehovah, that Yael changed to Tehovah, changing the prefix from male future tense to female future tense, the name Yah turned into Tah. And I wonder what will happen in Psalms to Hallelujah. Yael laughs through the screen and changes her name to Tael.
The next verse works beautifully with the melody, but something else doesn’t. Tehovah, a woman warrior, Tehovah is Her name. Tehovah, the what, exactly? “A woman warrior??” I tell Yael, I find it problematic and I’m uncomfortable with this. But this is what is written, she insists, and anyway, you’re only noticing this now? What about the Flood? And all the Plagues? And the drowning of the woman warriors of Metzarim running for their lives? Isn’t She a woman warrior?
I’m embarrassed. The project of Toratah, I thought, will invigorate good images of women and add faces of God that I wished were there. An aggressive, violent female divinity is an image I have a hard time accepting. Yael, by contrast, has faith in the possibilities of repair that the new text of Toratah offers. It presents new ways of experiencing existence – women and men act in ways that are different from those we’ve known, and the divine does too – and so opens a gate to new sacred writing that will hopefully be written about Toratah in turn. Yael explains to me that now that we are the subjects of the text, we are the ones created in Her image, we are the addresses of the revelation, and the text reflects ways of women’s existence that we ought to check. We stand inside the text now, from a starting point of strength and agency, so even if the stories are hard to bear they are about us and challenge us to think about our lives.
But still I’m upset. What am I supposed to do now with Tehovah as “A woman warrior?”
Before we began working together, Yael and I had long conversations around theology. Yael studied Kabbalah for many, many years. When she realized that she hadn’t and wouldn’t find an echo to her experience as a woman in Kabbalistic texts and teachers, she paved her own independent path in that Kabbalistic world. In Toratah, she believes, there is the potential for a feminine spirituality that couldn’t express itself until now in Jewish tradition, written by men, and from their life experience. Her theological language and forms of thought, when we discuss theology, are drawn from the Kabbalistic world, but she uses them in original ways, different from those that I know from my own Kabbalah studies in university, and different from my own theological terminology as I developed it over the years. Slowly we learned each other’s spiritual languages.
My spiritual language is unfamiliar to her too. After growing up in the religious educational system in Israel, and spending years in batei midrash,[2] I turned to the study of feminist theology. My attempt to find room for feminist insights in Jewish culture took a different shape than Yael’s. Even if I succeeded in erasing within me the images of divinity that circulated among the medieval Jewish philosophers (God as perfect, transcendent, self-sufficient, shaping but not being shaped), other traditional images of divinity still live in my consciousness and in the Piyutim (liturgical hymns) and Midrashim that I wrote I polemicized with them again and again and tried to offer other images.
Were I to imagine feminine divinity She wouldn’t be stormy, vengeful like the one in Toratah, so possessive and demanding.
I recall a Midrash I wrote once about Lot’s wife, whom in Torato, Genesis 19, turns into a pillar of salt. The letters of the root in melah, salt, are akin to those in the root of laham, made war, and so to milhamah, war, as in “Tehovah is a woman warrior,” eshet milhamah. I show Yael how through creative wordplay, I had written that Lot’s wife turning to melah, salt, was a punishment. In the Torato version, when the angels came to visit Lot, the people of his town, Sodom, demanded from Lot to hand them over so they could rape them. Lot refused and offered his virgin daughters instead. His wife’s voice, we don’t hear. Maybe, the daughters’ mother didn’t have compassion hemlah on them, and didn’t fight lahamah for them? In the Midrash I depict her as the mother who remains silent while her daughters are being abused. Yael and I are sunk in thought. All of a sudden, Yael points out that hidden in this root m-l-h is also the possibility of halhamah, welding. Maybe Tehovahs’ attribute eshet milhamah, has the potential, from the fire of feeling, to weld, join, and not just cleave apart.
I’m a little relieved, since the Midrashic language she is using is familiar to me, and is comforting. See! The same way, with the root h-l-m, we can get to the word hahlamah, healing….But what will happen when we get to those chapters in the Prophets that flame with divine anger and violence? How will I deal then with that terrorizing and cruel Goddess?