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Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Love of God: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Insights The Reverend Patrick J. Ryan, S.J. Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society Fordham University RESPONDENTS Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Theology, Fordham University Amir Hussain, Ph.D. Professor of Theological Studies Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles TUESDAY, APRIL 9, 2019 | LINCOLN CENTER CAMPUS WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10, 2019 | ROSE HILL CAMPUS Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Love of God: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Insights The Reverend Patrick J. Ryan, S.J. Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society Fordham University The American comic writer and cartoonist, James Thurber (1894-1961), created a series of cartoons for The New Yorker more than sixty years ago under the general title, “The Battle of the Sexes.” It had no connection with later tennis games. Thurber was gradually losing his eyesight at the time and sometimes the cartoons arrived at their hilarious captions because of mistakes he had made in draftsmanship. I liked one in particular called “The Fight in the Grocery” which showed men and women firing bottles and cans at each other in the aisles of a small supermarket. In the Mesopotamian valley 6000 years ago, the battle of the sexes was a struggle between male and female gods. In the Akkadian creation epic, Enuma elish, the ordered cosmos is imaged as the result of previous violent interactions within the assembly of divine cosmic forces.1 When the mother-chaos figure, Ti’amat, imaginatively associated with the salt sea, resents the noise made by the younger generation of gods, war ensues. 1 Ea, Ti’amat’s son but also her enemy, identified with the earth,defeats his mother’s ally, Apsu, a male god associated with the sweet waters that ever after remain below the earth.2 In the Babylonian recension of this creation story, the god of Babylon, Marduk, replaces his father, Ea. Marduk defeats the forces of chaos, achieving absolute royal power for himself over the other gods, whom Marduk dragoons into the construction of Babylon.3 The battle of the sexes is not the same thing as sexuality as a larger reality, or at least I hope not. There has been much discussion in recent years, at least in the countries around the North Atlantic, of gender theory, with some important voices questioning the distinction between male and female as anything more than a social construction. In the Global South, however, much more traditional views of sexuality and of what it is to be male an d what it is to be female still prevail. These views in the Global South reflect ancient patterns of thought that were once taken for granted in the North Atlantic community. Living as we do at a time when the Catholic Church is confronted, as are some other religious and secular institutions, with multiple problems connected with sexuality, and especially sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable adults, it is important to recognize that sexuality has a sacred meaning in the great monotheistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In what follows, I want to draw your attention to how very human forces, male and female, interact with each other in the imaginative creation of worlds of faith, worlds of spirituality. How, in particular, do our understandings of human sexuality color how those of us who are Jews, Christians, and Muslims think about God? SEXUALITY, SPIRITUALITY, AND THE LOVE OF GOD: JEWISH INSIGHTS Before the Children of Israel existed—the progeny of Abraham and Sarah—the world existed. There are two accounts of the creation in the Book of Genesis, the first attributed to the so-called Priestly source (P) and the second to a combination of the Yahwist and Elohist sources (J & 2 E). Both of these narratives have much to say about the human interaction of male and female from the dawn of creation. For the purpose of this lecture, I will concentrate only on the Priestly source. According to that source, humankind was created by a majestic decree. “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humankind in his image, / in the image of God he created them; / male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’” (Gen 1:26-28a). The rabbis of the early centuries of the Common Era, whose late antique interpretations of the Book of Genesis are compiled in the fifth-century midrash called Bereshit Rabbah, speculate about what it meant for the human being—Adam—to be created both male and female. To Rabbi Samuel ben Nahman, one of the Amoraim of the third and fourth centuries CE, is ascribed the opinion that “When the Lord created Adam, He created him double-faced, then He split him and made him of two backs, one back on this side and one back on the other side.”4 This sounds a bit like Aristophanes’ explanation of love in Plato’s Symposium.5 One intriguing rabbinical speculation suggests that God created the human being (Adam) “with four attributes of the higher beings [i.e., angels] and four attributes of the lower beings [i.e., animals].”6 Like the higher beings, human beings stand upright, speak, understand, and see. Like the lower beings, human beings eat and drink, procreate, excrete, and die. Why were human beings so created? Rabbi Tifdai speaking on behalf of Rabbi Aha, another of the Amoraim, gives God’s reason for making human beings this way: “If I create him of the celestial elements he will live [forever] and not die, and if I create him of the terrestrial elements, he will die and not live [in a future life]. Therefore I will create him of the upper and the lower elements: if he sins he will die; while if he does not sin, he will live.”7 Note that both the higher attributes (including human spirituality) and 3 the lower attributes (including human sexuality) all contribute to the whole nature of Adam as the image and likeness of God. There is a great deal more written about sexuality and spirituality in the Hebrew Bible and its early Jewish commentaries, but the only book in the Bible totally dedicated to the subject of sexuality and spirituality is the Song of Songs (Shir ha-Shirim). Although some voices in the ancient rabbinic traditions disapproved of the Song of Songs, Rabbi Akiva, the most influential rabbi of the late first and early second centuries CE, defended it vigorously: “All the Scriptures are holy, but The Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies!”8 On the surface a series of love poems or epithalamia, these songs have served Jews for many centuries as metaphors for God’s love for Israel and Israel’s love for God. Israel, the LORD’s bride, speaks the first words in the book: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!/ For your love is better than wine” (Song 1:2). The rabbis of the early centuries CE find the first two commandments of the Decalogue (in the Jewish counting of comandments) symbolized in this verse: “The whole Torah contains six hundred and thirteen precepts. The numerical value of [the letters in the alphabet of the Hebrew word] ‘Torah’ is six hundred and eleven, and these Moses communicated to us. But ‘I am’ and ‘Thou shalt not have’ we heard not from the mouth of Moses but from the mouth of the Holy One, blessed b e He .” 9 By asserting that the first two commandments come from the mouth of God and not from the mouth of Moses, these early rabbis were suggesting that the first two commandments are purely divine locutions. “I am the LORD your God...; you shall have no other gods before me” (Ex 20:2-3). In this reading of the Song of Songs, the sexual relationship between woman and man is intimately connected with and symbolic of Israel’s faith. The groom in the Song of Songs proves equally passionate about his bride; his words also come in for symbolic interpretation involving the origins of Israel in the era of the patriarchs and matriarchs: “Arise, my love, my fair one, / and come away; / for now the winter is past, / the rain 4 is over and gone” (Song 2:10b-11). The contributors to this midrash on the Song of Songs connect the command “Arise” (qumi), spoken by the groom to his bride in the Song, with the command, Lech lecha (“Get up”: Gen 12:1) spoken by the LORD to Abram in the Genesis account of his call to leave Haran and journey to the land of Promise. The rabbis authoring the midrash associate the groom’s next words with the binding of Isaac, his near sacrifice by Abraham: M“ Y LOVE, MY FAIR ONE: O daughter of Isaac, who drew close to Me and glorified Me on the altar.” The succeeding words of the groom associate the bride with Jacob (Israel), the son of Isaac, who was sent back to Paddan-aram to seek a wife, rather than marry a local Canaanite. “AND COME AWAY, O daughter of Jacob who listened to his father and his mother [and went away], as it says, And Jacob hearkened to his father and his mother, and went to Paddan-aram (Gen.

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