The God Squad: Praise God because he/she/it is good

Rabbi Marc Gellman, Tribune Content Agency on Mar 23, 2023

Every theistic religion in the world tries to include some reference to the feminine part of God but it would be quite wrong to assume that God has a gender. God is a being but a being that is beyond gender and beyond understanding.

My view of all this:

It is wrong to call God he. It is wrong to call God she. And it is definitely wrong to call God it because it is the pronoun we use to describe things and God is a being not a thing. So what do we do?

I have written several books for children about Bible stories and God and religion and in all these books I avoided ever using a pronoun to refer to God. It is hard to write without pronouns but in the case of God it is the only way to avoid the gender error of assuming that a non-human being was in fact a gendered being.

Avoiding gender-specific language also helps to avoid the harmful image of God as an old man in the clouds looking down on us like Zeus on Olympus. This is wrong on every level, not the least of which is that it teaches little girls that God does not look like you. The truth is that God does not look like any of us.

The fundamental problem in talking about God is not really gender. The problem is that everything we speak about is like something else, and so we are able to piece together ways of comparing what we seek to understand with what we already understand. With God there is no way to do that.

God is not like anything or anyone else. God is utterly unique and so our language just reflects the truth beyond our words. God is within us but God is also beyond us and the ways to understand God elude us no matter how we try. That is the test of faith. We are called to believe in a being we can feel but cannot ever completely understand.

(Send ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com. Rabbi Gellman is the author of several books, including “Religion for Dummies,” co-written with Fr. Tom Hartman. Also, the new God Squad podcast is now available.)