Who’s Your Daddy? God?

You might have noticed in previous years that the father imagery is big in High Holiday liturgy. God as a father is all over the place in the machzor, but perhaps most notably in Avinu Malkeinu, Our Father Our King. This is one of those songs you learn as a kid and it gets stuck in your head for years at a time, and because the tune is serious and kind of dirge-y people don’t always pay attention to what it’s really saying, they just get emotional regardless. But if we're going to get all up in arms about this prayer, can we take a look at it for a minute. Here we have a whole significant section of our service where we preface every statement with Our Father Our King. Does anyone else see a problem here? Aren’t we the religion that doesn’t think God was a father? Isn’t this whole father/king thing rather Christian? And the king thing seems rather quaint to most Americans. Prince Charles is going to be the King of England one day, and I’m not the least bit afraid of him, nor would I request anything from him except maybe local produce, since he seems interested in that.
The point is, this whole thing is rather oldschool, and I wouldn’t expect it to seriously affect me but every year it does. So how to compromise the daddy stuff with Judaism? There are actually some nice discussions of this elsewhere on the internet. MyJewishLearning has a nice article. And there’s a great post over at the Baraita blog. LeadershipU has a discussion of gender and God which is pretty interesting, too. Here’s my take: Even though I’m all for egalitarian liturgy, I think that the idea of God as a father is an important thing to have in mind during the high holidays. Too often we think of God as this warm comfy mommy figure who will comfort us and always be there for us when we’re having a hard time. God as nurturer is a big thing in contemporary Jewish practice. Nurturing, after all, is considered very noble. But discipline and fear—those are harder to get next to in such a crunchy new age world. It’s hard to know where they really fit in to the kind of spirituality that a lot of people practice. And so, on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and all the days in between, we get this reminder that God isn’t just there for us when things are rough. God also expects things of us when we’re doing fine. God has demands. I know people who really worry about this every day, and are constantly viewing the world from a lense of what God demands of them, but far more of my observant friends immerse themselves in Judaism because it’s reassuring in some way. It’s familiar, or it simply feels good. And I think that’s fine—and certainly it’s true of me much of the time—but I like that every year I start off with this reminder that it’s not all about me being comfortable. It’s stressful, but it’s also helpful, I think.