"Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax, of Cabbages and Kings..."

My swirling thoughts have begun to settle down, and I feel that writing them down will help make them clearer. This post is likely to be long; stick with me, please.

My Identity--a Gift?

I firmly believe that my identity, all of it, every aspect, is a gift from God. I know for a fact that I was made "B'Tzelem Elohim," in God's image, with a "lev tahor," a pure heart. As much as I struggle with accepting my sexual orientation, I know that this struggle will ultimately make me a more beautiful and stronger person. The ability to love, regardless of which gender one loves, is a gift. I am Jewish, I am homosexual or maybe bisexual, and I am proud.

The Jewish View of Our Relationship with God

According to Judaism, people are God's partners in fixing the world and continuing creation. Yes, there is a time to cry out to God for forgiveness, but we have only one day for that: Yom Kippur. Although there is also a short paragraph in the main weekday prayer, recited three times a day, asking God for forgiveness, it is sandwiched between praise and more important requests (health, rain for Israel, the coming of the Messiah, etc.) and is almost over before it starts.

Judaism teaches that we are God's witnesses, and some believe that without people, there would be no God. To put it in my own words, we (all people) are God's fingers, completing the work that could not be done without us. The main point of the Torah is to help us with this work and give us a way to approach God through the following of the commandments.

God's Gender?

Most people call God by a masculine name and pronoun. In all Hebrew prayers, God is portrayed as male. There is, however, a speculation that the sacred, unpronouncable name, Y-H-V-H, used once a year by one person in private during Temple times, was in fact God's feminine aspect, and we lost it when we lost the Temple.

I know that in my personal visions etc., when God appears to have a gender that gender is female, usually a mother. Because I believe that visions are real but their content is what we expect to see, I wonder whether the way I perceive God has to do with my lesbianism.