Don’t Call me Husband Anymore

Black leather straps, tightly spiraling around my left arm, twist on to my fingers, forming the three-lettered-name of an ancient Semitic deity. 

On most weekday mornings, since I turned 13, I start my days this way, wrapping Tefillin or Phylacteries, on my arm and head. It’s a super strange Jewish ritual that I was taught by my father, with insistence, although without ever been handed inner reasonings or meaning sof this peculiar obligatory daily performance. My father put them on until his dying day. 

Part of the ritual is the recitation of blessings and specific verses, transforming this rite whose origins are lost to the mists of time  into a personal procedure in which each participant creates a covenant with the divine - practically a wedding ritual between one and one’s soul. 

The key words, those recited as the strapped-on fingered spell the gender-ambiguous God Name SHADAI - are three verses from today’s chapter of Hosea. And only now, all these years late,  do I begin to understand why they are attached to the ritual - although I’ve not been able to find out who was the poetic genius who first suggested this. (If you got intel on this or time to research - yes please.) 

Before exploring these powerful words here’s the recap: 

Hosea Ben Be’eri, living in the 8th Century BCE in the Northern Kingdom of Israel as it disintegrates into a corrupt Assyrian vassal state, marries a promiscuous woman, with whom he has three symbolically named children, all as a mass scale allegory of the toxic relationship between the God of Israel and the deviant nation. At the start of chapter 2 it goes from bad to worse with humiliations and public abuse. But midway through the chapter, unclear how exactly, the couple, somehow, manages to reconcile and a new relationship begins to form:

וְהָיָ֤ה בַיּוֹם־הַהוּא֙ נְאֻם־יְהֹוָ֔ה תִּקְרְאִ֖י אִישִׁ֑י וְלֹא־תִקְרְאִי־לִ֥י ע֖וֹד בַּעְלִֽי׃

And on that day

—YHWH declares—

You will call Me Ishi - My man, 

And no more will you call Me Baali - My husband. 

Hosea 2:17-18

Robert Alter helps explain some of the subtler layers here, by focusing on the Hebrew word ‘Ba’ali’ - ‘My husband’:

“This line turns on an untranslatable pun: ba’al is one of the two Hebrew words for “husband,” but it is also the name of the principal Canaanite deity; the Hebrew synonym, ‘ish, is the word translated here as “husband.”

In other words - the redemptive future according to Hosea holds the possibility that the nation guilty of cheating on YHWH with Ba’al, will be back in good faith with its deity as it renounces idolatry. Relational respect will replace ownership models, both theological and social.

In modern Hebrew, the word ‘baal’ is still used to indicate ‘husband’ though in many progressive, feminist circles, including religious ones, that term is being replaced, exactly as Hosea had hoped by the egalitarian ‘Ish’. 

This long ago hoped for shift -and with far longer to go - will lead to peace and prosperity through the land, YHWH promises, challenging all other forms of hierarchy and imbalance. 

The restoration of the trust between people and their god in the aftermath of trauma is here told as the potential repair of a violent domestic crisis.  In his book ‘Eight Prophets’, Rabbi Benny Lau writes that “the repair begins by exiting the broken home..and this is the first time since the start of their relationship that he talks to her and not about her.”  This reconciliation, while still told from his POV, leads into the vows that would one day make their ways into the morning ritual (mostly historically practiced by men):

וְאֵרַשְׂתִּ֥יךְ לִ֖י לְעוֹלָ֑ם וְאֵרַשְׂתִּ֥יךְ לִי֙ בְּצֶ֣דֶק וּבְמִשְׁפָּ֔ט וּבְחֶ֖סֶד וּֽבְרַחֲמִֽים׃ וְאֵרַשְׂתִּ֥יךְ לִ֖י בֶּאֱמוּנָ֑ה וְיָדַ֖עַתְּ אֶת־יְהֹוָֽה׃

“And I will espouse you forever:

I will espouse you with righteousness and justice,

And with goodness and mercy,

And I will espouse you with faithfulness;

Then you shall be devoted to YHWH.”

Hosea 2:21-22

ֿShoshana Michael Zucker,  translator and writer, suggests that these are aspirational intentions:  

“To many readers, the assumption that a battered woman might willingly return to an unbalanced relationship is troubling at best. Relationships, even (especially) with God take work. 

Long-standing Jewish practice provides an opening for that work. Verses 21-22, quoted above, are particularly familiar to Jews who pray with tefillin, as they are traditionally recited while wrapping the tefillin strap around the pray-er’s hand. This liturgical usage removes the verses from their Biblical context making it possible, as many worshippers do, to ignore the pain and anger that precede them. But what if we keep the context alive? Ritual recitation puts God’s pledge of commitment in human mouths. The prophetic vision of a far-off future time becomes a human action plan, an antidote to the pain, illness, and want in our world. Although we shudder at the idea that suffering is the result of divine punishment, we can uphold the idea that righteousness and justice, goodness and mercy, faithfulness and devotion are the path forward not only towards ameliorating distress but also towards reinforcing or rebuilding our relationship with God.”

 Rabbi Lau adds that ‘by the use of the story of Hosea’s wife and their children, the prophet corrects the relationship between the people and the divine: Not by might but by encounter, not with fences and limitations, but by communication and touch.”

For me, the recital of these verses as I strap leather on my body is a deeper invitation to the inner union of masculine and feminine, ancient and contemporary, the tradition I inherited with all its beauty and bias - with the ones I choose to create and celebrate. 

Hosea’s family story has one more addendum, the short next chapter in which the overall theme of marital discord and repair as metaphor for the national master story echoes with a dim chord. We hear his words through the centuries, laced like Tefillin on human bodies that yearn, still, always for dignity, love, justice, and respect.

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