{"id":40,"date":"2026-09-19T15:23:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-19T15:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spiritualhumanisticjudaism.org\/?page_id=40"},"modified":"2026-09-19T15:36:47","modified_gmt":"2026-09-19T15:36:47","slug":"marcia-falk","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/spiritualhumanisticjudaism.org\/?page_id=40","title":{"rendered":"Marcia Falk"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Marcia Falk<\/h1>\n\n\n

Reimagining blessing without a divine King<\/p>\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Photo: loudfan, CC BY 4.0<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n

Marcia Falk (b. 1946) is a poet, translator and scholar whose The Book of Blessings<\/em> (1996) rewrites the entire cycle of Jewish daily, Sabbath and festival blessings in language that neither addresses a personal, hierarchical God nor falls back on simple gender-swapping. Her work matters to Spiritual Humanistic Judaism because she solved, in liturgy itself, a problem this community faces in theology: how do you keep blessing without keeping a Subject to bless?<\/p>\n

The Problem With “Barukh Atah”<\/h2>\n

The classical Jewish blessing formula — Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha-olam<\/em>, “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe” — addresses the divine as a personal, male, monarchical Subject standing over creation. Falk did not think the fix was to simply say “Queen” instead of “King,” or “She” instead of “He.” Swapping pronouns keeps the whole structure — a ruling person, external to the world, whom we petition and praise — intact. Her project went further: replacing the formula itself.<\/p>\n

Blessing the Source, Not a Sovereign<\/h2>\n

In place of the King-formula, Falk’s blessings open onto immanence: the sacred is located in the fullness of creation and the ordinary act of attention, not in a ruler above it. As the scholar Judith Plaskow put it, Falk’s work evokes “the sacred as totally immanent in creation,” offering an alternative to the whole notion of God as a male or female person. Her Hebrew is spare, exact and unmistakably traditional in sound — she keeps the music of Jewish prayer while emptying the formula of its monarchy.<\/p>\n

Her liturgy \u201cchallenges from within the tradition\u2019s patriarchal assumptions and hierarchical order\u201d — and yet, as one reviewer wrote, \u201cit all sounds so Jewish, so right, so easy to pray.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why She Belongs Here<\/h2>\n

Spiritual Humanistic Judaism sets aside God<\/em>, godly<\/em> and godliness<\/em> as terms in its own affirmative theology and liturgy, while still drawing on the full tradition those words come from. Falk shows one way to write that into prayer: not by arguing the theology in an essay, but by handing worshippers words that already assume it. Her other major works — The Song of Songs<\/em> (1977), The Days Between<\/em> (2014), and Night of Beginnings<\/em> (2022), a Passover Haggadah — extend the same method across the whole liturgical calendar.<\/p>\n

Visit Marcia Falk’s website \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n

See also our own Our Scholarship<\/a> for how this connects to Kaplan and Schulweis, and Our Practice<\/a> for how it shapes our own liturgy.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Marcia Falk (b. 1946) is a poet, translator and scholar whose The Book of Blessings (1996) rewrites the entire cycle of Jewish daily, Sabbath and festival blessings in language that neither addresses a personal, hierarchical God nor falls back on simple gender-swapping. Her work matters to Spiritual Humanistic Judaism because she solved, in liturgy itself, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-40","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritualhumanisticjudaism.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritualhumanisticjudaism.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritualhumanisticjudaism.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualhumanisticjudaism.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualhumanisticjudaism.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualhumanisticjudaism.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualhumanisticjudaism.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40\/revisions\/53"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritualhumanisticjudaism.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}