Local author Heather Mendel discussed spirituality and feminism in the search for God during a preview of her recent book Thursday at the Performing Arts Center.
She was invited by the Religious Studies program to preview “Dancing in the Footsteps of Eve: Retrieving the Healing Gift of the Sacred Feminine for the Human Family Through Myth and Mysticism.”
As a child born into a South African Jewish family, she experienced apartheid and a racist government. Later in life, she moved to America and became a feminist.
Religious Studies professor and program adviser Stephen Lloyd-Moffett said Mendel’s style is what makes her a Cal Poly Theisms club favorite.
“She’s a 4-foot-11, South African Jewish feminist with pockets full of rhetorical pistols and a tongue made entirely of fire,” he said. “We consider her part of our family here at Cal Poly.”
Mendel argued for the need to read between the lines of religious texts. She spoke of Judaism’s Torah, also known as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy in the Old Testament. Mendel said a less literal interpretation of this ancient Jewish story would shed light on traditional gender roles.
“We can visualize a better world than the one we’ve got now by going to the biblical stories, looking what’s on the surface and looking what’s below the surface and seeing how we can combine them,” Mendel said.
Lloyd-Moffett said diverse perspectives are hard to grasp in Western culture.
“What she’s saying is that there isn’t one interpretation, and that’s what is hard for most people, especially growing up in a sort of Christian society. We tend to think, ‘What did God mean by this?’ and that’s our role,” he said. “What she wants to do is stabilize that. She wants to say, ‘What could God mean by this? What are all the different meanings that God could entail?'”
In her argument for the respect of different perspectives, Mendel gave her own creation story that included Adam and Eve, but was differed from the one found in Genesis. Mendel presented it as though human kind made progress due to Eve’s curiosity, intuition and ultimately her decision to eat the forbidden fruit. From the traditional perspective, Mendel said the female gender has been unfairly victimized due to Western society’s literal interpretation of this account.
“Not to say people who read the Bible literally are wrong, they’re evil, they’re bad. No. They are answering the call from their own hearts to do things on a literal level,” she said.
Political science junior Amy Hart was intrigued by Mendel’s talk and glad to hear her viewpoint.
“She had a really good perspective on the Adam and Eve story that people don’t get to hear a lot, and it offered a kind of feminist approach that a lot of people aren’t open to very much. So I’m glad people got the chance to hear that perspective,” she said.
Lloyd-Moffett said the way she explained her theology in a story that included spirituality and meaning resonates with our culture.
“It’s great, because in the West we rarely think in terms of stories. We want things broken down into logical progressions,” he said. “What she just did was tell a whole story that had an entire theology behind it that made us think.”
Mendel said change can start with a new perception on gender roles.
“(It’s time) to put men in touch with the intuitive sides of themselves, with that unconditional love that’s within them as well as women,” she said. “For men to become more gentle, for women to become more powerful, for women to take a stand as to who they are, not to accept being put down by learning about all the things that we have. To stop worrying about the differences between men and women.”