Earth Based Judaism and Divine Feminine Impulses are looked at in this article.

Date:   6/14/2006 10:21:15 PM ( 18 y ago)

Friend Joy, a sister Enchanted Gardener
and percussionist, sent me this article on Jewish Paganism.
There are some threads here that I want to
personally follow up on, so I am putting it here:

Shalom,
Thought you might enjoy this article below on Jewish Paganism.
(I reservedly admit that Ezrahi, Winkler and Gafni have been my teachers.)

When I was a very muddy potter ("covered in mud") in the sixties and beyond, and intensely and quietly ecstatically in creation opening my mounds of sensuous moist clay on the spinning wheel, I wonder if I thought that I was "penetrating Mother Earth at her deepest place." I was surely in joy, bliss and at Oneness. Objects of beauty were birthed through the "life force" of witnessing "alive" the firing of ceramics involving "trees (which I have cut down, chopping for firing and ritually serving as Shomer 24/7 at my mountain Anagama kiln), fire, earth, air, spirits (Bruchot) and other people." and through the spontaneity in Raku pottery which I passionately loved.

As a teenager, I once "dressed-up" in high heels to walk "reservedly" to shul at the Hillcrest Jewish Center in Queens, NY. I did not know that a ticket was needed for the High Holidays.

Blessedly as an adult, Baruch Hashem, I found Renewal Judaism. I delight in the "Divine feminine", birthing blessings and "experiencing the various energies of that world with the body, mind, heart and spirit." I guess that makes me a Jewish "neo-pagan." Come, join me in "relationship."

Blessings of health and joy and creativity and love,
JOY

/Jay Michaelson's upcoming book, "God in Your Body," will be published
in 2006 by Jewish Lights Press. /
Jewish Paganism: Oxymoron or Innovation?
By Jay Michaelson
December 9, 2005

I was skinny-dipping in the mud springs on the shores of the Dead Sea
with Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi, a longhaired renegade kabbalist who runs a
commune in the Judean Desert. We were enveloped by the softest, silkiest
mud I've ever felt ˜ it was like moving through thick cream. Then the
rabbi told me to dive down as deep as I can go. When we each came up for
air, he said, "At this moment, you are penetrating Mother Earth at her
deepest place."

So this is Jewish paganism: naked, covered in mud, communing with the
God (or Goddess) in nature. It's sensual, it's controversial, and it's
the polar opposite of the reserved, dressed-up brand of Judaism that
fills many synagogues. And thanks to a new generation of young rabbis,
it seems to be growing.

If you're like me, you probably associate paganism with everything
opposed to Judaism: polytheism, idolatry, nature spirits and human
sacrifice ˜ just to name a few. Literally, though, the word "paganism"
simply means the practices of rural people; the word comes from the
Latin /paganus/, meaning country dweller. More substantively, it refers
to religious beliefs and practices that are centered on the natural
world, and on experiencing the various energies of that world with the
body, mind, heart and spirit. Of course, with that broad a definition,
much of Judaism is itself "pagan" ˜ which is precisely what today's
Jewish "neo-pagans" claim.

"Paganism is fundamentally about relationships ˜ with trees, fire,
earth, air, spirits and other people," Ezrahi said. "It's about not
seeing the world as an object, but seeing it as alive." For some in the
Jewish community, this translates into rituals celebrating the "Divine
feminine" (which the Kabbalah has been doing for centuries anyway). For
others, it means cultivating "eros," which can mean anything from love
and sexuality to more general notions of life force.

For Rabbi Jill Hammer, whose organization, Tel Shemesh, is dedicated to
"celebrating and creating Earth-centered rituals within Judaism,"
contemporary paganism is actually nothing new. Contrary to those who say
that paganism equals idolatry, or that "pagan Judaism" is no different
from, say, the messianic Judaism of Jews for Jesus, Hammer argues that
"paganism has always been part of Judaism. The rabbis in the Talmud are
worried about idolatrous objects, but they do magical spells. They're
involved in the same things they would consider pagan if other people
did them." What troubled the rabbis, Hammer said, was not the pagan
practices themselves, but their propensity to lead people to /avodah
zara/, or foreign worship.

As an example, Hammer cited the kabbalistic notion of the four worlds
and four souls, which correspond to the "pagan" four seasons and four
elements. Of course, Kabbalah always has struck its critics as smacking
of paganism, but according to Hammer, the roots run deeper: "Paganism is
a human impulse, whether you're monotheistic or polytheistic. People
experience divinity through their experience." Tel Shemesh's Web site,
http://www.telshemesh.org , includes rituals for invoking water spirits and the
four winds, poetry (including ˜ by way of full disclosure ˜ some of
mine) and a Jewish calendar centered on the solstices and equinoxes.

As we sat in New York City's Central Park, Hammer told me that she was
never inspired by the Hanukkah menorah as a symbol of freedom. "But then
I experienced taking a single candle and over eight days letting it grow
to eight candles, just as the sunlight grows after the winter solstice.
The earth is teaching me, and connected to my tradition. And I have that
experience in my life ˜ of being in a dark place, and then, God willing,
the world becomes light again."

Hammer paused as she told me this story. The wind blew, and some hippies
played "Imagine" over in Strawberry Fields. And then Hammer said, "I get
mad at the rabbis for making Hanukkah about a war, when it's really
about something that matters in our lives."

Ezrahi had similar reservations about the classical rabbinic move away
from what he calls a "balance" between paganism and prophetic ethics in
the Bible. He said that if we could resurrect King David and see what
his religion was like ˜ dancing naked in front of the ark, composing
love-drenched poetry for God in nature ˜ he might seem pagan, too.

But what about idolatry? "The world is full of living forces," Ezrahi
replied. "/Avodah zara/ ˜ idolatry ˜ is when you give power to those
forces, when you think that each thing has its own power, separate from
the One." The way Ezrahi explains it, monotheism is "a second stage
after the experience of being a pagan. If you don't experience paganism,
your monotheism is more an ideology than a religious experience. First
you have to know that there is a spirit in the tree, and in the river,
and in the sky. /Then /you can know that it's really all one spirit."

So how does this play out in practice?

At one extreme, there are kibbutzim re-enacting the harvest holidays,
Jewish gatherings at festivals in Israel and America, even Jewish
shamanism. For example, Rabbi Gershon Winkler is the director of the
Walking Stick Foundation, which trains students to become shamanic
healers; his Web site says that "Rabbi Winkler introduces us to the
animals, colors, powers, spirits, elements and attributes of the four
directions, and how to incorporate them into the varying situations of
our personal life journey." Winkler and his students, including Rabbi
Menachem Cohen, leader of the Jewish community at the Burning Man
festival, run "spirit-journeying" rituals in which participants invoke
the four winds and focus their minds on the different "energies" of
those directions in order to heal themselves.

Then there are those who emphasize the "pagan" content of existing
Jewish rituals. /Tashlich/, for example, is the cleansing, renewing
ritual of throwing breadcrumbs ˜ symbolizing the "sins" of the last year
˜ into a body of water. For many Jews, this is a faintly ridiculous
custom. But for Amichai Lau-Lavie, the flamboyant founder and artistic
director of Storahtelling: Jewish Ritual Theater Revised, it is a
primal, pagan act of community expiation. One year, he said, "we created
a show based on the narrative of the scapegoat, which was a very pagan
ritual done in our tradition with very unclear origins, in which one of
the goats goes to the demon of demons, and thus the community is
cleansed and the year can start again. So we re-enacted this story, and
then we walked down to the Hudson River at 47th Street with a lot of
people and drums and doing the conscious act of throwing it into the
water, feeding the fish, getting rid of your past. Is that pagan or is
it Jewish? Call it what you want."

Another time, Lau-Lavie orchestrated a three-day festival based on
Simchat Beit Hashoeva, originally an elaborately choreographed symbolic
rain ritual. The Talmud records that it frequently was so raucous that
it led to wanton sex. In Lau-Lavie's re-creation, it included "fire
juggling, chanting, music, yoga, and bodywork [massage, reiki, etc.]. On
the night of the full moon, we built a huge spiral of candles the size
of half a football field, and sang the 15 songs of ascents. We were
praying to the four directions with the /Arba'ah Minim/ (the four
species conventionally known as the /lulav/ and /etrog/). It doesn't get
any more pagan than that ˜ but regular Jews do it all the time."

Well, sort of. Traditional Jews "do" a deliberately watered-down,
domesticated version of these rituals, within boundaries circumscribed
by Halacha. Even if Judaism does have pre-monotheistic roots, is getting
back to those roots still "Jewish"? Or is it getting back to exactly
what we were supposed to get away from?

For Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, a controversial, charismatic rabbi with two
best-selling books and an Israeli television program, it all depends on
how paganism is put into context. For Gafni, paganism was the essence of
biblical Jewish practice. But, he said, "we need to distinguish between
'level one' paganism and this new, 'level three' paganism. Level one is
the idea in its raw form, and it was rejected by level two, which is the
religion of the prophets. The prophets saw that level one paganism was
all about eros, with its power and passion. There was no ethics. The
prophets rejected that. They said, 'God's primary demand is ethical
behavior.' And the prophets are right. But level three both transcends
and includes level two. We don't get rid of prophetic ethics, but we
move from that place to eros. We reclaim eros, the energy of Shechinah,
the energy of the goddess, and unite it with ethics."

Ezrahi, who recently co-authored a book with Gafni on the myth of
Lilith, told a similar story. "The Talmud is full of sages talking to
rivers, trees, birds. But in [Tractate] Sanhedrin it says, we don't want
to be pulled to idolatry, and we are willing to 'pay the price' of
prophecy to avoid it. "

Since then, Ezrahi added, the pagan parts of the Talmud were minimized
and marginalized by rationalistic rabbis. "We thought that we became
smart. We are scientific people, and we know these things don't happen.
Actually, we became blind, deaf and arrogant."

As a result, Gafni said, our culture has gotten so devoid of spirit that
paganism is needed to rescue ethics itself. "All ethical failure comes
from a lack of eros. When you're moved to act unethically, what is
happening? You're responding to a primal insecurity. In order to be
ethical, we have to be in eros. Bonfires, chanting, ecstatic dance,
embodied ritual ˜ all recapture divine energy," Gafni said.

But, I asked the rabbi, how do we know that we're not in danger of
precisely that which so many sacred texts warn about? The answer, he
said, is ethics. "You know it's holy eros because it leads to ethics.
People help each other, work with each other. That's the litmus test."
And the opposite? "A KKK rally," Gafni answered. "Lots of bonfires, lots
of energy. No ethics. That's the distinction between holy paganism and
idolatry."

So are these new "pagan rabbis" reviving ancient Jewish traditions ˜ or
creating a new heresy? Perhaps time will tell. On the one hand, drum
circles, sweat lodges and shamanic invocations are certainly not the
Judaism I grew up with in suburban Florida. On the other hand, young
people are leaving that Judaism in record numbers. Maybe, I thought one
late afternoon in Jerusalem, there really is something to all this
earth-based religion, after all. But then the setting sun let me know it
was time for evening prayers.



 

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