INTRODUCTION TO JEWISH ANIMISM SHORT CLASS
Hi, my name is Jared Gellert and I’m delighted you’ve chosen to explore the idea of Jewish Animism. This is a six part class, consisting of
An introduction to Animism
Animism in the Hebrew Bible, Parts 1 and 2.
Animism in the Talmud
Animism in early Hasidism
A possible Jewish Animism for today
I’ll be posting the writings on earthbasedjudaism.org. There will be a class in the Fall of 2025. This will be a group format on Zoom, with teachings, guided meditations, sharing and suggested practices. If you want more information or to follow along, please sign up on the website. https://www.earthbasedjudaism.org/get-involved
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY “ANIMISM”?
Animism is a cross cultural phenomenon found in many indigenous societies. The Animist world view, as I am using the term, believes that we humans are an integral part of an interwoven web of all beings. We are related to all beings. We are not the center of the universe, but rather the web as a whole is what is most important. French anthropologist Philippe Descola frames this as all beings have the same interior (we might say soul) but our bodies are radically different. (Descola “Beyond Nature and Culture” in Harvey ed. The Handbook of Contemporary Animism pp. 76-90) We have different abilities and interests based on our different bodies. I can’t be as patient as a rock or a long lived tree, I can’t fly like a bird or dig into the earth like a groundhog. Equally, we humans are uniquely capable of abstract reasoning and are highly adaptive to different environments. All beings have their strengths and weaknesses, and we humans aren’t any better or worse, higher or lower than any other.
Contemporary western civilization is anti-Animist at its core. The core belief of our contemporary worldview is that the more than human world, to use David Abram’s felicitous phrase, is a set of resources to exploit. We think the world is this dead inert thing and we believe we can do whatever we want with it and to it. This has led us to defecating in the very bed in which we sleep as we poison the world. We are reaping the consequences in very direct and practical ways of our lack of an Animist world view. Sure there is disquiet with this and some pushback, but mostly we are a completely human centric world view and we feel free to do whatever we construe as in our human interest. How often do we ask ourselves what our oak trees want?
Robin Kimmerer expresses the contrast between the Animist view and our contemporary perspective when talking about moving from an indigenous perspective to the modern scientific one when she went to the University to study Botany. She moved from a world “in which I knew plants as teacher and companions with whom I was linked with mutual responsibility, into the realm of science. They did not ask who are you, but what is it. No one asked the plants what can you tell us. The botany I was taught was reduction, mechanistic and strictly objective.” (Braiding Sweetgrass p.42).
WEB OF RELATIONSHIPS
Animism, as I am using the term, holds us in a web of relationships Carol Sanchez, who has Laguna Pueblo, Lakota Sioux and Lebanese heritage, has an absolutely wonderful essay called “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral” in Ecofeminism and the Sacred. She writes “native Americans believe themselves to be an integral part of the human world (p.211). As a girl, she was taught “not to destroy any creatures’ homes because they had the right to live their lives in their way every bit as much as I did.” (p.212) She was taught that all beings have a special place in the world and a particular task to perform.
Willerslev, an anthropologist writes of an indigenous Siberian tribe “For the Yukaghirs …personhood is not about a class of being or entity; rather it entails relationships. There would be no hunters without prey, just as there would be no living without the souls of the dead (Animism Handbook p.157). Kenneth Morrison an anthropologist says that the Navajo (an indigenous American tribe of the southwest) say of Europeans they behave as if they have no relatives (Animism Handbook p.38) meaning that we of Western Civilization don’t recognize that all of the other beings in the more than human world are our relatives. That is the meaning, Allen writes, of the Lakota phrase Mitayuke Oyas’in, “all my relations” the closing phrase of sacred Lakota work. The phrase “represents the Lakota belief in their connectedness to all beings.” (p.213) Robin Kimmerer, a Potawatomi, writes “In the Western tradition there is a recognized hierarchy of beings, with, of course, the human being on top…and the plants on the bottom. But in Native ways of knowing, huma people are often referred to as the younger brothers of creation…we must look to our teachers amongst other species for guidance.” (Braiding Sweetgrass p.9). She also writes “we have always known that the plants and animals have their own councils and a common language. The trees, especially, we recognize as our teachers.” (p.18)
David Abram tells a fascinating story about his house in his book Becoming Animal. He drove his wife and 16 week old baby to the airport to fly to his wife’s mother’s home in Belgium. When he returned home “something about the house was distressed, disturbed.” (p.31). He writes “the walls, the ceiling, the low tables and even the windows were glaring at me. The couch, with its thickly upholstered cushions was keeping me at arms length.” He wonders what is happening and then he mumbles “the little one’s gone.” The house seems to sag in total dejection, but then he says to the house “But the baby will be back” and everything returned to normal, as if the house were reassured.
Now Abram is well aware that the typical Western response would be that this was all in his imagination. Indeed, that’s exactly what his friends said to him. “Yet this interpretation seemed far too facile, too easy” (p.32) because it wasn’t like he thought the house would respond to the baby’s absence—he had thought of the house as this inert, dead being. And it was only the house that responded this way, not the automobile he drove or the fields surrounding the house. The idea that he was only imagining it is based on the idea “that the objects we perceive are purely passive phenomena, utterly neutral and inert, and so enables us to overlook the way in which such objects actively affect the space around them.” (ibid).
THE PROBLEM OF PLATO
The degradation of the body starts in Western thought with Plato. What all bodies share in common, from a Platonic view, is that they don’t partake of the truth that is found in ideal forms (see the famous allegory of the cave in Plato’s The Republic). It’s really hard to underestimate how influential Plato is on Western thought and civilization and the alienation we experience from our bodies and the earth. If the history of Western thought is a series of footnotes to Plato as Alfred North Whitehead famously said, we need a new/old kind of thinking.
LANGUAGE AND ANIMISM
Let’s turn our attention to the question of language. There’s no question that language shapes our thought and mediates our interactions with others. I want to raise three different questions about language and contrast our modern perspective with the perspective of Animism, as I’m using the term. As Kimmerer says “The animacy of the world is something we already know, but the language of animacy teeters on extinction.” (Braiding Sweetgrass p.57)
These three questions are: to whom does language belong, gendered and non gendered language, and beings as verbs compared to beings as nouns.
To whom does language belong? The usual western view is that language is the sole province of humans. We read in Genesis “And the human [better translation would be earthling] gave names to every domestic animal and bird of the skies and every animal of the field.” (2:20) Our modern argument is that only humans have truly sophisticated languages with abstract thought; that’s how we are different than all other beings who have some kind of rudimentary (to our minds) means of communication such as the barking of deer and dogs.
However, Abram argues “What if mind is not ours, but is Earth’s? What if mind, rightly understood, is not a special property of humankind, but rather a property of the Earth itself—a power in which we are carnally immersed?” (Becoming Animal p.123) Kimmerer writes “we have always known that the plants and animals have their own councils and a common language. The trees, especially, we recognize as our teachers.” (Braiding Sweetgrass p.18). Abram’s insight leads him to launch a highly persuasive argument that language does not belong to the mind only, but rather to the body. As Linda Hogan, a Chicksaw elder, says our “cognitive and spiritual worlds are already created by our rivers, mountains and forests.” Linda Hogan (Animism handbook page 17).
English is a non gendered language. That is our nouns, verbs and adjectives are the same for both male and female beings. In English it is very easy to talk about the beings of the more than human world as “its”, because the nouns to name them and the verbs to describe their actions are non gendered. Chinese is also a non gendered language from my understanding. The dominance of English and Chinese in the modern world makes it easier for us to not assign personhood to the more than human world.
Languages can be gendered. Hebrew is gendered, meaning every noun is either male, female or somewhat ambiguous in that sometimes the plural takes a different gender than the singular. For instance, the word for field in Hebrew, sadeh is male, but the plural is conjugated as sadot, a female conjugation. Romance languages such as French and Spanish are gendered as is German. So when you talk about “river” in Hebrew you would say he flows, in French you would say she flows, for instance. You can’t say it flows, as you would in English. This gendering has the possibility of awakening a sense of personhood for beings of the more than human world.
Kimmerer highlights another possibility in language. Potawatomi, the language of her ancestors, has beings in the more than human world as verbs, not nouns. She points out that English is 30% verbs, but Potawatomi is 70% verbs. As she says “A bay is a noun, only if water is dead.” It is a verb in Potawatomi. “This is the grammar of animacy.” (Braiding Sweetgrass p.55). I’m not even sure how you would render this in English—almost as if there is no such word as “bay” but only “baying” implying that the bay is alive and actively doing something (that’s the verb), just by being alive. She continues that in Potawatomi “Rocks are animate, as are mountains and fire and places. The list of inanimate is much smaller filled with objects that are made by people. Of a table we say what is it and answer, table it is. But of apple, we must say, who is that being and reply, apple that being is.” (p.56).
However, according to Australian philosopher Freya Matthews, the Australian Aborigines regard the rusted cars that dot their landscape as animate. When she inquired about this, they said to her that the rusted cars came from the earth, so of course they were animate. (Reinhabiting Reality, p. 210). Who is this computer I am typing on—not what is this computer I am typing on.
Language shapes cognition and world view. We who are native speakers of English need to work hard to overcome the instilled habits of a non gendered language.
LAND AND ANIMISM
I want to make some preliminary comments on the question of land, then offer a guided visualization and offer some practices you could undertake to undermine your Western approach to the more than human world. Why turn to the question of the Animist view of land? Because belonging to and exile from the land is such a huge issue in Judaism.
The land is viewed as a living being from an Animist perspective. As Kimmerer writes, land “to our people was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our non human kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity.” (Braiding Sweetgrass p.17). She later adds “People often ask me what one thing I would recommend to restore relationship between land and people. My answer is almost always plant a garden.” (ibid p.126). If we love the land “The land loves us back. She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with roasting ears and blackberries and birdsongs.” (ibid p.122).
Our current day alternative agriculture movement echoes the beliefs expressed by Kimmerer. Wendell Berry is constantly asked what’s one thing city people can do to connect with the land, and he responds to plant a garden. (see his essay “Pleasures of Eating” in Art of the Commonplace) Many years ago I read a book with a collection of essays called Listening to the Land and the premise of the many essays was that we in modern civilization had lost the ability to listen to the land, and that if we wanted to save the very foundation of our material life, we needed to relearn this. As Aldo Leopold wrote in the forward to a Sand County Almanac. “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” This is Animism.
Now note that Leopold is writing within the limitations of English and is pushed by English grammar to call land an “it.” Here’s how we might render this. “We abuse land because we regard her aliveness as if her aliveness were not really her true state, so we believe this living being belongs to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to embrace the aliveness of the land and of ourselves who are alive only in the context of a living land which nurtures us.”
This sense of land being alive is really hard for our scientific worldview to grasp. Again, here’s Kimmerer “Gardens are simultaneously a material and spiritual undertaking. That’s hard for scientists, so fully brainwashed by Cartesian dualism, to grasp.” (Braiding Sweetgrass p.123)
GUIDED VISUALIZATION
Here’s our guided visualization. Close your eyes and feel the earth underneath your feet. Take some deep breaths, in and out, in and out. Go to a favorite place in the more than human world. Might be a waterfall, a beach, a flower field, a pasture, a woods. What time of the year is it? Imagine all your surroundings, Pick one of the beings in your scene. Walk over to him/her and introduce yourself. If you can add anything about your lineage that’s great. Ask permission to touch them, if that’s relevant. Ask them if they have anything to say to you. Hang out with your being and have a conversation. If you are reading this come back and then journal about it, draw it, make a collage—mark it in some way. If you are in the class, let’s all share.
ANIMISM CHANGES EVERYTHING
An animist perspective transforms everything. A friend relates that Martin Prechtel, a white man who was raised on a Pueblo and became a Mayan Shaman who lived amongst the Mayan Indians in Guatemala, asks his car if the car wants to go where he wants to go before he starts driving. Can you imagine asking your computer if the computer is OK with you typing on the computer before you start writing something? Martin also stops whenever he crosses water to ask permission and make offerings. We literally could not run the modern world like that. I thinned the carrots the morning I first wrote these words. Did I ask permission to pluck the weeds, did I make any offerings? Of course not. I’m too busy and haven’t interiorized the Animist world view adequately.
We have lost too much of the ability to have intimate relationships with both our fellow humans and with the more than human world because of our alienation from the more than human world. How we treat our fellow humans and how we treat the more than human world are related. Open yourself up to the possibility of treating the more than human world as a “thou”. Open yourself up to the possibility of increasing the times that you treat fellow humans as “thous.” Watch both of them increase in a virtuous circle. Or harden your heart to survive our transactional world and watch your innately given ability to connect circle the drain, akin to the future of humanity on this beautiful green earth that is our great gift that we are squandering.
PRACTICES
How can you open yourself up to the aliveness of the world? Over the course of the next while, I urge you to adopt/experiment with one or more of these possible practices.
Sit Spot. Sit quietly in the more than human world for 15 minutes and journal about what you observed. The journal can take the form of words, pictures, a collage, a dance of your experience or any other possible creative expression.
Hitbodedut. Sit outside and pour out your heart in prayer.
Plant and/or tend a garden—your own or someone else’s.
Spend time wandering in the more than human world without listening to something on your phone.
Engage in a conversation with some other being in the more than human world—could be a tree, a squirrel, a plant, a body of water, a stone.
The next class begins our exploration of Animism in our indigenous tradition. We are going to look at three examples of Animism in Genesis as Part 1 of our exploration of Animism in the Hebrew Bible.
This writing is most of what will be the content for the class that starts in Fall 2025—and you’ll get to do the guided visualization and share with like minded people in real time. If you’d like more information, please place yourself on our mailing list at https://www.earthbasedjudaism.org/get-involved
