RECLAIMING JEWISH ANIMISM POSSIBILITIES

I want to offer four possibilities for reclaiming Jewish Animism as the culmination of this class. All four, I believe, are legitimate and authentic Jewish Animisms rooted in our ancestral heritage. My purpose here isn’t so much to advocate for one or the other of these possibilities as much as it is to encourage you to adopt some form of Jewish Animism as a guiding light in your engagement with Judaism.

These four possibilities will be:

A return to the Hebrew Bible

A Luria-Buber hybrid

R. Dr. David Seidenberg’s Jewish Animism

A pantheist Animist harkening back to our ancestors’ worship of the Goddess with a little Spinoza mixed in.

That the God of the Hebrew Bible is engaged in the world is beyond question. He is constantly talking with Abraham and Moses, saving the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt, guiding them to the promised land, making the sun stand still so Joshua can win a battle, attempting to murder them when they disobey him, causing their exile at the hands of their enemies because of their faithlessness.

I’ve also argued in the second and third classes that the Hebrew Bible can be read in an Animist way. Further, this will be buttressed when we turn to Seidenberg’s Animism. However, there are at least two significant problems with this approach which I think have to be addressed before you adopt it.

The first problem is that most of our fellow Jews read the passages that I’ve outlined as indicative of an Animist belief in a metaphorical way rather than literally. For instance, the land doesn’t actually vomit out its inhabitants, but God does this. Houses and clothing don’t literally get scale disease, it’s just some kind of mold or fungus, and the purification they need is a good cleaning rather than some kind of spiritual or moral purification. I think that if you want to adopt a Biblical world view, you need to read these passages literally and you need to believe that mountains can skip and all beings can praise the divine.

The second problem as I see it is that you have to find a theology that works. The core problem of Biblical theology is the problem of evil. If God is capable of intervening in human history, why do we as individuals suffer and why does the collective suffer? Surely there are good people who suffer without justification, and as evil as we Jews might have been, there is nothing that justifies Hitler or Hamas. Historically, the Jewish theological tendency has been both to talk about human free will, talk about God suffering with his people, AND to develop an idea of a less then present God who no longer can intervene in human history. But if you believe that the divine can’t intervene in human history, then you have in fact rejected the Biblical idea of God. This is exactly the criticism that Maimonides opponents articulated against his theology—and I think they were right. This problem of evil has led some of the ultra Orthodox in Israel to do obscene things like blaming the Holocaust on Reform Judaism.

This theological problem seems insurmountable to me, but maybe not to you.

Isaac Luria’s cosmogonic myth tells us of a world permeated by the divine because of the shattering of the vessels. Luria’s myth begins with the idea that the divine was perfectly whole and self sufficient by itself. However, it craved connection and thus began a creation process of emanation from the divine. However, things didn’t work out quite as planned. The vessels that were supposed to capture the emanating divine light cracked and the shards of the vessels filled the world in a patchwork fashion. Hence we have our piecemeal world of good and evil, of divine sparks and divine absence. Our human task then becomes to find and redeem the divine sparks. Thus we repair both the divine and the human world simultaneously. This is the original meaning of the phrase tikkun olam, which is so prominent in some strains of contemporary Jewish thought.

Luria’s myth is hugely influential for Hasidic thought, particularly with the idea that the divine can be found everywhere. Hasidism taught, against its opponents that the divine is just as likely to be found milking a cow as studying Torah (not that they didn’t believe in studying Torah) because the sparks of the divine is everywhere. A key watchword became the opening of Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.” This teaching of the omnipresence of the divine is also a core belief of the neo-Hasidism that is prominent in our time in the teaching of people like Arthur Green and the Jewish Renewal movement.

Following Luria’s cosmogonic myth, there’s no reason to limit both the brokenness and the task of repair to only humans. The Animism of the Hebrew Bible and the vast evidence that Seidenberg brings to us about the aliveness of all beings and how they are created in the divine image means everyone suffers and everyone can participate in the repair. The whole world is broken, the whole world needs to be repaired.

How do we do this repair? Luria had a wide range of complex practices that were totally oriented towards human practitioners and mostly towards repair of elite practitioners and repair of the divine. Hasidism sought to empower everyday Jews to participate in repairing the world and the divine through their engagement with their Rebbe. The Jewish environmental movement of the last thirty or forty years has extended this notion of repair to the environment, but I think largely sees the environment as something to act upon and for, rather than as an independent actor.

So how might we incorporate the more than human world as more than a mere object? Let’s turn to the Jewish master advocate of moving from transactional interactions to deep connected relationships—Martin Buber.

Buber’s core insight in I and Thou is that healing of the world comes from moving from the transactional I-it relationships that characterize the modern world to intimate, unique, personal I-thou relationships. Buber doesn’t believe that we can eliminate all I-it relationships. Most of our interactions, even with our deepest connections are going to be transactional. But he believes that we need to find our way to I-thou relationships. Although he doesn’t quite use this language as far as I know, I believe we may fairly say that Buber sees the spiritual task of all of us as cultivating the possibility of I-thou relationships.

Further, I-thou relationships are not limited to relationships between humans. and we can find them with our fellow humans, the divine and other beings. There’s a famous short piece in I and Thou about cultivating a relationship with a tree. He writes “I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its construction and its way of life. I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it only as an expression of the law–those laws according to which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or those laws according to which the elements mix and separate. I can dissolve it into a number, into a pure relation between numbers, and eternalize it.Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition.” This is an I-it relationship.

“But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me….One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity.” This is an I-thou relationship.

Can the tree reciprocate? Here’s where Buber diverges from a full Animist perspective. “Does the tree then have consciousness, similar to our own? I have no experience of that. But thinking that you have brought this off in your own case, must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself.” (I and Thou pp. 57-8 Kaufmann translation).

I suggest that Buber is asking not quite the right question about the tree and that leads to his lack of experience. If he asked instead does the tree have a soul (or intentionality if you prefer less religious language) similar to our own, the clear Animist answer is yes. And this affirmation leads to the possibility of experiencing the tree as initiating connection. That’s been my experience.

This combination of Luria and Buber, with my Animist emendation can be summarized by saying that it is an authentically Jewish view to argue that the divine is present in all beings and that our job in repairing the world and ourselves is to facilitate I-thou relationships with all beings.

The practice here is pretty straightforward. Go and hang out with different beings from the more than human world—could be a tree, a river, a squirrel, a mountain, a pasture. Quiet yourself by feeling your body connected to the earth and by taking deep breaths. Then open yourself up to the other being. Ask permission to enter into a conversation. If the being says no, move on. Otherwise say hello, introduce yourself, bonus points for your lineage. Say something about why you chose this being and then listen for a response. Move on their time which will be slower than ours if we are talking about a rock, or a tree, or a river, and much faster if we are talking about a fly. When it feels like the conversation has come to an end, express your gratitude for the chance to share with the being. Know that you have undertaken a tikkun, a repair of the world and of the divine.

R. Dr. David Seidenberg clearly enunciates a philosophically sophisticated Animist view in his wonderful work Kabbalah and Ecology. He writes “The central question of this book is: “Can we, on the basis of traditional Jewish sources, say that creatures other than human beings are in God’s image?” (p.7). The answer is a firm yes. He adduces a variety of arguments. The first is about the place of humans in the cosmos. As Maimonides says “this[the second creation story] narrative merely describes humanity’s great power and concurrent responsibility. It does not endorse the view that the world exists for our sake. Rather creation exists for its own sake.” (R. Dan Fink’s Between Dust and Divinity in Ellen Bernstein ed. Ecology and the Jewish Spirit, pp.230ff) Further “If the whole of the earth would not constitute even the smallest part of the sphere of the fixed stars, what is the relation of the human species to all these created things, and how can one of us imagine that they exist for our sake and because of us and that they are instrumental for our benefit?” (Guide to the Perplexed III:14).

Seidenberg also points out that it is common Rabbinic thought to believe that animals have souls and the land has rights, as I’ve argued in previous classes (see Seidenberg Chapters 4 and 5). Seidenberg compellingly argues “These questions about humanity led to the conclusion that humanity was in the middle, rather than at the top, of the metaphysical hierarchy.” (p.54) I also want to add his argument that Hasidism endorses the idea that rocks have life force. He introduces arguments from Shneur Zalman of Liady and Yaakov Lainer that chiyut, lifeforce, is present in rocks (the silent ones) and tachtonim (lower forms of being) in general (pp235-236)

Thus, “This book, behind all its talk about ancient texts, proposes that we most fully experience the meaning of the divine image not by limiting it to ourselves but by finding it within the other creatures and dimensions of this world that embraces us.” (p.34) And the fundamental message of the book is “we cannot know ourselves fully as human beings in God’s image without seeing the image of God in the world around us.” (p.40)

We have arrived at an authentically Jewish Animist view. This is also a panentheist view. Seidenberg believes that God as creator is essential to Jewish belief. God, to his mind, is more than creation. (p.276). He clearly rejects in advance what I am going to offer below. Seidenberg’s work is very rich. He makes a compelling argument that while his views aren’t mainstream Jewish perspectives, they are grounded in readings of tradition that other premodern thinkers have shared. This is a theology for you if you feel drawn towards theology in general and towards a view of the world as created by a creator who exists outside of creation.

There is also a possible Jewish Animist pantheism. What I mean by pantheism is that all beings are inside the system. Pantheism rejects the idea of the divine as existing outside of the world or the cosmos, broadly conceived. Let me be clear that Pantheism is absolutely contrary to mainstream Jewish thought. It is usually viewed as paganism, which is absolutely heretical within the Rabbinic tradition.

I want to offer two considerations for arguing that pantheism is authentically Jewish. The first is the worship of the Goddess by our ancestors, both the common people and the elite. Of the 40 kings named in the 2 books of Kings in the Hebrew Bible, 37 of the 40 by my count supported or tolerated some of the traditional indigenous religious practices where there were Gods and Goddesses beyond YHVH. (See also the chart by Ziony Zevit The Religions of Ancient Israel p.478) It’s fair to say that in the ethnographic and mythic literature of cultures that believe in many Gods, polytheism, there’s decent evidence that the idea of a God who exists outside of the system comes from the monotheistic influence of Christianity (or possibly Islam).

Our ancestors who were polytheists and worshipped the Goddess in some form were just as authentically Jewish as the ancestors who became the Rabbis and the thought leaders of Rabbinic Judaism. This says loudly that we can reclaim what they (likely) believed and have that be an authentic Jewish belief. It’s a core message of my writing and practice that Rabbinic Judaism does not equal Judaism.

The second consideration is the example of Spinoza. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) a Sephardic Jew from the Netherlands. Spinoza was descended from crypto Jews (Marranos) and educated in a Jewish school. He was a knowledgeable Jew. Spinoza is probably the leading Western philosopher of pantheism. He is famous for arguing that “God is nature” meaning that there is no God outside of the system. Spinoza’s views were deemed heretical, and he was excommunicated from the community. He published very little in his life at least partly to avoid persecution for his beliefs from secular authorities. Still, I see no reason not to claim him as an authentically Jewish, albeit non Rabbinic voice.

The core question for reflection here is to step back from everything you have learned and assume to be true, particularly about monotheism. Do you believe that there is some kind of being or force that exists outside and separate from the world, whether or not He/she/it can also penetrate into the world?

I am personally most comfortable with a Pantheistic Animism, because that feels true to my experience of the world. Yet I strongly believe that all four of the possibilities I have suggested are all authentic Jewish Animisms. And I would urge you to wrestle with the possibilities.

Which of these four possibilities appeals to you and why? What parts feel true in your body?