SPIRIT ALLIES IN JUDAISM

One of the challenges for me in my spiritual wandering has always been the felt conflict between my deeply felt Judaism, and the lack of earth based Jewish models to which I could relate.  I suffered seriously from Native American envy.  I wished Judaism had an Animist world view in which all beings are believed to be alive and have equal status, even if we all have different bodies.  I wished for vision quests and animal spirit helpers like I read about when I read a lot of Native American writings and anthropology when I was in my 20’s.

Well, lo and behold, we have some animism in our psalms, we have a history of vision quests (https://earthbasedjudaism.org/indigenous-jewish-practices/the-possibility-of-jewish-vision-fasts) and today I am going to talk briefly about spirit helpers.

Spirit helpers in Judaism seem to come not in the form of animals but in the form of angels or deceased teachers.  I’m going to touch on three of the more famous examples of Jewish practitioners who had spirit helpers.

Joseph Karo (1488-1575) was both a Kabbalist and a legal scholar.  He is perhaps best known for his summary work of Jewish law, the Shulchan Aruch (the arranged table).  He was born in Spain, was part of the expulsion from Spain and then Portugal, and then the Ottoman empire, settling in Safed in Israel around 1535. He was instructed for most of his adult life by a maggid.  Maggid in this case means an angelic being. He recorded the teachings of his maggid in a book called Maggid Meisharim.

Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (1707-1746) was born in Italy and was a child literary prodigy.  He is best known for two works. Derekh Hashem (The Way of God) is a concise work on the core theology of Judaism.  Mesillat Yesharim (1740) presents a step-by-step process by which people might eventually experience a divine inspiration similar to prophecy. He was forced into exile from Italy by the Jewish community because he claimed to have received lessons from a maggid and wrote up these lessons and circulated them amongst his peers. From what I can gather, this claim created quite a stir because the Rabbinical authorities felt that he was setting himself up to another Sabbatei Zevi, the false Messiah who had converted to Islam.  These writings were turned over to the Italian Rabbinical authorities, and then burned.

The Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760) was the founder of Hasidism.  Throughout his life, he had a spiritual ally, Ahijah the Shilonite. Ahijah was a prophet in the days of King Solomon and appears in Kings (I Kings 11:29, 1 Kings 11: 31-39,  I Kings 14:6-16).  We know Ahijah was the teacher of the Besht from the testimony of Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye, a foremost student and a large number of tales.  Here's a typical story (In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov, story 104)  According to the story, the Besht was so deep in his devotion or clinging to the divine that he couldn’t successfully communicate with people, “His words lacked order.”  So Ahijah “taught him to recite each day the chapter of Happy are they who are upright in every way[Psalm 119] and other special psalms. He revealed to him wisdom by which he could talk with people and continue his devotion. He used to recite these psalms every day.”

We have a native tradition of spirit helpers. And I believe that we can reclaim this tradition without any fear of being guilty of cultural appropriation through our own diligent practice.

Joseph Karo