VISIONS OF HEALING FROM EXILE
One of the great pleasures of being a teacher is learning from your students. Our Discover True Earth Based Purpose class is exploring the question of exile. One participant said that we Jews have myths of exile and what we don’t have is myths of healing or redemption. She wondered if we are so traumatized that Judaism has become this kind of picking at the scab of exile and we can’t imagine anything else.
This really got me to thinking about exile and healing/redemption in two ways. Firstly, we actually have some myths of redemption, but they don’t seem as powerful in our experience as the myths of exile. I want to share some brief thoughts about these myths of redemption in a more explicit way than I have in the course.
Second, it led me to wonder why I included exile and healing/redemption at all in the course. For those not in the course, each presentation has a half that is drawn from Bill Plotkin’s Journey to Soul Initiation (at least until the journey home after Shavuot when I utilize some different non Jewish sources) and a half that is drawn from Jewish sources (Plotkin is Jewish, but his work is not). The discussion with the student made me think of Plotkin’s work as a myth of healing/redemption. I had included all the discussion of exile because it seemed like it went with the Plotkin work but I couldn’t have quite told you why. Now I can see Plotkin’s work in a framework of exile and redemption.
Our class will explore exile in four frames: exile from the divine, exile from the land, exile from community and exile from self. Jewish responses to exile, as I’ll talk about below are both collective and individual and more oriented towards the collective, contrary to Plotkin’s individual orientation.
Exile from our soul or true purpose is always a possibility for Plotkin. The Journey to Soul Initiation is a roadmap for what might be called our individual redemption. It seems to me that Plotkin’s view of collective exile and redemption is based on individual exile and redemption. He has a concept of exile from land although he does not view the exile as being specific to a piece of land but rather an exile from realizing our place in what he calls the “earth community.” He has some vague idea of community of visionaries, but it is not a community grounded in any kind of ancestral tradition.
I want to share some brief thoughts on four visions the redemption from exile that have been active in Jewish history.
The messiah is the most common vision of redemption or healing in the history of Judaism. But this is a myth without power in the liberal (non Orthodox) Jewish community. Who expects the Messiah to come any time soon? When I was a kid some thinkers attempted to reinvigorate this myth by talking about a Messianic age. This too seems to me to be without any power in our contemporary world, though I think it operates in the background for those Jews whose Judaism is largely social justice oriented. The idea that we can attain some kind of perfect or almost perfectly just world seems….quaint these days.
A second myth of redemption is Zionism. AD Gordon offered a clear vision that physically working the holy land of Israel was the way to end our exile and redeem our Jewish souls. This certainly was the myth that fired my imagination and motivated my Zionism as a young man. While I certainly recognized the need for a state so that Jews would have a place to flee to should another Hitler arise, what grabbed me was a specific plan to end the exile that was deep in my soul—an exile from land, God, community and myself through working the holy land.
Alas Gordon’s vision was a mirage. Israel is the start up nation and depends upon immigrants for its agriculture. Israel has become much more like Herzl’s vision of a state like any other except with we Jews in charge.
A third myth of healing is the myth of cosmic repair (the original meaning of Tikkun Olam) that Isaac Luria taught. Lurianic cosmology is a myth of the origin of exile from the divine, which has the trickle down effect of general exile. It’s not specific to a particular land or community, with the Jewish context and the land of Israel as a kind of background given. Luria was a healer, following David Fine’s wonderful work on him. “Among the most significant roles Luria played in the lives of his disciples was that of physician of the soul. Before they could practice rituals intended to enable them to bind their souls to the divine realm and to repair that realm…his disciples had to first mend their own souls, to cleanse and purify them of all imperfections.” (Fine Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos p.150).
I’m not sure how much this works for how many Jews. I’m not a Kabbalist, so I don’t know how many serious Kabbalists there are who are undertaking to both heal themselves and heal the cosmos. There’s no questioning Lurianic cosmology’s influence on Jewish thought, I’m just not sure how much this kind of repair is actually done or how effective it might be. Certainly, the world remains a terrible mess.
A fourth myth is found in the career of the Baal Shem Tov. Burt Jacobson in his magisterial posthumous work Living in the Presence, argues that there are two views of the Baal Shem Tov as cultural hero. One view sees him as a mystic, teaching techniques for unification with the divine. Most mysticisms share a common tendency towards quietism where they offer a potential path to the end of exile from the divine for the rare super talented individual practitioner, and far less for the rest of us. The other approach to the Baal Shem is to see him as a healer, a truly powerful person who sought to heal the bodies and hearts of Jews both individually and then collectively through his shamanic action on behalf of the people as a whole.
How does the Baal Shem Tov as healer heal us in our exile from God, land, community and self? Our job, as his followers later develop his theories, is to be Hasids, devoted followers of Rebbes who can take shamanic action for us in bridging the gulf between exile and redemption, who can help us find our way home.
My personal hesitations here center on a few different things. I don’t think the connection to the land is adequate. This connection is absolutely central to my own path of redemption from exile. My experience of awakening to my connection to the earth community was on top of a grain silo when I was on Kibbutz. As I sat there overlooking the Hula valley, I had the somatic experience that I belonged to the land. The Besht attempted to travel to Israel and aborted the trip feeling the time wasn’t ripe. If I believed the time wasn’t ripe for being connected to the land, I wouldn’t be connected to the earth community at all.
Second, automatically deferring to some authority figure doesn’t fit for me. There are plenty of thinkers who are authority figures for me and whom if they say something, I will certainly carefully listen and consider. When I first heard Wes Jackson talk to me about rejecting the idea of a growth economy, I was completely taken aback. But Wes is a wise man, and I would be remiss not to seriously consider what he says. However, the authoritarian impulse that was expressed in Hasidism from the very beginning just doesn’t work for me. I don’t think anyone else can do the work for me. The premise of the shamanic work of the Rebbe is that he (and it is always a male) can do the work for you. Maybe, but not my approach.
Where this leaves me personally, and where this leaves the class participants is something we will continue to explore. I invite you to consider these different approaches I’ve sketched. What, if anything speaks to you? How do you think about exile and healing/redemption? What, if any, is the connection to an ancestral tradition?
