#major trends in jewish mysticism

[monstrousgourmandizingcats]

Lottie and Laura Lee + Merkabah mysticism

(Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle; II Kings 2:9-12; Michael D. Swartz's Mystical Prayer in Ancient Judaism; Genesis 5:24; Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha Nachmani's Sefet Hekhalot; Jalal ad-Din al-Suyuti quoted in S.R. Burge's Angels in Islam)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Generation.

“When the Baal Shem had a difficult task before him, he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer–and what he had set out to perform was done.

When a generation later the "Maggid" of Meseritz was faced with the same task he would go to the same place in the woods and say: "We can no longer light the fire, but we can still speak the prayers" - and what he wanted done became reality.

Again a generation later Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the woods and said: We can no longer light a fire, nor do we know the secret meditations belonging to the prayer, but we do know the place in the woods to which it all belongs–and that must be sufficient; and sufficient it was.

But when another generation had passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the task, he sat down on his golden chair in his castle and said: We cannot light the fire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done.

And, the story which he told had the same effect as the actions of the other three.”

(Told by S.J. Agnon to Gershom Scholem. From 'Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism', Gershom G. Scholem, Schocken Books, 1954)

The Power of Echoes: I recall a version of this story, read to our group by my teacher, Rina. The version she read started with the need for a certain ritual to be performed to keep the world in being and finished with, "And even this was enough."

[Ian Sanders]

[daimonios]

purchased major trends in jewish mysticism by gershom scholem today from the used bookstore & the dedication to walter benjamin made me so sad :'(

[bestinternetthing]

Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p. 139.

[ouroboros8ontology]

The new Hasidism was founded shortly before the middle of the eighteenth century by that famous saint and mystic Israel Baal Shem (“Master of the Holy Name”) who died in 1760 and who during his life-time impressed the mark of his personality on the movement much as Sabbatai Zevi had shaped the character of Sabbatianism. Large sections of Russian and Polish Jewry were drawn into the orbit of the movement, particularly up to the middle of the nineteenth century, but outside the Slavic countries and Russia this form of mysticism was never able to gain a foothold.

Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; Ninth Lecture: Hasidism: The Last Phase

[onpyre]

No words need be wasted on the subject of Crowley’s “Kabbalistic” writings in his books on what he was pleased to term “Magick,” and in his journal, The Equinox.

- Gershom Scholem, Notes to Lecture 1, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism

[arcane-offerings]

Gershom Scholem. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. Paperback. 460 pages. 

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[itonje]

people of color in arthurian legend masterpost

hi! some people said it would be cool if i did this, and this is something i find interesting so. yeah! are you interested in king arthur and the knights of the round table? do you like to read about characters of color, especially in older lit? well, i hope this can be a good resource for people to get into stuff like that, especially poc/ethnic minorities who might feel uncomfortable or lonely getting into older media like arthuriana. this post is friendly to both those who prefer medieval lit and those who prefer modern stuff!

disclaimers: i am not a medievalist nor a race theorist! very much not so. i am just a 17 year old asian creature on the internet who wants to have an easy-to-reference post, if i’m not comprehensive enough please inform me. i’m going to stay closely to the matter of britain, as well, not all medieval european literature as a. this is what i’m more familiar with and b. there’s so much content and information and context to go along with it that it would really be impossible to put it all into one tumblr post. (however there’s always going to be overlap!) also, please do not treat me or any other person of color/ethnic minority as a singular all-knowing authority on anything! we’re all trying to have fun here and being made into an information machine on things, especially what is and isn’t offensive isn’t fun. with that out of the way, let’s get into it! (under cut for length!) 

part i: some historical context (tw for racism and antisemitism discussion)

fair warning, i’m going to start off with some discussions of more heavier history before we talk about more fun stuff. while pre colonial racism was far more different than how it is today, there still...was racism. and it’s important to understand the social mien around nonwhite people in europe at the time these works were written. 

to understand how marginalized ethnicities were written in medieval european literature, you have to understand the fact that religion, specifically catholicism, was a very important part of medieval european life. already, catholicism has violent tenets (ie, conversion as an inherent part of the church, as well as many antisemitic theologies and beliefs), but this violence worsened when an event known as the crusades happened.

the crusades were a series of religious wars started by the catholic church to ‘reclaim’ the holy land from islamic rule and to aid the byzantine empire. while i won’t go into the full history of the crusades, (some basic info here and here and here) its important to understand that they had strengthened the european view of the ’pagan’ (ie: not european christian) world as an ‘other’, a threat to christiandom that needed to be conquered and converted, for the spiritual benefit of both the convertee and the converter. these ideas of ethnoreligious superiority and conversion would permeate into the literature of the time written by european christians. 

even today, the crusades are very much associated with white supremacy and modern islamophobic sentiment, with words such as ‘deus vult’ as a dogwhistle, and worship of and willingness to emulate the violence the crusaders used against the inhabitants of the holy land in tradcath spaces, so this isn’t stuff that’s all dead and in the past. crusader propaganda and the ignorance on the violence of the catholic church and the crusaders on muslim and jewish populations (as well as nonwhite christians ofc) is very harmful. arthuriana itself has a lot of links to white supremacy too-thanks to @/to-many-towered-camelot for this informative post. none of this stuff exists in a bubble. 

here’s a book on catholic antisemitism, here’s a book on orientalism, here’s a book about racism in history that touches on the crusades. (to any catholic, i highly reccommend you read the first.)

with that out of the way, we can talk about the various not european groups that typically show up in arthurian literature and some historical background irt to that. the terms ‘moor’ and ‘saracen’ will typically pop up. both terms are exonyms and are very, very broad, eventually used as both a general term for muslims and as a general term for african and (western + central) asian people. they’re very vague, but when you encounter them the typical understanding you’re supposed to take away is ‘(western asian/african) foreigner’ and typically muslim/not christian as well. t

generally, african and asian lands will typically be referred to as pagan or ‘eastern/foreign’ lands, with little regard for understanding the actual religions of that area. they will also typically refer to saracens as pagans although islam is not a pagan religion. this is just a bit of a disclaimer. the term saracen itself is considered to be rather offensive-thank you to @/lesbianlanval for sending me a paper on this subject. 

while i typically refer to the content on this post as having to pertain to african and asian people (ie, not european) european jewish arthurian traditions are included on this post too. but, i know more about poc and they’ll feature more prominently in this post because of that, lol. 

part ii: so, are there any medieval texts involving characters of color?

i’m glad you asked! of course there are! to be clear, european medieval authors were very much aware that people of color and african + asian nations existed, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. even the vita merlini mentions sri lanka and a set of islands that might (?) be the philippines!! for the sake of brevity though, on this list i’m not going to list every single one of these small and frequent references, so i’m just going to focus on texts that primarily (or notably) feature characters of color. 

first of all, it’s important to know was the influence of cultures of color and marginalized ethnicities that helped shape arthurian legend. the cultural exchange between europe and the islamic world during the crusades, as well as the long history of arab presence in southern europe, led to the influence of arabic love poetry and concepts of love on european literature, helping to form what we consider the archetypal romance. there are also arthurian traditions in hebrew, and yiddish too, adding new cultural ideas and introducing new story elements to their literature-all of these are just as crucial to the matter of britain as any other traditions!

when it comes to nonwhite presence in the works themselves, many knights of color in arthurian legend tend to be characters that, after defeated by a knight of arthur’s court join the court themselves. though some are side characters, there are others with their own romances and stories devoted to them! many of them are portrayed as capable + good as, if not better than their counterparts. (this, however, usually only comes through conversion to christianity if the knight is not christian...yeah.) though groups of color as a general monolith created by european christians tended to be orientalized in literature (see: mystical and strange ~eastern~ lands), many individual knights were written to be seen by their medieval audience as positive heroes. i’m going to try to stick to mostly individual character portrayals such as these. 

with that all said though, these characters can still be taken as offensive (i would consider most to be) in their writing, so take everything with a grain of salt here. i will also include links to as many english translations of texts as i can, as well as note which ones i think are beginner friendly to those on the fence about medieval literature!

he shows up in too many texts so let’s make this into two bullet notes and start with one of, if not the most ubiquitous knight of color of the round table (at least in medieval lit),-palamedes! palamedes/palomides is a ‘’saracen knight’’ who (typically) hails from babylon or palestine and shows up in a good amount of texts. his first appearance is in the prose tristan, and he plays a major role there as a knight who fights with tristan for the hand of iseult-while he uh. loses, him and tristan later become companions + friends with a rivalry, and palamedes later goes off to hunt the questing beast, a re-occurring trend in his story. 

palamedes even got his own romance named after him (which was very popular!) and details the adventures of the fathers of the knights of the round table, pre arthur, as well as later parts of the story detailing the adventures of their sons. it was included in rustichello da pisa’s compilation of arthurian romances, which i unfortunately have not seen floating around online (or...anywhere), so i can’t attest to the quality of it or anything. he appears in le morte darthur as well, slaying the questing beast but only after his conversion to christianity (...yeah.) in the texts in which he appears, palamedes is considered to be one of the top knights of the round table, alongside tristan and lancelot, fully living up to chivalric and courtly ideals and then some. i love him dearly and i’ve read the prose tristan five times just for him. (also the prose tristan in general is good, please give it a try, especially if you’re a romance fan.)

speaking of le morte d’arthur, an egyptian knight named priamus shows up in the lucius v arthur episode on lucius’ side first, later joining arthur’s after some interactions with gawaine. palamedes has brothers here as well-safir and segwarides. safir was relatively popular, and shows up in many medieval texts, mostly alongside his older brother. i wouldn’t recommend reading le morte of all things for the characters of color though-if you really want to see what it’s all about, just skip to the parts they’re mentioned with ctrl + f, haha. 

the romance of moriaen is a 12th century dutch romance from the lancelot compilation, named for its main character morien. morien, who is a black moor, is the son of sir aglovale, the brother of perceval. whilst gawaine and lancelot are searching for said perceval, they encounter morien, who is in turn searching for aglovale as he had abandoned morien’s mother way back when. i wholeheartedly recommend this text for people who might feel uncomfy with medieval lit. though the translation i’ve linked can be a bit tricky, the story is short, sweet, and easy to follow, and morien and his relationships (esp with gariet, gawaine’s brother) are all wonderful. 

king artus (original hebrew text here) is a northern italian jewish arthurian text written in hebrew- it retells a bit of the typical conception of arthur story, as well as some parts from the death of arthur as well. i really can’t recommend this text enough-it’s quite short, with an easy-to-read english translation, going over episodes that are pretty familiar to any average reader while adding a lot of fun details and it’s VERY interesting to me from a cultural standpoint. i find the way how they adapt the holy grail (one of the most archetypal christian motifs ever) in particular pretty amazing. this is also a very beginner friendly text! 

wolfram von eschenbach’s parzival (link to volume 1 and volume 2-this translation rhymes!) is a medieval high german romance from the early 13th century, based off de troyes’ le conte du graal while greatly expanding on the original story. it concerns parzival and his quest for the grail (with a rather unique take on it-he fails at first!), and also takes like one million detours to talk about gawaine as all arthurian lit does. the prominent character of color here is a noble mixed race knight called feirefiz, parzival’s half brother by his father, who after dueling with parzival, and figures out their familial connection, joins him on his grail quest. he eventually converts to christianity (..yeah.) to see the grail and all ends happily for him. however, this text is notable to me as it contains two named women of color-belacane, feirefiz’s black african mother, and secundilla, feirefiz’s indian wife. though unfortunately, both are pretty screwed over by the text and their respective husbands. though parzival is maybe my favorite medieval text i’ve read so far i don’t necessarily know if i’d recommend this one, because it is long, and can be confusing at times. however, i do think that when it comes to the portrayal of people of color, while quite poor by today’s standards, von eschenbach was trying his best?-of course, in reason for. a 13th century medival german christian but he treats them with respect and all these characters are actually characters. if you’re really interested in grail stories (and are aware of the more uncomfortably christian aspects of the grail story), and you like gawaine and perceval, i’d say go for it. 

in the turk and sir gawain, an english poem from the early 16th century, gawaine and the titular turkish man play a game of tennis ball. i’m shitting you not. this text is pretty short, funnily absurd, and with most of the hallmarks of a typical quest (various challenges culminating in some castle being freed), so it’s an easier read. it’s unclear to me, but at the end of the story the turkish man turns into sir gromer, a noble knight, who may or may not be white which uh. consider my ‘....yeah’ typical at this point, but i don’t personally read it that way for my own sanity. also he throws the sultan (??) of the isle of man (????) into a cauldron for not being a christian so when it comes to respectful representation of poc this one doesn’t make it, but it does make this list. 

the revenge of ragisel, or at least the version i’ve read (the eng translation of the dutch version from the lancelot compilation), die wrake van ragisel, starts off being about the mysterious murder of a knight, but eventually, as most stories do, becomes a varying series of adventures about gawaine and co. one of gawaine’s friends (see: a knight who he combated with for a hot sec and then became friends and allies with, as you do) is a black knight named maurus! he’s not really an mc, but he features prominently and he’s pretty entertaining, as all the characters in this are. i also recommend this highly, i was laughing the whole time reading it! it’s not too long and pretty wild, you’ll have a good romp. this is a good starter text for anyone in general!

i’ve not read the roman van walewein, which, as it says on the tin, is a 12th century dutch romance concerning some deeds of gawaine (if only gawaine was a canon poc, i wouldn’t need to make this list because he’s so popular...). i’m putting it on the list for in this, gawaine goes to the far eastern land of endi (india) and romances a princess named ysabele. i can’t speak to ysabele’s character or the respectfulness of her kingdom or representation, but i know she’s a major character and her story ends pretty well, so that’s encouraging. women of color, especially fleshed out woc, are pretty rare in arthurian lit. i’ve also heard the story itself is pretty wild, and includes a fox, which sounds pretty exciting to me!

now the next two things i’m going to mention aren’t really? texts that feature characters of color or jewish characters, but are rather more notable for being translations of existing texts into certain languages. wigalois is a german 13th century romances featuring the titular character (the son of, you guessed it, gawaine!) and his deeds. the second, jaufre, is the only arthurian romance written in occitan, and is a quite long work about the adventures of the knight jaufre, based on the knight griflet. what’s notable about these two works is that wigalois has a yiddish translation, and jaufre has a tagalog translation. wigalois’ yiddish translation in particular changed the original german text into something more fitting of the arthurian romance format as well as adding elements to make it more appealing for a jewish audience. the tagalog translation of jaufre on the other hand was not medieval, only coming about in 1900, but the philippines has had a long history of romantic tradition and verse writing, so i’m curious to see if it too adds or changes elements when it comes to the arthurian story, but i can’t find a lot on the tagalog version of jaufre unfortunately-i hope i can eventually!

this list of texts is also non-exhaustive! i’m just listing a couple of notoriety, and some to start with. 

part iii: papers and academic analysis

so here’s just a dump of various papers i’ve read and collected on topics such as these-this is an inexhaustive and non-comprehensive list! if you have any papers you think are good and would like to be added here, shoot me an ask. i’ll try to include a link when i can, but if it’s unavailable to you just message me. * starred are the ones i really think people, especially white people, should at least try to read. 

Swank, Kris. ‘Black in Camelot: Race and Ethnicity in Arthurian Legend’ *

Harrill, Claire. ‘Saracens and racial Otherness in Middle English * Romance’

Keita, Maghan. ‘Saracens and Black Knights’ 

Hoffman, Donald L. ‘Assimilating Saracens: The Aliens in Malory's ‘Morte Darthur’

Goodrich, Peter H. ‘Saracens and Islamic Alterity in Malory's ‘Le Morte Darthur’

Schultz, Annie. ‘Forbidden Love: The Arabic Influence on the Courtly Love Poetry of Medieval Europe’ *

Hardman, Philipa. ‘Dear Enemies: the Motif of the Converted Saracen and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’

Knowles, Annie. ‘Encounters of the Arabian Kind: Cultural Exchange and Identity the Tristans of Medieval France, England, and Spain’ *

Hermes, Nizar F. ‘King Arthur in the Lands of the Saracens’ *

Ayed, Wajih. ‘Somatic Figurations of the Saracen in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur’

Herde, Christopher M. ‘A new fantasy of crusade: Sarras in the vulgate cycle.’ *

Rovang, Paul R. ‘Hebraizing Arthurian Romance: The Originality of ‘Melech Artus.’’

Rajabzdeh, Shokoofeh. ‘The Depoliticized Saracen and Muslim erasure’ *

Holbrook, Sue Ellen. ‘To the Well: Malory's Sir Palomides on Ideals of Chivalric Reputation, Male Friendship, Romantic Love, Religious Conversion—and Loyalty.’ *

Lumbley, Coral. ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Race’ *

Oehme, Annegret. ‘Adapting Arthur. The Transformations and Adaptations of Wirnt von Grafenberg’s Wigalois’ *

Hendrix, Erik. ‘An Unlikely Hero: The Romance of Moriaen and Racial Discursivity in the Middle Ages’ *

Darrup, Cathy C. ‘Gender, Skin Color, and the Power of Place in the Medieval Dutch Romance of Moriaen’ *

Armstrong, Dorsey. ‘Postcolonial Palomides: Malory's Saracen Knight and the Unmaking of Arthurian Community’ (note this is the only one i can’t access in its entirety)

part iv: supplemental material

here’s some other stuff i find useful to getting to know knights of color in arthurian legend, especially if papers/academic stuff/medieval literature is daunting! i’d really recommend you go through all of these if you can’t go through anything else-most are quick reads. 

a magazine article on knights of color here, and this article about the yiddish translation of wigalois. 

this video about characters of color in arthurian legend!

the performance of the translation of arabic in Libro del Caballero Zifar, and how it pertains to the matter of britain 

a post by yours truly about women of color in parzival

this info sheet about palamedes, and this info sheet about ysabele-thanks to @/pendraegon and @/reynier for letting me use these!

this page on palamedes as well

this post with various resources on race and ethnicity in arthuriana-another thank you to @/reynier! 

part v: how about modern day stories and adaptations?

there’s a lot of em out there! i’m not as familiar with modern stuff, but i will try to recommend medias i know where characters of color (including racebends!) are prominent. since i haven’t read/watched all (or truly most) of these, i can’t really speak on the quality of the representation though, so that’s your warning. 

first of all, when it comes to the victorian arthurian revival, i know that william morris really liked palamedes! (don’t we all.) he features frequently in morris’ arthurian poetry, (in this beautiful book, he primarily features in ‘sir galahad, a christmas mystery’ and ‘king arthur’s tomb’. he has his own poem by morris here.)

and some other poems about palamedes, which i’d all recommend. 

for movies, i know a knight in camelot (1998) stars whoopi goldberg as an original character, the green knight (2021) will star dev patel as gawaine. 

some shows include camelot high, bbc merlin, disney’s once upon a time, and netflix’s cursed, all featuring both original characters of color and people of color cast as known arthurian figures. 

for any music people, in ‘high noon over camelot’, an album by the mechanisms, mordred is played by ashes o’reilley, who in turn is performed by frank voss, and arthur is played by marius von raum who is perfomed by kofi young. 

i’ve also heard the pendragon and the squire’s tales have palamedes as a relevant character if you’re looking for novels, as well as legendborn and the forgotten knight: a chinese warrior in king arthur’s court starring original protagonists of color! 

part vi: going on from here

so, you’ve read some medieval lit, read some papers, watched some shows, and done all that. what now? well, there’s still so much out there! 

if you have fanfiction, analysis, metaposts, fun content etc etc about arthurian poc, feel free to plug your content on this post! i’d be happy to boost it. 

in general, if you’re a person of color or a jewish person and you’re into arthurian legend, feel free to promote your blog on this post as well! i would love to know more people active on arthurian tumblr who are nonwhite. 

this is really just me asking for extra content, especially content made by poc, but that’s okay! arthurian legend is a living, breathing set of canons and i would love love love to see more fresh diversity within them right alongside the older stuff. 

a very gracious thank you to the tumblr users whom i linked posts to on here, and thanks to y’all for saying you want to see this! i hope this post helped people learn some new things! 

[eirikrjs]

I'm guessing you're also rather "twitchy" when it comes to words like Talmudic, at least in regards to mythological descriptions?

Well, I wouldn't describe something as Talmudic because I'm almost completely unfamiliar with the Talmud except for things here and there I've read in, say, a Gershom Scholem book or other Jewish books. I don't like to talk about things of which I have no knowledge.

So don't let me give the wrong impression--I'm not an expert in any topic of religion or mythology. Almost everything I know is self-taught, and that tends to mean I gravitate towards topics in which I'm genuinely interested; I've never tried to be exhaustive or authoritative. It's a hobby!

I think what may fuel this misconception is that this IS primarily an SMT blog that has existed for a relatively long time, I enjoy reading, I do like the fact-check the series' claims with books, and, well, I think the vast majority of SMT fans aren't necessarily going to pick up Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism to learn more about Metatron.

But if something needs to be corrected or even rendered more correct, please let me know!

[whiterosebrian]

Heritage

I oppose Folkism. I understand Folkism to represent a very ugly parody of the pre-Christian religions that neopagans have been working to revive. I understand neopagan paths to be open. When the old gods call Black or Asian followers, we should let those people answer the gods’ calls.

The reason why I made those statements up-front is that I’m about to delve into a topic whose discussion will require much nuance. I’ve made an effort to write this in such a way as to keep my intentions consistently clear. However, there could still be a possibility of taking many of the following statements out of context, whether by Folkists wanting validation, mainstream people who don’t know much about neopaganism, or Christian-Right propagandists. I’m about to discuss old spiritual heritages of people of European descent.

I may need to touch upon what Folkism is before going on with that discussion. Folkism, in the most basic sense, is the notion that certain old European practices and religions are the sole provinces of their associated cultural groups, whether Celtic or Slavic or, most notoriously, Germanic. It derives from the Volkisch movement which purported to revive Germanic traditions and the people’s connections to their lands. The Thule Society, in particular, laid the groundwork for Nazism. The Nazi regime retained the occultic influences—though I should note they weren’t the dominant strain and the party rose to power by appealing first and foremost to Christian culture (which is yet another historical fact that raises hard questions of what Christianity looks like in the real world).

Today’s adherents of Folkism exploit the discourse around cultural appropriation, though in a mendacious and vulgarized form. Sometimes well-meaning allies do unintentionally vulgarize said discourse as well. One part of appropriation is swiping elements of other people’s cultures willy-nilly—though there are two other key aspects that should be kept in mind. First is the fact that elements of cultures are often taken with little acknowledgement of or gratitude towards the originators. More importantly, there is a context of colonization, marginalization, and erasure.

Even if you haven’t followed me for a while or read my journal entries before, you may be aware of the elements of Asian, African, Native American, and even Jewish spiritualities within the New Age movement. It’s quite clear that a number of people, disenchanted with historic Christian culture for any number of reasons (including extremely serious ones), look elsewhere to find genuine spirituality. Actually, those trends were also present in Europe during the peak of modern imperialism in the nineteenth century, evidently influencing today’s New Age movement.

To my understanding, Buddhists and Hindus are very willing to share elements of their spiritualties—but too often those elements are half-understood, ripped out of context, and watered down anyway. Native Americans have seen their spiritual practices outlawed until fairly recently, which is why they resent those practices being commercialized or taught outside the proper contexts. The Jewish people have faced persecution for many centuries and similarly seen their mysticism suppressed—and they resent mangled or incomplete versions of Kabbalah floating around metaphysical circles.

You may recall the interest that I actually once had in Kabbalah. I did genuinely want to learn from the Jewish people. I had abandoned Catholicism and wanted to learn from its Jewish roots (though I probably underestimated how far Christianity deviated). I was actually ready to start delving more deeply into Kabbalah after reading introductory texts of admittedly varying degrees of quality. I was under the mistaken impression that Kabbalah was now being opened up (though in fact Kabbalah is still considered a closed practice, due mainly to requiring an intensive grounding in Jewish scripture and practice). However, some Jewish users on Tumblr and PillowFort convinced me to rethink my interest. I soon decided that Judaism in general wasn’t for me, much less Jewish mysticism. I didn’t think I could even devote myself to the religious law (however different movements within Judaism interpreted it).

I also had some interest in my own Northern European heritage. That is part of what led me to examine Heathenry in more detail. What finally led me to devote myself to the Heathen path was animism, or a relationship with nature as well as the spirits within and the very powers of life. Sometimes, spiritual practitioners of color heartily exhort white seekers to look into their own ethnic heritages to find their own gods, medicines, rites, and modalities. What ultimately prompted this essay is a video from a healer who goes by “heart of Hamsa” on Instagram; they (I’m using the apparent preferred pronoun) are of Vietnamese and French descent.

They speak of the need for greater respect towards and gratitude for Asian practices. They speak of how they delved into their own heritage. They touch upon the distinctions among cultures and peoples—most certainly not in any exclusionary or purist sense, but in the sense of deepened understanding and appreciation. They speak of a need to give back to the peoples who inspire us, especially in light of colonization, with Vietnam as a prominent example that they cite.

Hamsa goes on to speak of white people who are ashamed or fragile (often understandably, giving rise to the “white guilt” that neo-Nazis maliciously mock) and chase after what they view exotic and foreign, only to fail to do justice to reiki and ayahuasca and the like. They essentially ask people to restart by looking into their own ancestors and uncovering histories. They exhort viewers to set roots and share their own inheritances before looking outside, much less making smorgasbords. Basically, Hamsa asks people to remember who they are and be themselves first and foremost.

How does that apply to a man of Northern European descent born on a land that was stolen from indigenous people? Occasional tweeters will remark that white people have no culture except for banal capitalism and arrogant colonization. Irish, Italian, and German immigrants eventually assimilated into the hegemonic American culture after facing their share of prejudice (my father’s family actually used to be named Koch before becoming Cook during the First World War). The old Christendom may have initially been a union of different Christianized peoples, but at some point (I can’t say exactly when) it became a more-or-less homogenized bloc of Christian colonizers. If even the Irish faced domination at the hands of Englishmen, the Christian European powers were sure to dominate other peoples in worse ways.

Hamsa does speak of “blood” and “bloodline”, which admittedly can raise hackles for good reason. Folkish neopagans also speak of “blood” as in “blood and soil”. Obviously, as you can see from the above context, Hamsa is using “blood” in a subtly though crucially different way. Perhaps, then, Folkism is a distortion of a truth—that truth being a rootedness in personal bloodline and heritage. The kind of “meta-genetics” that people like Stephen McNallen and Stephen Flowers promote is indeed Nazi-leaning bunk—otherwise, learning about the pre-Christian past would not be so difficult or involve so much ambiguity and guesswork. I can accept that white supremacy has influenced the pagan revival to some extent, particularly in its early stages. Did the original Volkisch movement deal with the trauma of enforced Christianization (and the later rise of an increasingly ruthless capitalism) in a very unhealthy way? I don’t have enough historical education to really answer that.

In any case, I’m very pleased to see neopagans seriously work on disentangling that influence. Improved historical scholarship in recent times has been a blessing. Perhaps European-Americans who take the time to learn from such scholarship as well as experienced practitioners might find many boons. It’s possible that the old gods of Northern Europe called me back into their embrace. Indeed, as I began to seriously consider training myself to be a magician working with Odin and Freya, I began to get a sense of a homecoming. My Scandinavian, German blood, and Anglo-Saxon bloodlines ultimately aren’t major factors, but they still are factors in a homecoming. While figuring out a spiritual path, I increasingly wanted to work with divine power as a magician—it turned out that I wouldn’t do so through Kabbalah but through animistic Heathenry.

The question of what a settler is supposed to do among the many settler communities on a continent stolen from its original inhabitants remains. I most certainly have a responsibility to those who lack what privileges I have. I hope to find stronger opportunities to aid the indigenous communities, especially those within the Great Lakes, the region of Turtle Island where I live. For that matter, I hope to find stronger opportunities to aid other communities.

In general, I understand a need to participate in the work of decolonization in some manner. I understand a need to take part in breaking down what has become whiteness. Those who think that they are being broad-minded in taking from so many cultures (and I would have also thought so even a few years ago), it seems, unintentionally contribute to colonization and white privilege. Maybe I will start learning from other peoples after gaining a very firm grounding in a revived Germanic magic, though maybe they will tell me to keep up with that. There are indeed many different paths for people to take to the divine. Some of them are closed (or at least require formal initiation) for very good reasons. Kabbalists and Jewish mages deny that Judaism is for everyone—they might speak of other gods who call to their peoples while the presence of the supreme Godhead remains with the gentiles. People like Hamsa speak of honoring and reinvigorating diversity among the human shards of divinity within today’s world. Thus, demagogues who fearmonger over the One World Religion for the New World Order show themselves to be paranoid fools. There certainly isn’t a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world!

I will take my time in building relations with Freya and Odin, contemplating the runes, training myself to connect to Yggdrasil, and looking forward to meeting elves and various ancestors who have walked my path before. I hope to be of great service as a Germanic magician among the Great Lakes. I also wish to gradually build up stories of diverse people seeking truth, goodness, beauty, joy, and spirituality as a novelist (and possible comic artist). I struggle with lethargy and a troubled heart, but I do believe that I have a calling. You are all welcome to support me and, perhaps better, find your own mystic paths.

[underseadevotee]

Tagged by @woolandflax

Last Song: K'edsuha - Nekadesh from Melodies of the Burnt Synagogues by Cantor Zeev Shulman

Currently Reading: Gershom Scholem's Major Trends In Jewish Mysticism

Currently watching: I'll watch Townsends and other history channels on youtube. But nothing at the moment.

Last Movie: Napoleon Dynamite 👀

I tag @porko-rosso , @raaviel-resurrected-ix @fancy-fancy , @laboratoryretriever , @wisgi

[azdoine]

I think it’s no great secret that I have a pretty complicated relationship with my Judaism, to the point that it’s gotten me into a fair bit of trouble and it’s gotten me to say some pretty stupid shit. I am, to put it irreverently, a heretic, or just a dumb kid on the internet - that I’m now an adult seems of no consequence in the face of the desolate confusion and alienation I still feel towards my religion, have always felt since I really was a child, have been irrevocably characterized by. such is the scope of my big fat idiot mouth that I hesitate to say anything more, on these topics and on others.

But why the alienation, and what of its kind?

In many respects, it’s probably a common story, so I won’t belabor the point too far: I was raised performatively into my religion - at the behest of a mother I still have a complicated relationship with! - not to believe in it with all my heart, but to find a community and a culture in it, and even back then, I was already too much of a fag and a fuckup to ever fit in with the world that had been presented to me in bits and pieces. My experience with Judaism is a decade of passively absorbing Torah anecdotes that I didn’t even believe in while my peers ignored me or laughed at me for being the little bitch that we all knew I was. C’est la vie.

But if my disconnection from the Jewish religion feels embarrassing, my lingering attachment to it is even worse, because here we come up on the k-word - no, not that k-word. I’m talking about the Kabbalah, and perhaps no element of the Jewish religion is more charged, easily disrespected, or frequently misappropriated. Were I not so wounded in my attachment to Judaism, as it were, I would feel no such need to explore the Kabbalah as I do, and thus have nothing to rationalize, but were I not still ethnically Jewish, I would have no rationalization for it which I could accept. I would have turned back at the gate rather than be another idiot pretending he knew anything whatsoever about a tradition that wasn’t his to claim.

Why am I talking about this now? In part it’s nothing more or less than what it is: a rumination on some of my eclectic traumas and interests. (If you can’t use tumblr as a sounding board in the absence of a therapist or religious leader in your life, what good is it even for?)

But it’s also a disclaimer and a contextualization. Because although I would have no basis otherwise to comment on the appropriation of Kabbalah by various vulgar mystics, I wouldn’t feel confident or honest talking about that appropriation without also contextualizing my own place in that discussion, as someone who may indeed have participated in that appropriation.

Why is the Kabbalah so appropriated as it is, and what is the significance of its appropriation? Why did the Kabbalah catch my eye when the lore of a more mainstream or conventional Judaism could not?

In his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem speaks not as a vulgar mystic but as a dedicated Jew. And yet, although Scholem does not perhaps forgive the vulgar mystic for his trespasses against Jewish lore, Scholem’s profoundly and aggressively historical approach immediately forecloses the possibility that anything else could have come to pass:

The great Jewish scholars of the [1800s] whose conception of Jewish history is still dominant in our days... had little sympathy—to put it mildly—for the Kabbalah. At once strange and repellent, it epitomised everything that was opposed to their own ideas and to the outlook which they hoped to make predominant in modern Judaism...

It is not to the credit of Jewish scholarship that... the greater part of the ideas and views which show a real insight into the world of Kabbalism, closed as it was to the rationalism prevailing in the Judaism of the nineteenth century, were expressed by Christian scholars of a mystical bent.... It is a pity that the fine philosophical intuition and natural grasp of such students lost their edge because they lacked all critical sense as to historical and philological data in this field, and therefore failed completely when they had to handle problems bearing on the facts.

The natural and obvious result of the antagonism of the great Jewish scholars was that, since the authorized guardians neglected this field, all manner of charlatans and dreamers came and treated it as their own property.

Scholem and others similarly contextualize the “great Jewish scholars” in their own time, explaining their steadfast refusal to engage with the mystical discourses of Judaism, but we needn’t concern ourselves with the reasoning of those great scholars here, beyond acknowledging its existence and its essentially reasonable character. (We should by no means imply that the final “fault” for the appropriation of the Kabbalah by other religious bodies somehow lies with the Jews who dismissed the subject, after all.)

The more important and interesting takeaway here is that this “emergent” mythologization of the Kabbalah by non-Jews is, in fact, not so different in character from the mysticism of the Jews who formulated the Kabbalah in the first place! For Scholem likewise characterizes the formulation of the Kabbalah as, among many other things, a kind of metaphysically (rather than politically) reactionary response to the sterile rationalist discourses of the Judaisms that were predominant at the time: a historically-necessary and inevitable attempt to reclaim the possibility of a mythic theology and a personal (and mystical) experience of God, despite the oppressively transcendental and impersonal formulation of monotheism that held so much more authority. The Kabbalah is implicitly a heretical foil to a more traditional canon - an ecstatic and pre-Othered body of work which always threatens to dissolve and lose all integrity under the immense weight of the purpose it was created to serve. The unleashed spiritual thirst of the deprived devours beyond restraint.

In this respect, there is no strain of Kabbalah which we can isolate, shining and unsoiled, as the thing which was later appropriated by vulgar syncretists, because the Kabbalah itself was always vulgar, and both the creation and the appropriation of the Kabbalah are products of the same human drive for mystical experience. It’s heresy all of the way down! The phone call is coming from inside the house. The genie was always already out of the bottle. Lord English was always already here.

Scholem bitterly appreciates this problem, I suspect, for even in charting the self-destructions of mysticism and in identifying the psychic universality of the mystical experience - the mystic’s unmediated contact with an absolute - he rejects out of hand the notion that mysticisms are fungible, or that our study of mysticism should treat it as infinitely plastic. A Jewish mysticism is not a Christian mysticism, nor are they merely two different forms of some “pure” archetypal mysticism. A mysticism, however transcendental, can neither be divorced from or escape from the historical context that created it. And nor should it, at least in Scholem’s estimation.

So what, then, is the historical context which created the appropriated forms of the Kabbalah that proliferate western esotericism, and how does it still imprison or inform those mysticisms?

Answering such a question with any degree of depth is, at least for now, beyond me... but I wonder, sometimes, whether we can escape from the infinite plasticity and universality of mysticism any more than we can escape from its specificity and boundedness.

Such a dialectic is a thing that Scholem does not speak of, a reach his expertise does not want or need know.

[apenitentialprayer]

The Gnostic Gospels: Major Theses

A summation of The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagel, with a chapter-by-chapter explanation of the basic theses. [I started this a while ago, but only did the first three chapter summaries. Gonna leave it as-is, because I don’t know if I’m ever gonna get back to it] Chapter 1: The Controversy Over Christ’s Resurrection According to Pagel, even the books that were accepted in the New Testament open themselves to non-literal readings of the Resurrection event. Nonetheless, the Christianity that would become orthodox absolutely insisted on a literal understanding of the Resurrection event. Gnostics, on the other hand, viewed the Resurrection in spiritual and psychological terms only. While both sides were likely sincere in their faith, the way they articulated the Resurrection event nonetheless express the particular political views of how the Church was to function. The gnostic Christians viewed the Resurrection event as an individualized, recurring event that a disciple must personally experience. By being initiated into the Christian life, the gnostic would subsequently experience a personal encounter with Christ; this personal encounter, along with any further ones, defined the Christian experience, even if such an experience contradicted the traditions handed down by previous gnostic initiates. Under this understanding of the transmission of the Christ-life, there would be no way to create a stable institutional framework through which to establish a normative Christianity. The orthodox Christians viewed the Resurrection event as a historical and physical event, which directly affects who can be considered a legitimate successor to Jesus. Because the Apostles encountered Jesus Christ firsthand, and the people of that generation alone encountered the Resurrected Christ in the flesh, ordained successors of the Apostles are the only ones who can be trusted to have transmitted the true faith to future generations. This new social order for Christianity was threatened by individuals who claimed that their personal experiences overrode the traditions of the Church (a fact that distinguishes gnostic mystics from orthodox mystics). Chapter 2: “One God, One Bishop”: The Politics of Monotheism Noting the absolute ire that Irenaeus had for Valentinian Christians (who were not quite gnostic, but nonetheless are usually identified as such by early primary sources), Pagel connects the polemical writings to the development of the Church hierarchy. Irenaeus felt threatened by the Valentinians, who believed the legitimacy of the Church hierarchy while nonetheless accepting a second source of authority, because they challenged the idea that the bishop was the true representative of God on earth. Drawing on the beliefs of Marcion of Sinope, several gnostic Christians distinguished the Father of Christ from the God who created the world. Valentinians believed that the bishopric was derived from traditions from the Demiurge, which were taught publicly by Christ, while their secret traditions came from a God even higher than this one. Because of this, Valentinians were accepting of the authority of the bishops for normal Christians, but once they were initiated into the secret rites, the bishop could no longer hold authority over them; they were freed from the power of the Demiurge by Christ’s true Father. While the hierarchy of bishops was becoming more and more common, the Valentinian Christians were practicing rites that attempted to circumvent the growing distinction between laity and clergy; ordination was not a permanent position, but the designated priest would change with each meeting. The fact that members of Irenaeus’s diocese were being initiated into these circles made him especially hostile to the Valentinians - especially since they did not view their practices as contrary to the Catholic faith. The fact that they believed that they were still members of the Church, and not of a rival organization, indicates that Tertullian’s story that Valentinus purposely separated himself from the clergy is not true; the split between the orthodox and Valentinian Christians seems to have been initiated by the orthodox themselves. Valentinus, for his part, attributed his tradition to Saint Paul, through a ‘Theudas’ who was purportedly a disciple of his. “Ireneaus ironically agrees with [the Valentinian Christians] that there are two sources of tradition - but, he declares, as God is one, only one of these derives from God [... t]he other comes from Satan - and goes back to the gnostic teacher Simon Magus.” Chapter 3: God the Father/God the Mother Pagel makes it clear that, while many modern theologians in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions speak of God as though He is not gendered, the standard language used to speak of Him is heavily masculine in nature. What distinguishes gnostic Christianity from both traditional Jewish-Christian tradition and the pagan traditions of surrounding cultures is that it incorporates heavily sexualized metaphors while still utilizing language derived from Jewish tradition. Pagel suggests that this difference in conceptualizing God with distinctly masculine and feminine aspects, rather than distinctly masculine and ambiguously gendered aspects, is the cause of the social differences between gnostic and orthodox Christianities. One criticism that appears repeatedly in orthodox attacks on gnostic Christianity is the allowance of female-led worship and ceremony. The orthodox, on the other hand, had an exclusively male priesthood, and at the height of the gnostic controversy even separated churches by gender, as was done in the synagogues. The gospels, even those that would become orthodox, depict Jesus as regularly interacting with women and having prominent female disciples. The letters of Paul, meanwhile, also have progressive verses concerning women and mention women in positions of authority in the early Church. Rather than seeing verses that seem to express limits on the equality between man and woman as such, she takes the position that Pauline letters of questioned authenticity were forgeries created by orthodox Christians to establish Paul to be a specifically orthodox Christian - as the reader may recall, Valentinus claimed to have been initiated through Theudas, himself claimed to be a disciple of Paul. Pagel believes that Paul is best seen as a figure who is both proto-orthodox and proto-gnostic, who the orthodox then co-opted. Pagel is careful to note that these generalized trends are not absolute; even in texts that seem to affirm women among the gnostics, the rhetoric of the feminine is used to negatively describe things. The Dialogue of the Savior, which sings praises of Mary Magdalene, nonetheless requires the readers to “destroy the works of femaleness” - that is, sex. In the Gospel of Thomas, Salome is told that she must become a man in order to enter the kingdom of heaven: that is to say, one must transcend the natural (and thus female) to become divine (male). Clement of Alexandria, meanwhile, was an orthodox figure who viciously attacked gnostics, but nonetheless spoke of God in feminine metaphors, including that of mother. He also praised famous women throughout history, Christian and non-Christian, in his Paedagogus. The reason that the orthodox community took this position is not clear; as one historian said, the only certainty is that it happened. Pagel notes several suggestions that are possible; that the influx of hellenized Jews into the Christian movement is one proposed cause. Another possible cause is that Christianity moved from the lower class, which divided labor between genders more evenly, to higher classes. [One possibility, one not brought up by Pagel, is that the rise of the gnostics themselves are the impetus for the change; Pagel had mentioned that many gnostic groups centered their movements around figures on the periphery of orthodox Christianity, which may have caused early Christians to double-down on stances already moderately held].

[schraubd]

"Navigating Intersectional Landscapes" for Jews: Half Bad, Half Good, Sadly Incoherent

The Reut Group, in partnership with the JCPA, has written a new set of guidelines for Jewish community professionals seeking to deal with the "challenge of intersectionality" to Jewish engagement on Israel. It's a fascinating piece, in that I disagree with much of the diagnosis but agree almost entirely with the prescriptions. Normally one sees the opposite -- agreeing with the problem but disagreeing on how to solve it. Here, I think the guidelines do an exceedingly poor job in identifying the issues but -- miraculously -- ends up urging action-items that are very close to what I'd propose anyway. It creates a whiplash document which is myopic in the first half and insightful in the second half. It's a 43-page document that should be started at page 23. Start with the positive. The guidelines decisively reject uncompromising approaches that effectively write-off huge swaths of the Israel-critical Jewish community unless they agree to become Bibi-cheerleaders. It says that communal "redlines" and definitions of Israel "delegitimization" should be drawn narrowly and with an eye toward a big tent, and suggests that this tent should include even harsh Israel critics (the "wedge" point, the guidelines suggest, should be peeling off "harsh critics" from outright radical anti-Zionists -- the former kosher, the latter not). It notes that many Jewish youth express feelings of "betrayal" when their only pre-collegiate education on Israel consists of simplistic cheerleader narratives, and thus insists we'll need to prepare them for tough conversations. It speaks out against the propensity of some Jewish writers and organizations to effectively carpet bomb the slightest whisper of "anti-Israel" activity from progressive writers and political figures, especially from racial minorities, and says that we should be more willing to unite around issues of common concern even when there are sharp disagreements over Israel. Critics of Israel should be encouraged to structure their concerns in ways that manifest continued engagement (e.g., BLM-sympathizers should aid Ethiopian Jews protesting police violence; immigration activists should work on behalf of Eritrean asylum-seekers, all in ways that try to shore up and bolster humanitarian and liberal institutions currently operating in Israel). Overall, the document preaches a message of engagement and putting in the work, and understands that overreaction can be as damaging as the initial blow. Finally, while framed around the "challenge of intersectionality", the article doesn't present intersectionality as solely an enemy to be destroyed but rather a resource to be harnessed -- you beat bad intersectionality with better intersectionality (though I might suggest here that part of that project is starting to wean ourselves off the reflexive treatment of intersectionality as a "challenge"). All of these are things that I like. But it's weirdly difficult to see how they got to this fabulous destination given the route that they took in identifying the problems they purport to tackle. The first, diagnostic half of the document almost entirely fails to recognize the fact that Jewish anxiety around Israel stems from tensions emanating from two sides, not one. Yes, there's the problem of people on the far-left demanding Jews "check their Zionism at the door", or submit to humiliating ideological litmus tests before being acknowledged as one of the good Jews. But there's the equal problem of people in the pro-Israel community demanding Jews "check their progressivism at the door", insisting that they are traitors to the Jewish people if they insist on applying progressive values to issues surrounding Israel or even, sometimes, just for being progressives generally. Both sides of this are troublesome, and both sides contribute to the problem. I suppose the authors might argue that the goal of this document is simply to focus on the "intersectional" aspect of the challenge, and grappling with the challenge of rigid and uncompromising pro-Israel fanaticism is best given its own treatment. One problem with this apologia is that I've never seen a document of this sort written by a body like the JCPA which takes as its "challenge" the way rigid and uncompromising pro-Israel fanaticism prompts American Jewish disengagement. You can't argue for division of labor if you never actually assign anyone to cover the other half of the work. Moreover, the very topography of the document seems to make this problem incognizable: its taxonomy of "American Jewish tribes" re: Israel -- "aligners", "moderate critics", "harsh critics", and "radicals" -- is presented as a continuum from most safe to most threatening. "Aligners" -- those who "consider Israel to be an integral part of their Jewish identity and generally support the State of Israel" -- lock down one side of the spectrum and are presented as wholly unproblematic and uncomplicated figures, as against the "critics" who, though not portrayed as "enemies", are viewed as at-risk. Yet pretty much any of us in the "moderate" or "harsh critic" camp have a lot of experience with an unnamed and unmarked fifth tribe -- the "zealots". These are the people who radically identify not just with "Israel" but with its most extreme, irredentist settler right, and who actively seek to sabotage or demolish any Israel discourse -- in the Jewish community or outside -- that is viewed as a threat to the Greater Israel project. It is a problem, and an increasingly unforgivable problem, that we refuse to call this group out or treat it as if it isn't a meaningful player. Is it representative of the majority of "pro-Israel" Jews? No. Is it at least as prominent, toxic, and destructive as the anti-Zionist "radicals" that are the "bad guy" focus of documents like this? Yes. For many Jews, then, the forces which end up yielding disengagement from Israel aren't (just) looming pressures from the far-left, which they may be closer to or more distant from as they traverse from "aligner" to "moderate critic" to "harsh critic". Rather, it's bidirectional -- the left-radicals tug us from one side and the zealots from the other, and (pinching towards the center of the continuum, if not necessarily the political spectrum) we see ambivalence or apathy from the "aligners" or the "harsh critics" who seem unwilling to challenge the bad behavior of their neighboring extremists. The result is a feeling of being "pulled apart" on the issue of Israel -- "engaging" with Israel means choosing between two equally unappealing forms of zealotry. This was a major theme of the "safe and on the sidelines" study on Jewish student disengagement that came out of Stanford a few years ago: simply put, students felt like Jewish life on campus meant enlisting in a war. Go to the various social justice groups, and they were asked to join a war on Israel. Go to Hillel, and they're called to join a war for Israel. But these students didn't come to college to fight a war, they came take some classes, have some beers, make some friends, and get their psychology degree. They aren't averse to Israel being part of their Jewish lives per se, but they are averse to becoming ideological soldiers in a brutal trench war, and they felt that both "sides" of the fight refused to leave room for anything but fanaticism. So they disengage. If you want to write about why some Jews are disengaging from Israel, approximately half the story hence has to target overly zealous and uncompromising efforts by putative "Israel supporters" to impose a "my way or the highway" approach that should be and will be flatly unacceptable to huge swaths of contemporary American Jews. The prescription section gestures at this by insisting that "red lines" and "Israel delegitimization" be drawn narrowly. But the failure to explicitly grapple with the far side of the problem comes at cost -- the document is notably vague in actually laying out what is and isn't a legitimate operating case of "delegitimization", and offers virtually no guidance as to how to respond to those forces in the Jewish community which have recklessly and harmfully expanded the in a bid to exclude giant swaths of the Jewish community (consider the mostly successful efforts to bar J Street from the "communal circle" at the institutional level). Likewise, the document commits one of my cardinal sins in that it does not even acknowledge, much less explore, the possibility that there ought to be right-ward "redlines" -- positions associated with the "pro-Israel" right that, if taken, preclude them from being considered members-in-good-standing of the Jewish communal world. It's not an accident that our redlines are only applied to JVP and not ZOA. If you only read the diagnostic part of document, you'd come away with the impression that the only reason Jews (and non-Jews) are drifting from Israel engagement is because of unreasonable haranguing from an ideological left that thinks Israel can do no right. The idea that the right side of the political spectrum bears any responsibility for the problem -- including the erosion of Israel as a "bipartisan" issue -- is scarcely even gestured at. The simple reality that a deeply conservative government imposing deeply conservative policies and which has deeply entrenched itself as the dominant force in Israeli politics is going to eventually become deeply unpopular with progressives is not even acknowledged. At some point, asking progressives "why don't you like Israel?" is like asking them "why don't you like Mississippi?" It's not some mysterious-cum-mystical antagonism -- it's because they're both conservative places enacting conservative policies which progressives aren't going to like! There's no strategy for arresting that trend that doesn't entail, at least in part, trying to insist on more progressive policies in those locales. The astounding lack of attention to the way right-wing forces have their share of responsibility for undermining American Jewish engagement with Israel is only underlined by perhaps its only exception. Buried in footnote 21 (in approximately 3 point font) we see this doozy: "Israel’s lack of a credible and persistent commitment to the two state-solution has become a significant stumbling block in Israel’s relations with World Jewry. Any form of annexation in the West Bank would dramatically and potentially irreversibly accelerate that trend." Yeah, no kidding! Talk about hiding elephants in mouseholes! But taking that seriously means that, if your goal is reversing the disengagement of world Jewry from Israel, you need in part to tackle "Israel's lack of a credible and persistent commitment to the two-state solution" -- and that includes taking on the members of the pro-Israel community who outright oppose a two-state solution and are seeking to affirmatively undermine it at every turn. Yet even as one-stateism has become Republican Party dogma, it gets virtually no attention in favor of an entire section on the "Corbynization" of progressive politics -- a serious problem in the UK, but utterly marginal as a feature of American politics. This sort of abject failure of perspective has long since passed the point of indefensibility. In essence, prescriptively the document seems to tacitly acknowledge that there are a host of bad practices, most of which generate from overzealous efforts to defend a "pro-Israel" position, which end up backfiring and driving Jews and non-Jews away from even a complicated respect for Israel as a state. But it refuses to actually come out and name the problem in the diagnostic section, instead presenting the challenges as emanating almost univocally from the intersectional left. The result is a document that is functionally incoherent -- and I fear that the generally salutary actions it recommends will end up being corrupted and perverted because of an inability to honestly reckon with the full scope of the problem. At the meta-level, one of the biggest challenges facing Jewish communal cohesion, unity, and engagement -- on Israel or anything else -- is our ongoing practice of giving destructive right-wing forces free passes. We dedicate pages upon pages of agonizing over every fringe-left march or protest or chant, but when the time comes to apply that same discerning analysis to our right-ward colleagues, we clam up. As many good ideas are contained in the prescriptive sections of this guideline, for me it stands out as embodying that trend, and it's one we just can't tolerate anymore. This doesn't mean suddenly letting bad behavior on the left go unchallenged. But it does mean we need to start developing principles and guidelines that clearly and unambiguously dictate what sort of behavior from the Jewish right crosses the line, just as we already do with the Jewish left. And when the Jewish right does go past its red lines, we need to simply get over our sniveling fear of calling it out by name. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2G3ZM6Q

[ouroboros8ontology]

It means briefly that the existence of the universe is made possible by a process of shrinkage in God. Luria begins by putting a question which gives the appearance of being naturalistic and, if you like, somewhat crude. How can there be a world if God is everywhere? If God is ‘all in all,’ how can there be things which are not God? How can God create the world out of nothing if there is no nothing? This is the question. The solution became, in spite of the crude form which he gave it, of the highest importance in the history of later Kabbalistic thought. According to Luria, God was compelled to make room for the world by, as it were, abandoning a region within [Themself], a kind of mystical primordial space from which [They] withdrew in order to return to it in the act of creation and revelation. The first act of En-Sof, the Infinite Being, is therefore not a step outside but a step inside, a movement of recoil, of falling back upon oneself, of withdrawing into oneself. Instead of emanation we have the opposite, contraction. The God who revealed [Themself] in firm contours was superseded by one who descended deeper into the recesses of [Their] own Being, who concentrated [Themself] into [Themself], and had done so from the very beginning of creation.

Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; Seventh Lecture: Isaac Luria and his School

[septembriseur]

hi! do you have any theological texts to rec? i haven't been able to find any good critical ones and i /know/ a rec from you would be super fascinating!

I’m definitely not an expert, and what I read tends to have a somewhat narrow focus. I’ve just been reading for interest. I find myself frustrated with theology very often because while I have a certain mystical bent, I’m extremely allergic to the slightest hint of New Age-iness, and to writings that don’t engage in rigorous analysis of their own ideas. I found Arthur Green’s Radical Judaism to be very worthwhile, and I’ve been reading or glancing through Daniel Boyarin’s Carnal Israel and some stuff by Amy Kalmanofsky. I want to read Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, which has been recommended to me, but WHEN WILL I HAVE THE TIME???