This is a cross-post of an article from Haaretz by Sefi Rachlevsky, author of ‘The Messiah’s Donkey’, the best-seller which critiqued the Jewish Orthodox establishment.
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“A Bag of Fibs,” the classic collection of tall tales from the pre-state Palmach militia, tells of a truck driver sent from Tel Aviv to deliver a water cistern to Jerusalem. During the steep approach to the city, at Sha’ar Haggai, he slams on the brakes and the tank slips off the truck. While backing up in order to reload the tank, he falls in and drowns. Israel’s cistern is the religious autonomy that has grown within it.
In 1985 I spoke on Army Radio with Moshe Unna, then a leader of the National Religious Party and of the Religious Kibbutz Movement, which had created a world in which mixed dancing and egalitarian, socialist culture were taken for granted. In the middle of the interview, Unna suddenly grew quiet and began to cry. Eventually he said meekly that when he tried to speak to his own party, Haim Druckman would shout him down until the veteran MK was silent.
Today Druckman is perceived as a “moderate,” and the culture of silence is being imposed on Pinhas Wallerstein, until recently the long-serving head of the Binyamin Regional Council. A leader of the Samaria hilltop settlements in the 1980s, Wallerstein was convicted of causing the “death by negligence” of a rock-throwing Palestinian youth. Now he says he can’t take it anymore. His attempts to condemn systematic, violent attacks on innocent Palestinians are silenced by his erstwhile friends.
MK Yaakov Katz (National Union), the leader of the Knesset political camp that inherited the NRP’s mantle, said “good riddance” upon hearing of Wallerstein’s departure, adding that the movement is “tired of his whining.” It is not for nothing that Katz failed to condemn recent death threats against the defense minister, but instead said that every time the government tries to carry out “crimes against the Jewish people,” the Shin Bet security service instigates slanderous provocations. After all, the Shin Bet initiated the murder of Yitzhak Rabin.
It is not for nothing that the head of the Council of Rabbis of Judea and Samaria is Rabbi Dov Lior, who was a respected Torah authority for the Gush Emunim Underground and a mentor to Baruch Goldstein – who Lior described as “holier than all the martyrs of the Holocaust,” “principled” and “persecuted.” With several important positions, Lior receives tens of thousands of shekels a month from a government that has blinded itself to reality.
The religious public was the first to fall into the cistern, but the state itself will follow shortly after. In its weakness, Israel has developed an autonomous, competing religious apparatus, one operating in stark opposition to the promises of Israel’s Declaration of Independence for civil equality. Israel has passed racist legislation like the Citizenship Law, which prohibits Palestinians married to Israeli citizens from becoming naturalized citizens, and has brought the consequences of such legislation upon itself. It is no coincidence that the country now has a justice minister who calls for the legal system to be informed by Jewish juridical codes, as well as an interior minister driven by transparent racism and a foreign minister with a racist platform. As such, most Jewish first-graders in Israel receive a religious education explaining that the goyim are not human beings, that women are inferior and that the secular are deficient.
A similar process is taking hold across the Middle East and beyond. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, the world of the madrassa has swallowed the national-secular order completely.
This pattern is anything but coincidental. When the secular system allows religion to create a messianic bubble within it, it creates a hothouse that converts religion into reality and fosters the growth of violent sentiment with no room for those who are both pragmatic and religious.
Unless democratic, non-messianic forces in Israel unite, they will find that the existential threat to Israel is the religious-messianic threat both within and without. They must dismantle the religious-messianic autonomy, step by step, and restore equality, democracy and openness in Israeli society, or Israel will be no more.
hat/tip: Eyal
22 Comments
i think this goes into the “scary but true” box – but whilst condemning the misconceived accommodation of messianic national-religious extremist groups, i think it is important to be careful about what you call for. it is not feasible to characterise all “messianic” forces as harmful, nor is it sensible to use vague language on this subject. every religious jew of whatever sort (and i include the non-orthodox here) prays for the coming of some sort of messianic age, we only differ on what that might look like and how it might come about. someone who thinks (as the people referenced in the article do) that the messiah will be some sort of great warrior who kicks all the arabs out of eretz israel and turns the state into an iranian-style theocracy is very different from someone like myself, who has an entirely different vision. what must happen here is a clear separation between the prophetic mission of the jewish people and the existential purpose of the jewish state. when we consider the state of israel to be a religious body, then that raises some very difficult issues. where people attempt to co-opt a secular democracy and transform it into a radical theocracy, that is decidedly to be combated. the accommodation that has so far occurred has allowed these agendas to take over the debate because of the supine position the democratic majority has taken towards the entryism of ultra-orthodox viewpoints. this must cease.
b’shalom
bananabrain
Margaret Atwood, the brilliant Canadian novelist who wrote “A Handmaiden’s Tale” about the Christian Right’s takeover of the US government said in an interview that when you mix the supernatural with politics, you get poison. All three monotheistic religions –Judaism, Christianity and Islam–have a set of prophecies in which a Savior, a Messiah, will come, destroy in a mega-battle and a Day of Judgment all the folks that the true believers don’t like and set up a world-wide theocracy. For the Jews, it’s Moshiach, the Messiah; for the Christians, it’s the Second Coming of Jesus as predicted in the Book of Revelations; for Moslems, it’s Issa, their version of Jesus. And for the Shia Moslems, it’s also the Mahdi, the Hidden Imam, who has been hiding for hundreds of years and who will fight alongside Issa and drive the Crusadors and the abominable Jews into the sea. These Messianic beliefs have no place in politics, especially in Israel. There will never be peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the Arabs and the Moslems because belief in the supernatural colours people’s perceptions. True believers are delusional. They are not in the here and now. They do not see clearly. They are very dangerous to us all.
lavalon,
that is not, in fact, how jewish eschatology works – you are simply assuming (as is margaret atwood) that it works the same way as muslim and christian eschatology. it doesn’t. not that i entirely disagree with the main thrust of your post except for the bit about “true believers” being delusional. i think you’d be better off being more precise – i think it’s more about people who don’t have any doubt and are so 10000% sure they’re right that they’re willing to harm others in pursuit of their rightness.
b’shalom
bananabrain
I would be interested to learn more about the differences between Jewish, Christian and Muslim eschatology. Whilst I can see the passing similarities between Christian and Muslim escahtology, I know, to my regret, too little about Jewish interpretations of the “End Times”. I take it the Book of Daniel is a good place to look, given its topics.
I agree with you about doubt – indeed I would suggest that reasoned and reasonable doubt is a vital pillar of faith (as the Stoics, amongst others, understood). Especially when faith is understood as a process, rather than a fixed item.
Bananabrain,
Perhaps what you say is true–that Jewish eschatology differs from Christian and Moslem. I am not as learned as you are on these matters. While I do believe in God, I am not a practicing Jew, so I too would be interested in being enlightened on the differences between the eschatologies of the monotheistic religions.
Regarding “true believers being delusional”: I mean this in the Buddhist sense: they are not present; they are not in the here and now. They are making stuff up in their head which they believe to be true.
When asked about the existence of God, the Buddha wisely would not answer. He said he was concerned with liberation from suffering in this life and would not speculate about the existence of a soul or heaven. His focus, amongst others, was on how do we all delude ourselves into believing that our ego identity exists and is solid like a rock. He said that, in fact, the ego was empty, a chimera. Buddha invited people to check everything out for themselves and not buy into any doctrine including his own. He invited people to observe the workings of their own mind, senses, feelings, beliefs. I think this is the development of sanity.
As I see it, the danger in Judaism, Christianity and Islam is identifying with a supernatural being and believing what others have said about this being as THE TRUTH: Abraham, Moses, Daniel, Samuel, Jesus, Mohamed etc. Christians and Moslems go so far as “becoming” Jesus and Mohamed. That’s why Moslems were/are so offended by the Danish cartoons of Mohamed. They took it as a personal insult because they aren’t indoctrinated to separate their personal ego from Mohamed. This makes them particularly vulnerable to group think and manipulation. In fact, the haj to Mecca is all about merging with other pilgrims into One Entity. Kind of makes me sick to think about it!!
I do think that mysticism and the supernatural have their place. I am not a die-hard, left-brain empiricist and rationalist, but the supernatural and mysticism are tricky and one of the tricks is to delude oneself that what one believes is THE TRUTH when it may simply be THE TRUTH for that person.
So did Samuel communicate directly with Yahweh? He believed he did: that was the truth of his experience. Did Mohamed communicate directly with the angel Gabriel and did Gabriel dictate to him the Qu’ran? He believed it: that was the truth of his experience.
The question is: am I supposed to believe what Samuel, Mohamed, the Pope or Osama bin Laden believed/believe or am I free to focus on the truth of my own experience? I suggest to you that the saner, more liberating path is to trust in one’s own experience and to refuse to buy into what anyone else says or believes without checking it out for yourself and seeing if it’s true for you. Samuel’s and Mohammed’s experience do not resonate for me. I am more tuned into what the Buddha said.
Ultimately, different strokes for different folks.
i think the most important difference is that of *approach*. for example, most jews have no idea what is supposed to happen at the “end of the world” and those who do can’t agree (no surprises there) and, in particular, they can’t agree whether it is the same thing as what happens when you die, which we’re not entirely sure about either. the issue hinges on the meaning of the phrase “the world to come” – does it mean the afterlife, or the messianic age, or what? we aren’t sure. there’s a famously inconclusive argument in the talmud about it. in fact, our profound ignorance, or, if you prefer, our profound lack of interest in the subject is the most important difference between us and the christians and muslims – any christian or muslim learns practically straight off what happens when you die and what happens at the end of the world. with us, it just simply isn’t a priority area compared to, say, what we do now and how we act – it is understood that what we do now can affect the future and, by extension what happens after we die, but it’s the *how* that we can’t agree on, or even what the future options are in the first place.
the other thing to bear in mind is that as a matter of speculative theology (i.e. something we really can’t know for certain) the halakhah says it comes under the rubric of “aggadah”, or “interpretive explication” – we’re entitled to hold any opinion we like as long as it’s reputable, in contrast to halakhah, where the normative majority opinion must be respected. by this logic, we are entitled to believe in reincarnation, or not – both positions are respectable and, in any case, we really can’t prove it one way or t’other, so it’s pointless to argue.
as for what happens at the end of the world, we don’t know either – all we know is what we can do to affect the situation by our action or lack thereof. there’s the messiah, who is supposed to be descended from the davidic royal line (which covers a sizeable number of people, i know about ten myself off the top of my head) – and then there’s the other messiah, who is supposed to be from one of the josephic half-tribes, but as they were carted off by the assyrians in 722 bce, who knows where he’s got to? anyway, when he turns up, he’s supposed to get killed after fighting in a war against some guy called “armilus”, who is the closest thing we have to a dajjal/antichrist, but very few jews have ever heard of that name in any case, i only heard it myself about five years ago, whereas more of us have heard of the wars of gog and magog, as they figure in christian eschatology as well, although we don’t really know what those are about either, anyway he might win the war and die fighting, or possibly not, or just get killed anyway and then the davidic messiah is supposed to show up after it’s finished, rebuild the Temple (possibly out of light) and re-establish sacrifices, plus we’re all supposed to move to israel and become perfectly halakhically observant. we also can’t agree whether the Temple gets built before he shows up or after, or whether the great sanhedrin should be re-established before or after, although we do more or less agree that elijah shows up to announce him (which is why john the baptist was compared to elijah, incidentally, to make jesus fit the prophetic framework) and then prophecy would recommence. depending on who you agree with, then, a sort of age of peace and justice will then happen, in which loads of people convert to judaism, or not. the davidic messiah reigns as a king and then dies, or he may live for a thousand years and then die, or not. plus there is the resurrection of the dead (as per ezekiel’s valley of dry bones) which may or may not involve the resurrected ones being brought back the same age they were when they died and may or may not involve them living a slightly longer life and then dying again. either way it’s supposed to be jolly nice. other opinions have us all sitting in a giant sukkah (tabernacle) eating roast leviathan (that’s the “valhalla” option) and still others have the whole world turning into a giant yeshiva (seminary) in which we all sit around wearing crowns and studying Torah. no prizes for guessing which versions of what are popular where. we also agree that it is forbidden to calculate when all this will happen and are told to get on with keeping the mitzvot instead.
i hope that’s all clear now. hah.
it is often mentioned, but in our opinion most of those prophecies refer to the period under the seleucid – the four animals represent the four empires we survived in late antiquity, the the assyrians/babylonians, the greeks, the medes/persians and the romans. the “abomination of desolation” is usually taken to refer to the desecration of the second Temple by antiochus epiphanes, leading to the maccabean revolt (or civil war, if you like) and the triumph of the hasmonean dynasty.
this is one of the reasons the stoics and the rabbinic sages always tended to get on reasonably well – we’ve never gone in for fixed items of faith until the mediaeval period and even then, we could never agree on what they were.
lavalon:
philosophically speaking, i don’t think there’s a way to differentiate religious positions from any other positions in this respect, due to the privacy of experience, if i remember correctly.
for what you say about buddha, you will find more or less equivalent positions in various kabbalistic schools as well as the mussar movement of the C19th – that passage could have come straight out of luzzato’s “mesilat yesharim”, or any number of sufi or christian mystical texts i am familiar with – if you are familiar with the work of professor moshe idel you will discover this.
i see what you mean – we certainly have our own hot-button issues, but generally speaking we are enjoined to break any rule for the sake of preserving human life. we tend to understand that, philosophically, the idea of truth is a difficult one to universalise.
i can’t see how you can refer approvingly to the buddha’s statements about ego as a chimera and consider it different to what the haj is about.
as far as judaism is concerned, you can believe what you like, as long as you observe the seven noahide laws – this is the difference between us and christianity and islam, we do not require other people to convert because whilst judaism is the truth for us, it is not required for everyone. the implications of this are enormous – we are universalists only as far as the good of society is concerned, but there is not one template for everyone; this is not the way christians and muslims (or doctrinaire rationalists) think.
jewish life is experiential, learning-centred and is based around ferocious and painstakingly granular questioning of every detail of existence.
b’shalom
bananabrain
bananabrain,
Thank you so much for a very learned explanation of Jewish eschatology and how it differs from Christian and Moslem eschatology.
From what you say, it is very different and I stand corrected on lumping the 3 together.
I should tell you that my father was a communist in Poland before WW2 and belonged to a group who mocked rabbis and the Judaism that was practiced in Poland at the time as being “primitive”, “backward”. My mother was a socialist and her family did not go to synagogue. My folks considered themselves rebels and free thinkers who had liberated themselves from the yoke of shtetl life.
My father and mother escaped from the Nazis and the Holocaust by going to Portugal and later came to Canada, arriving Passover, 1944. Both their parents and brothers and sisters were murdered in the gas ovens. This made my folks more disdainful of Judaism. “How can there be a God if such a thing could happen?”, my mother would say.
So I grew up in a secular Jewish home and one of the benefits was that I could read, think and believe what I wanted. I decided not to have a bar mitzva because it didn’t make sense to me, although I did attend bar mitzvas of my friends. I learned to read and write Yiddish which was my first language–my parents spoke to me in Yiddish. I also explored Jewish mysticism in my late teens, reading Martin Buber, and I’m also learned in astrology–there is Jewish astrology!!!–and have read about the Kabalalah. I have also read the Old and New Testaments and portions of the Qu’ran which I don’t much but I am ignorant about much of Judaism e.g. the Talmud etc.
I find what you say and the way you say it — very learned, clearly argued — very appealing. Whenever I encounter Jews who are learned in Judaism, I am always impressed.
Regarding the Buddha’s belief that the ego is a chimera and my dislike for the Haj. I was aware of the contradiction after I wrote it. However, I don’t agree with the Buddha that the ego does not exist. The universal psychological developmental process we all go through from infant to adult is constructed around the growth and development of an ego, and in the West, the stronger the better!! I think the Buddha was wise in deconstructing how the ego is created and that it is our identification with the ego and its likes and dislikes that is the root of suffering, what he called “attachment”. But I have problems with jumping to the conclusion that the ego doesn’t exist and that identity is an illusion. Frankly, I’ve never read or met a practicing Buddhist teacher who didn’t have a strong ego no matter what they say about it.
I also have a problem with Buddhist “enlightenment”, how to get it and who has it. The definition of enlightenment changed as Buddhism spread from India to China, to Tibet and to Japan. Buddhism enjoys being slippery. When you think you’ get it, the meaning slips away from you! Zen plays around with this, giving you koans which are meaningless riddles, and after struggling and driving yourself crazy trying figure them out, when you finally give up, you are supposed tio be “enlightened”. I’m not so sure. I think that you’re kind of jerking yourself around. I actually prefer the Talmudic way of studying and analyzing and discussing the meaning of words and symbols.
So I don’t like the Haj because I’m not wiling to surrender my ego identity and merge with others. I think this is psychologically dangerous and makes you vulnerable to the manipulation of the likes of Osama Bin Laden and the Mullahs of Iran. No thank you. I also have an aversion to the way people behave in groups. Sometimes they become mobs up to no good, so I prefer to go my own way.
Anyway, bananahead, thanks for this discussion. One more thing though, may I ask why you call yourself “bananahead”? You seem far wiser than a “bananahead”.
bananabrain,
Sorry! I called you bananahead, but my question still stands. Why do you call bananbrain?
Interesting commentary on the Book of Daniel. The famous Apocalypse attributed to St John of Patmos (but certainly not his work) serves as an early Christian eschatology with a parallel interpretation of the Whore of Babylon as Rome, of course (as an aside, when one gets up Biblical, Koine Greek, one is always traditionally warned to avoid this work – as its Greek is some of the most difficult and very worst in the whole of the Christian Scripture in Greek!).
Early Christian eschatologies were actually very varied, in particular pre-Nicene models. There was, understandably a lot of emphasis on martyrdom in the way of the end of the world, which was considered to be very imminent. The idiom of the “purple robe (sometimes crown) of martyrdom” figures in many non-canonical very early Christian texts. Millenarian sects abounded. When one reads accounts of the Diocletian persecution in Lyon (Irenaeus is a source), where tens of thousands were murdered in what reads like an appalling orgy of violence aimed at the citizenry of a Gaulish city that early appears to have gone over to Christianity, one may be less than surprised to find that many early Christians were convinced that the Last Days were upon them and that the martyrs were, more or less, the Elect. Indeed the subsequent non-happening of the End of the World as we know it appears to have promoted early disputes and crises in the Early Church.
bananabrain,
I have just reread this thread and I have several additional thoughts and questions.
First, as I’m new to posting on this site, I’m wondering if relating some of my personal history and that of my family of origin is too personal and inappropriate for this site. Could you kindly advise me?
Also, I think that I come across very strident in how I express myself as compared to yourself and some others who post here. I appear out of nowhere and then I have an axe to grind. Is this also inappropriate for this site?
Finally, if what you say is accurate about the freedom to think as one pleases in Judaism with a few caveats, then why do Jewish Orthodox men wear the same clothes, pray in the same way and adhere to many injunctions as outlined in the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy? The rituals and beliefs of Orthodox Jews appear to me to be as stringent as those of Catholicism and Sunni and Shia Islam? Do you see a difference, and if so, what is it?
lavalon:
*sigh* most people, unfortunately, because of words like “judeo-christian” and “abrahamic” assume that we all work the same way and think the same way. in practical, operational, day-to-day terms, judaism is far closer to islam, although our prophetic spirit is probably closer to christianity; it is quite complicated, but unfortunately there is this tendency to believe that judaism is essentially christianity with the jesus bit chopped off, which it isn’t.
i don’t think it’s inappropriate for you to relate your personal history if you’re comfortable doing so. it is a fairly familiar pattern in my experience – your family are not the only people who generalise on the basis of specifics, but i only felt i really started learning something about life, my own religion and that of others when i started realising that, as the author of “bad science” puts it, “i think you’ll find it’s a little bit more complicated than that”. whether one is an ultra-orthodox zealot, a newly frummed-up ba’al teshuvah, a mainstream shul-on-shabbes anglo, a socialist “free thinker” or the sort of person that objects to quietism and keeping your head down. as for the holocaust-theodicy question, that is no different, as many who went through the camps also believed, including my late father-in-law, zt”l.
i have to say that it seems odd to me that you should grow up free of the “shackles of superstition” and end up into astrology. i know there’s jewish astrology and i don’t pretend to know much about that, except that it is reputable in some kabbalistic circles but not others. either way, one thing that you have to remember about kabbalah is that it is intended to be part of an integrated lifestyle system, not done instead of it. this is something that martin buber never really got, which is why he is more popular with christians than with jews.
that’s a very jewish position to take; the kabbalistic concept of bittul ha-yesh,”self-nullification” is viewed as a meditation technique, not an ultimate objective; this is why one is supposed to be married and have children, because it is dangerous to fly through the clouds unless you also have roots in the ground to bring you back.
i think both of these have their place, but it is the ability to keep dynamic tension between them that is more challenging.
as do i. abraham, the founder of our religion, felt the same way. so did moses, who destroyed the exploitative consensus of egypt. so did our prophets, who fought tooth and nail against the decline of their society. it’s a complex dynamic.
not especially – the web is a brusque medium and this blog is much concerned with politics. i do think, however, that for some of what you’re interested in, you might prefer the discussion board at http://www.interfaith.org, where i moderate.
aha – you’ve missed the bit i wrote above about the difference between halakhah and aggadah, halakhah being the rules which determine the normative practice of fulfilling the commandments, which are subject to binding majority rule (whilst, incidentally, offering far more wiggle room than most people realise in practice; the precise manner in which the commandments are observed can sometimes owe more to local custom – “minhag” – or worldview – “hashkafa” – than it does to the strict requirements of the halakhah; for a discussion of this, see here: http://www.spittoon.org/archives/3501 ) and aggadah being more speculative matters not related to practical observance, where the sages recognised that nobody can ultimately control what you believe. traditional judaism is, in fact, more “orthoprax” than it is “orthodox”.
b’shalom
bananabrain
Bananabrain,
Thanks again for taking the time to respond to my recent post. What’s very interesting to me is that some of the positions I hold regarding Buddhism and groupthink are similar to Jewish positions which you point out in your recent post and earlier ones.
“I have to say that it seems odd to me that you should grow up free of the “shackles of superstition” and end up into astrology. i know there’s jewish astrology and i don’t pretend to know much about that, except that it is reputable in some kabbalistic circles but not others. either way, one thing that you have to remember about kabbalah is that it is intended to be part of an integrated lifestyle system, not done instead of it.”
I have a mystical bent and, in the 60s, I became friends with the folksinger Richie Havens and his friends. At the time, they were into astrology and had various texts lying around which I would look into. Then, in the early 70s I read Dane Rhudyar’s Astrology of Personality. He was a Dutch intellectual who had studied the works of Carl Jung and that of an English physicist whose name escapes who examined cycles. Jung studied divination in various cultures including the Chinese I Ching and astrology and concluded that divination works because what happens in a moment in time has the quality of that moment. Ergo, when you raise a question and do the I Ching and create a hexagram, the meaning of the hexagram arises organically from the “vibes”, the “energies” within the moment. Similarly, the moment when a child inhales its first breathe, it is inhaling the qualities of the cosmos at that moment, Rhudyar also applied the theory of cycles to astrology and used the monthly solar-lunar cycle–new moon, quarter moon, full moon etc as the archetypal relationship between all the planets to one another. Astrololy had developed a body of knowledge moe than 2000 years old and Rhudyar drew from this to interpret the meaning of e.g. 2 planets in opposition.
The other core beliefs in astrology is the ancient dictum: As above, so below and synchronicity. Planetary configurations do not cause events on earth to take place. Planetary configurations correspond to events events on earth, and if you learn to read the meaning of the pklanets and teh configurations and you know which configurations will take place in the future and when they will occur, you can predict with over 70% accuracy what will take place.
I have studied astrology for almost 40 years and have done some professional work as well, and I can tell you that it works. If it was total BS, it shouldn’t work at all, but it does work. Some of the finest minds today are astrologers. Liz Greene who is a Jungian Analyst in Zurich has been a practicing astrologer for many years, has written many scholaly books and teaches astrology in the summers at Bath, England. Bill Meridian who is a financial and political astrologer predicted many months ahead the problems that woudl a
Bananabrain,
Sorry! I have a hyperactive and exciteable mouse which apparently clicked the post button, so I will continue:
Bill Meridian who is a financial and political astrologer predicted many months ahead of time the problems that arose in Iran with the bogus election of Abadinejad in June, 2009, the rise of the opposition and the subsequent crackdown. He did this not with any hocus pocus: he looked at the chart of Iran and the planetary configurations that were forming around the time of the election and how the configurations impacted the planets in the chart of Iran and came up with a prediction based on his knowledge of the meaning of the planetary configurations…
Regarding Jewish astrology: The basis for Jewish astrology lies in interpretations of certain passages in the Old Testament. The most famous one is “To everything, there is a season and a time for every purpose under Heaven…”. The 12 archetypal astrological signs are based on the 12 sons of Jacob and the descriptions of their character in the Torah beginning with Reubin who is Taurus, the Bull; Levi is Cancer, ruled by the Moon, whose descendants became the priests of the ISraelites, and ending with Joseph who is Pisces, the dreamer.
I have seen a photo of an ancient synogogue [don't remember where or the date] whose floor tiles were designed as a zodiac with the symbols of the 12 astrological signs.
Astrology is universal to every people on the planet. Every tribe had a shaman who read the stars, created archetypal forms out of their configurations and attached meaning to these configuratons. Astrology and its body of knowledge are at the root of the modern empirical sciences: astronomy chemistry and physics. Yet the scientific community dismisses astrology and alchemy as being completely without merit. However, many of the founders of modern astronomy, physics and chemistry were themselves closet astrologers and alchemists. Anyway how can you trust modern scientists who have a problem with Intelligent Design and continue to believe that the Cosmos is a series of random accidents and that the hand of God is nowhere to be found in the Creation and evolution of the universe and everything in it?
Your honour, I rest my case!
Bananabrain,
I have a rather broad question about the current world zeitgeist to ask you and I’m very interested in your opinion. I’m posting it here, but it doesn’t have to do with the specific topic under discussion. [I donl;t really know where to post it in this site.]
In the political world today in the West, there is great polarization between the Left and the Right in the US, Canada, Great Britain, France, Israel etc. These folks really do see the world very differently and the stubborn adherence to their ideologucal positions makes it very difficult for their democratic governments to function properly. However, the totalitarian dictatorship of China is doing very well.
Meanwhile, medical scientists are making tremendous breakthroughs in discovering the origins of diseases by studying genetics and are coming up with ways to save lives. At the same time, there are wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia in which soldiers and innocent people are dying terrible deaths almost on a daily basis. In fact, violent death has become the main subject of American movies, TV programs and computer games.
Add to this mix, the very slow recovery of the world economic system from the mortgage meltdown in the US, and for additional seasoning, mix in global warming, climate change and 5+ earthquakes worldwide over the past couple of months or so.
Meanwhile, on the 2 web sites on which you post and moderate, [and I'm sure there are many others] intelligent people from very different backgrounds come together to discuss in a serious, open-minded and articulate way the problems of today. They treat one another with mutual respect and dignity.
My question is: what the fuck is going on? How can all these extremely contradictory things be going on at the same time and where do you think it’s all headed? Are the good guys going to win or what? Please advise.
umph. jung concluded a lot of things, some of which were bollocks; he is one of the more famous misunderstanders of kabbalah, although his misunderstanding of it has been more powerful than many people’s more accurate understanding.
this is for me closer to how we see it and to how it has been explained to me by a (jewish) friend who is knowledgeable in such matters. it seems reasonably plausible, in the same way that we are mostly made of water and thus subject to gravitational pulls from astronomical phenomena, albeit i think the actual effects of these are too subtle to be observable. there’s a very good summary of the plethora of views here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_views_on_astrology
what i gather is not that astrology is somehow incorrect, but more that it is not permitted to us, in the same way that pork is a perfectly healthy meat, but is not permitted to us. i gather there’s some sort of conflict with our philosophical commitment to free will and that anything which smacks of fatalism could potentially harm our perception. i find that a complex and subtle insight.
umph. although this is much spoken about in the hermetic traditions, the kabbalistic position tends towards the theurgic, again, allowing human free will to dictate the precise relationship.
i would appreciate some evidence to support this statement, if you have it easily accessible. however, it seems to me that in some way science could be said to support it, in that it takes 8 minutes for light to reach us from the sun apparently, so when you observe a star you are essentially relying on the laws of physics to allow you to see into the past.
well, that’s what they say about homeopathy and that is merely down to a lack of understanding of how the placebo effect works. i wouldn’t be surprised to find the same thing going on with astrology – but don’t mistake me, that might in fact mean that astrology is an extraordinarily successful way of understanding, neutralising and manipulating the placebo effect.
yes, but so did i, based on my knowledge of the political situation. there are a number of ways to do this; you might like to read george friedman’s “the next 100 years” and compare it to astrological predictions, because a different set of assumptions and algorithms underpin this kind of prediction.
i’m sorry, you seem to be saying that intelligent design is credible scientifically – it isn’t, in my experience. the Hand of G!D Is where we look for It, not proven or disproven by double-blind, peer-reviewed evidence-based testing and, especially, not by playing silly buggers with scientific method. i trust scientists who stick to science and understand its limitations, but nor do i disrespect scientific method or intentionally distort what it teaches me. it is not me that has a problem with darwin, but the likes of richard dawkins that has a problem with me.
er… is that not because it doesn’t have to pay attention to any other ideology than its own? if you can engineer or domineer consensus, why wouldn’t that be successful – at least until you make a bad bet, which is where totalitarian dictatorships always come unstuck; they commit to a policy and nobody has the power to stop it until it screws everything up. that is why democracy is a good idea, it prevents anyone having it all their own way.
the only answer i can give you is: normal human civilisation is going on. it thrives on contradiction and variety like all diversified ecosystems; it requires its scavengers, its fertilisers, its killers, its builders, its destroyers, its maintainers, its balancers. when a system gets out of whack, that is what causes problems if it can’t correct itself – that is what is supposed to be happening with climate change. i know where i believe it’s all headed, but i don’t know when, or how. i only know what i can do about it. to my way of thinking, anyone that shares enough of my goals can be a “good guy” – but i don’t divide the world into goodies and baddies any more than i can divide a biodiverse environment that way. of course, if there are too many locusts you’re screwed, but that doesn’t mean locusts are evil per se. what bothers me is homogenisation, or forces that destroy competing ideas, options or choices, without an equal balance of heterogenising forces. who wants to end up with the world as run by microsoft, or disney, or rupert murdoch, or simon cowell, or nutty american evangelists, or the iranian government, where all restaurants are taco bells? that is not to say that any of these things, in small doses, might not be beneficial, the same way as a small amount of poison may be needed for an antidote. we don’t know – that is what we took on when we ate the fruit in the garden of eden; we realised that we understood consequences and would henceforth have to take account of them from then on; without free-will, there is no such thing as evil or sin, but the opposite is also true. being human is about coping with this kind of requisite systemic complexity.
b’shalom
bananabrain
Bananbrain,
You’re awfully smart!! I appreciate you taking the time to respond to my posts. I’ve just been reading you at 3:00 AM [yawn] and so I will respond in detail tomorrow. But I think I have an empiracal way of testing the validity of astrological predictions and their 70% accuracy. In my opinion, one of the best predictors is financial astrologer Raymond Merriman who writes a free column every Friday on his web site. He has been discussing a very unique planetary configuration that will begin moving into alignment at the beginning of May involving 5 planets which will reach exactitude or “perfection” at the end of July. He explains very clearly the meaning of each planet and the nature of the configuration. I will quote what he has said so far and let’s see if his interpretation and predictions will, in fact, take place. I will do this in my next post tomorrow.
Regarding “70% accuracy”. This is my intuitive ball-park guess based on how accurate I have been in doing charts for people and telling them what issues could confront them in the coming year as well as predictions that I have read made by astrologers such as Raymond Merriman and Bill Meridian.
I should add that I don’t consider astrology to be a science, but rather an art. Ten different astrologers could look at the same chart and come up with 10 different interpretations, but the one who gets my vote is the astrologer who has the most “elegant” interpretation. Given that each planet, sign, house and configuration has many different meanings, the astrologer who is the most skilled is the one who can zero in on the core issues and dynamics and explain them in the clearest and most direct way. It takes many years and the examination of several thousand charts to get this good and there are only handful of astrologers who are this good.
Also regarding Jung: he may have gotten some things wrong–I’m not an expert on Jung — but I think his explanation for why divination works is right on: What happens in a moment of time, has the quality of that moment. Jung was an artist, not a scientist and he used language like a poet. That doesn’t mean that what he says isn’t true. Poetry is true: symbols, metaphors, similes, archetypes etc are true just as a mathematical equation is true or a chemical formula. They all use different parts of the brain. The brain has the capacity to perform many different functions: thinking, feeling, imagining, intuiting, believing, sensing etc. and the content which derives from these functions is all “true”. But Western culture has lionized empiricism, materialism and technology and discounts feelings, imagining and intuiting as “touchy-feely stuff”…..
To be continued anon….
Perhaps a little OT:
Interesting – as this resonates in Bergson’s views on free-will and his opposition to determinism. As you are aware, bananabrain, I am in a bit of a Bergson period at the moment.
It would be interesting to know more about Jewish views on free-will, as Bergson’s views are not usually associated with the same, although he was Jewish by birth (although his family had converted to Roman Catholicism before his birth).
As another OT note: Bergson was very sensitive to his Jewish heritage; refusing all positions and awards from the Vichy government because of their anti-Semitic stance and vocally condemning the treatment of Jews in France and beyond even before WWII. Bergson died in 1941 – before he could witness the liberation of France – or perhaps before he himself was carted off by the fascists because of his Jewish ancestry.
lavalon:
this is probably about as far as i would go in an endorsement of astrology – i am glad you consider it an art, nonetheless.
except that in these cases the operational definition of “true” is different.
i’m afraid i think you’re not on a winner with this argument – i may believe that my left bum-cheek is george galloway, i may even be convinced that i can see this, but i’m afraid that all that is actually “true” is that i believe it to be the case. scientific truth is about triangulation, about establishing agreement that is free from bias based on shared definitions, methodology and standards . if you do not have these, you do not have shared truth.
that’s a different answer. you need to read stephen jay gould on this to really gt to grips with the area of competence of different magisteria.
abu faris:
really, you like bergson? who would know? “phew, lucky guess, i never even heard of him – i don’t like darkies” (to quote mrs scum).
i suppose the most important thing to know about jewish concepts of free will is that this is at the root of the question of the expulsion from eden and, hence, the core of what it is to be human, or a sentient being at any rate. it was the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” – in other words, the tree which enabled us to know there was a value judgement attached to our choices and, hence, if we included that value judgement in our consideration, that made us responsible for our adoption of those values and culpable if we erred in our commitment to them. similarly, the choice to accept the Torah and, indeed, covenantal relationships in general are predicated upon free will and the capacity to employ it. angels are not supposed to have free will, which is why they cannot sin (or rebel, incidentally) – nor do they have thumbs (interesting, this, that the opposable digit is linked to humanity) nor genitals (known for affecting our judgement) nor knees (linked to submission – if you have no choice to kneel, you cannot be forced to do so). jewish philosophy and religious thought places enormous importance on the subsidiarity of choice to the individual (see deuteronomy 30′s famous passage on “choosing life”) and the continuing binding obligations pursuant to that choice. interestingly enough, the paradox of Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence is then resolved by understanding that G!D Is experiencing at the same time, both all possible potential outcomes and those which were made in this space-time continuum; our choices shape the five dimensions of the universe whilst, at the same time, G!D not Being subject to such considerations makes all choice irrelevant; thus we are able to speak of destiny or fate whilst denying that they have any real hold over us.
i hope that all makes sense.
b’shalom
bananabrain
Bananabrain,
I just checked out: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_views_on_astrology. Whenever I read the word “forbidden” in Jewish commentary, I turn off and remind myself why it is that I am not, and will never be a practicing Jew. There is no empirical evidence for what learned Jews claim is “forbidden” and what is acceptable to God. We are all making it up here in our heads including you and me and those learned Jews who wrote down the 5 Books of Moses in Babylon, as well as those who interpret every word in the Torah and ferret out it’s hidden meaning, so no rabbi or religious Jewish scholar is going to tell me what is and what is not “forbidden”.
Furthermore, to me, there is no contradiction between free will, Fate and destiny as such. The sequence of the planetary configurations over time was set up by God when He created the cosmos. This sequence tells a story, the story of God’s Providence.
The planets, signs, houses and configurations in a natal chart are innate tendencies i.e. karma that you have brought forward into this life to work on using your God-ordained free will. The natal chart is a guide, a signpost, a map e.g. a square between 2 planets indicates that one failed to work out the issues symbolized by the planets. E.g. Pluto symbolizes power issues and Venus symbolizes love and affection. Venus square Pluto suggests that the person used manipulation, maybe even sexual abuse to assert their power over another in previous lives. The person incarnates with this issue still unresolved. If the person does nothing to deal with this problem, then indeed, the person is “fated” to act out this issue yet again. However, the person also has the choice to take responsibility and resolve this issueand thereby change their fate.
No one’s “fate” as written in stone. This is a creative, unfolding universe and it’s always a new moment, so uncertainty is built into the very fabric of the Cosmos. While I know what planetary configurations will be taking place on June 1, 2010, I can’t possibly know with 100% accuracy what will take place. Only God knows. But using astrology, I can make an educated guess.
Therefore, what is “fated” is that a particular planetary configuration will occur at a particular time. An ephemeris will you give you the astronomical data. However, you have the choice of informing yourself of what will be coming up, figuring out what the spiritual test is of the upcoming configuration and taking appropriate action to make the most of it for your ongoing spiritual development. If you do nothing, that’s fate. You will be a victim of the configuration. If you take action, that’s destiny.
This is the modern, enlightened view of astrology. It is very different from the astrology that is discussed in the piece on Jewish astrology in Wikipedia. God gave us astrology and the power to use it for our own ongoing spiritual development.
Very interesting.
Bergson begins his work on religion and morality by posing the question of free-will by a reference to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil”. I have the text (in French) somewhere – I’ll dig it out.
On Angels and their lack of knees – you know that infants are not born with kneecaps? Children develop the kneecap between the ages of four to six, normally.
Your solutions to the Paradoxes of Omniscience and Omnipotence are very similar to Bergson’s solutions to Zeno’s Paradoxes of Time in their emphasis on what Bergson would call “duration” and his notion of “intuition”.
Let me find this all rather fascinating. I had an inkling that Bergson was tapping into Jewish philosophical and theological ideas; but what you have written rather confirms it.
Thanks also for the quote from Monty Python. Do also recall “The Philosophers’ Song”…
Cheers!
Bananabrain,
“but don’t mistake me, that might in fact mean that astrology is an extraordinarily successful way of understanding, neutralising and manipulating the placebo effect.”
I don’t think that astrology is like homeopathy or the placebo affect as such. I think it has more to do with what occurs in quantum physics where the rudimentary particles of the universe are both a particle and a wave at the same moment and are moving around randomly, but as soon as an observer observes the particle/wave, they line up in an orderly fashion if to say, “Here I am. What is it that you want?”
The intentionally of an observer or an actor seems to have the power to organize reality and bring about a positive result. Once you decide on a course of action and marshal all your forces, doors start to open for you and the Cosmos help you along to achieve a desired result. We have all experienced this at some point.
I think astrology works something like this. The astrological prediction becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. The Cosmos organizes itself to give you the result that you predict. I have no idea how this works. I just know that it does
Regarding astrologer Bill Meridian’s accurate predictions about Iran:
“yes, but so did i, based on my knowledge of the political situation”.
But that’s not the point. I’m sure there are several routes to Rome, but the route that Meridian took is the use of symbols and a body of astrological knowledge to make an accurate prediction. The fact that you did this using a different method doesn’t discount the way Meridian did it
Regarding Intelligent design and the hand of :
“i’m sorry, you seem to be saying that intelligent design is credible scientifically – it isn’t, in my experience. the Hand of G!D Is where we look for It, not proven or disproven by double-blind, peer-reviewed evidence-based testing.”
Actually, I know full well that Intelligent Design is not credible scientifically. The limitation of the scientific approach to the cosmos is that while it can indeed describe with accuracy the physicial, organic, chemical, nuclear mechanisms of HOW a process occurs in the material universe, it can’t tell you WHY . Science has nothing to say about why we are here and what is the purpose and meaning of life. What you get with science is a dead universe which runs on random accidental physical events. There is no soul in the scientific universe and there is no God. But I see the Hand of God in all these mechanical processes. I also see a spiritual purpose to the origins and development of human consciousness and in evolution. I see no harm when teaching Darwin’s Theory of Evolution to also teach that some see the hand of God in evolution. This isn’t science, but so what? To not do so is a form of scientific bigotry.
Re: scientific truth”scientific truth is about triangulation, about establishing agreement that is free from bias based on shared definitions, methodology and standards . if you do not have these, you do not have shared truth.
Bananabrain,
How about if you and I agree to disagree about the absolute validity of the scientific method, the efficacy of astrology and the belief that Judaism has the right answer for everything.
I’m afraid that I don’t have the time or the energy to devote to further discussions on these matters.
Thanks very much for your responses which I enjoyed reading. You’re very smart and very fair and even-handed in what you say and how you say it. You are an excellent educator and this website is fortunate to have you as its moderator.
Best regards,
Lavalon