Week 1
General Insights:
As might be a commonly
filled gap, I was entirely unaware of Lilith as Adam's first wife in the Garden of Eden. In an allegorical context, this seems to parallel
the lecture material of the late Terence McKenna who would (and most
likely did) find much kaleidoscopic significance in this version of
Genesis. The clout surrounding this version seems mutual throughout
the three Abrahamic religions, and the story in itself seems more
valuable to Western mysticism than to its Orthodox counterparts. By
far, this changes my knowledge and interpretation of
Judaeo-Christianity as a whole.
Question: “What do
you expect to learn in this course? What do you bring to the course,
and what gaps of knowledge and insight do you wish to fill?”
Answer:
Religion, in all of its facets, has always fascinated me. As an
intellectual, I have run the developmental course of the passive
Baptist turned evangelical atheist, swearing off religion and all
those who ignorantly believed in the literal interpretations. Over
time, this position softened into an acceptance of ambiguity, and the
recognition of the symbolic value and allegorical importance of
religion as a whole. I wish to learn the detailed ins-and-outs of
Judaeo-Christianity as it continues to affect our collective psyche
as both a race and a culture. Most recently, the monotheistic
authority of the Church was usurped by the desired objectivism of
science. When Nietzsche said 'God is dead,' he did not mean that a
literal God was dead, but that our attempt at objective truth was
dead and dying. I believe that we now live in a time that seems to be
positively dealing with what was once a psychological trauma
manifesting itself in philosophical nihilism and scientific
reductionism. It's like the allegory of the finger pointing at the
moon: both religious scripture and scientific literature are fingers.
Historically, much of the race has been stuck staring at the finger,
when the finger is wanting you to look away and at the moon.
Week 2
General Insights:
The story of Exodus and
the rise of the ancient Israelites sheds light on the mechanisms that
lead to the creation of a religion. As I stated above, the
allegorical value of each religion is incomprehensible in scope, but
does not exempt said religions from creating and developing cultish
orthodoxies that eventually grow to fuel functionless dogma. This is
due less to the importance of the stories, and much more to the use
of these stories as tools of power, appealing to the lowest common
denominator in order to establish and perpetuate a social control.
The three Abrahamic religions are especially in need of constant
scrutiny, as their symbols are often historically invoked in
demagogic rhetoric as a means to a Machiavellian end.
Question: “What is
the significance of the command to not make ‘images’ of God? Note
the discussion on the‘tabernacle’ on p. 78.”
Answer:
This strange commandment—made most viscerally in Judaism and
Islam—has become a dogmatic crutch upon which many assume there is
still a strange sort of anthropomorphic God (or Allah) with a
humanocentric agenda, yet do not realize that a command forbidding
anyone to create images of God is nothing more than the 'finger
pointing at the moon,' with said finger shaking at the moon in a
desperate attempt to make humanity look—as individuals—at nothing
but the moon. It is an allegorical dictate that is, in essence,
describing that God or Allah are symbolically representative of the
Great Unknown; the massive scope of the reality we live in that cannot
be described, discovered, or illustratively depicted (only reveled
in). As far as my interpretation goes—aside from the dogmatic twist
this demand has taken with the childish evolution of orthodox
religion—it is meant to humble the hubris of the human intellect
and arrogant assumption by describing that what is represented cannot
ever be understood by anyone, ever. It is tantamount to what the
late and great Alan Watts once said: “something we don't know is
doing who knows what; that is what our knowledge amounts to.”
This is not to say we should cease with our curiosities or attempts
to better ourselves through philosophy, science, or spirituality; it
is only to say that there is no truth in deciding a particular
religion or school of thought is in any way objective. In some
abstract way, the early Jews (in regards to the 'tabernacle'
and the mysterious concept of 'Shekhinah,' a transliteration
of a Hebrew noun which denotes the presence and indwelling of
Divinity) understood the undeniable mysticism of their God, as well
as the elasticity and essential 'invisibility' of truth as a whole.
This, by and large, is how dogma evolves; as a result of trying to
consolidate a certain amount of static consistency through the
guarantee of ritualism, unaware that said consolidation is as
impossible as freezing a cloud.
Week 3
General Insights:
The history of Judaism is
much longer and much more complicated than I ever ventured to
imagine. One of my main motivations for taking a class on Western
Religions was due to my perception that I generally understood the
basics of Christianity, and had ventured upon my own initiative to
learn as much as I could about Islam as soon as I saw polarizing
agendas and orthodox prejudices begin to grow in the minds around me.
This Islamaphobia was obviously rooted in the attacks of September
11th, 2001... but have been reignited with the military
successes and sheer brutality (physically, ideologically, and
otherwise) of groups such as the Islamic State. So, although I know I
have many gaps I'd like to fill in my knowledge of Christianity and
Islam, my knowledge of Judaism has always been one of complete
ignorance. This is mainly due to the convoluted nature of their Holy
Books (such as the Torah, the TaNaKh, the Talmud, the Mishnah, the
Midrash etc) which I am still having trouble deciphering, but which I
feel I'll be one step closer to grasping by the end of this semester.
I learned, long ago, not to equate Judaism with Zionism, but did not
entirely understand what separated the two as a result of my
confusion over whether the Jews were primarily an 'ethnicity' or a
'religion.' With the help of this class, I've come to the tentative
conclusion that the Jews—by and large—are a bit of both, but
primarily neither.
Question: “What
challenges did Hellenism bring to Judaism, and how did Judaism
respond? Note the groups and the changes in Jewish ideas.”
Hellenism
had a profound effect on Judaism as a whole. Not only did the Jews
begin to adopt Hellenistic mannerisms, they also began a
cross-cultural synthesis between Jewish and Hellenistic thought. This
is illustrated in the writings of Philo, a Hellenistic Jewish
philosopher who lived in the ancient Jewish diaspora of Alexandria.
It is also touched on to a lesser extent in the writings of
Maimonides, who was born in Cordoba at the beginning of Moorish Iberian rule (and thus also absorbed much in the way of Islamic
thought and mannerisms). By the third century BCE, knowledge of the
Hebrew language had declined so dramatically that the Bible was
translated into Greek (called the Septuagint).
Judaism
responded in fractalized ways to Hellenization depending on the group
or subgroup. Some acquiesced and began to adapt, whilst others
continued to believe Hellenization and the Greek rule of the Jewish
homeland was an abomination that must eventually be ended. After a
century of Greek hegemony, a change in dynasty from the Ptolemies
(descendants of one of Alexander's generals) to the Seleucid's (the
rulers of Syria) finally predicated this end. The Seleucid's
bastardized the sacred Jewish Temple by transforming it into a shrine
to Zeus. This ignited the Maccabean revolt, which was successful in
expelling the Greeks from Palestine and reestablishing a Jewish
state. This victory is still celebrated today through the tradition
of Hanukkah.
Week
4
General Insights:
It is common knowledge that the Jews have a long and illustrated
history of marginalization and persecution—more than a few cases of
which lead to either expulsion (from post-Moorish Spain and, at one
time, even England) or genocide (in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia).
What seems to be historically taken for granted is the grand scale
upon which those of Jewish belief or ethnic connection were forcibly
removed from Spain in the 15th century, both as preamble
to and because of the Spanish Inquisition. The expulsion was so rapid
and chaotic, in fact, that in 1492 when Christopher Columbus was
setting off to find an alternative passage to India (and accidentally
came upon North America—or the Caribbean, to be exact), he had to
launch his voyage from a quiet southern port because most of the
major Spanish ports were so clogged with forced Jewish immigrants.
Most of these immigrants found refuge in states under the religious
authority of Islam—such as the Ottoman Empire—and began to
develop new twists on their ethnic and religious identities, as well
as work to the benefit of their new respective homelands.
Personally, it still perplexes me as to why Jews were always
specifically targeted as scapegoats. I've heard many different
theories on the matter, the most unlikely of which are such
theocratic assumptions as “God is punishing the Jewish people,”
or that the Jews are at the center of a worldwide conspiracy tocontrol the financial system and such... but others, that do make
socioreligious and economic sense, include the observation that the
Jewish people (especially in Medieval Christiandom) were marginalized
to such great degrees that they were either forced or decided to
reside in walled ghettos surrounded by bigotry and paranoid
superstition. This marginalization led to the development of a very
self-sufficient and introverted culture that struggled with all of
its might to resist the political and religious forces demanding its
extinction. This magnified the external perception of peculiarity in
the eyes of non-Jews, and made them a 'sore thumb' in many societies
looking for scapegoats to ease any sense of personal or collective
responsibility. This is, quite plainly, what happened in Nazi
Germany.
Question: “Is mysticism a comfortable fit for Judaism, or is
something like the Kabala, way out in ‘left field’?”
Mysticism, by my standard interpretation, is a good spin to have on
any religion. Orthodox literalism is bogged down in useless rhetoric,
committing itself to enforcing abstract laws of the spirit as opposed
to embracing the fact that spirituality is an individual experience
beyond the realm of verbal expression.
In and of itself, Kabala is an incredibly interesting take on the
Jewish religion, but in its scope of articulation, it has developed
its own specific dogmas and orthodox superstitions (such as the
numerological aspect which stinks of a certain form of
pseudoscience).
By contrast to orthodox Judaism, I would have to assert that Kabala
and other such mystic traditions are radical exceptions to what
appears to be very strict rules (hence why the rabbinic movement
holds such contention against it) but expresses a more realistic
version of and expectation towards religious “truth.” It's brazen
cosmological assertion that it holds the key to a form of
enlightenment, however, brings it closer to the same orthodoxy it
seemed keen to allegorically reinterpret.
