Sacred Fragments – Explorations of Jewish Belief
Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
Jewish Shamanism
MAGIC OF THE ORDINARY: RECOVERING THE SHAMANIC IN JUDAISM, R. GERSHON
WINKLER ...................................................................................................................................................................2
JEWISH SHAMANISM? ................................................................................................................................................2
MYSTERY OF THE VOID .............................................................................................................................................4
THE SOUL KNOWS: SHAMANIC HEALING IN THE JUDAIC TRADITION ...................................................................... 17
“RE/MEMBERING NATURE”, R. RAMI SHAPIRO .......................................................................................... 25
FROM THE WISDOM OF THE JEWISH SAGES ............................................................................................................. 25
RE/MEMBERING NATURE ........................................................................................................................................ 25
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Sacred Fragments – Explorations of Jewish Belief
Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism, R. Gershon Winkler
Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism, R. Gershon Winkler
Jewish Shamanism?
The notion of Jewish shamanism may seem like an oxymoron to a lot of people, but it
happens to be an integral part of the Jewish tradition that has been suppressed for centuries.
Driven from its ancient sojourns in the fresh air of earth and sky, it is now confined to crowded,
inaccessible texts that are as unintelligible in English translations as they are in the Aramaic and
Hebraic original. What’s even more tragic is that the information lies suffocating in the dust of
libraries and archives, in books and in manuscripts, often on the very shelves of those same
scholars who dismiss the notion altogether. But now … I [reintroduce the] teachings from
ancient Jewish mystery wisdom that shatter the Judeo-Christian fiction. I talk about animal
medicine, stones having soul, the powers and colors of the four directions, and other such wild
stuff that appears to align Judaism more with Native American spirituality than with Christianity.
… So, whatever happened to all this purported Jewish shamanistic stuff? The
disappearance of the aboriginal Jewish mindset and wisdom is easily traced to the deadly
campaigns waged against sorcery and witchcraft that cost the lives of millions since the period of
the Crusades. Yet even the Church’s war against sorcery and shamanism, successful amongst
numerous European tribes, failed abysmally amongst the scattered Jewish populations, who held
tenaciously to their traditions, of which an integral part remained their mystery wisdom, or
kabbalah.
… But in order to survive, the Jewish people had to compromise. For example,
Jews had to tone down the roles of their women in religious life and function to avoid suspicions
of witchcraft … Likewise, especially by the eleventh century, the Jews had to fold up much of
their kabbalistic tradition and practice, and stow it either in the disguise of innocent hymns or in
cryptic oral transmissions confined to a select few. …
Unfortunately, most Jews and certainly most Christians are completely ignorant of the
Talmud, the Midrash, and other oral traditions of scriptural interpretation and qualification that
accompanied the Hebrew scriptural writ since its inception. …
The fact is that acts of sorcery fill much of the narrative in the Hebrew Scriptures:
Abraham winning a war against four kingdoms with the aid of only three hundred and eighteen
schleppers, or Moses turning his walking stick into a serpent and drawing water out of rocks, or
Elijah and Elisha resurrecting the dead, and so on. …
Jewish magic was rooted in Jewish tradition and Jewish sorcerers were humble, pious
individuals, who were well versed in the tenets of the Jewish faith and their proper observance.
Within the ranks of these wonder-workers were scholarly men and women who were thoroughly
trained in Hebrew and Aramaic and an understanding of the oral and written traditions of the
kabbalah. Such knowledge enabled them to invoke the Sacred Names so as to effect
metaphysical phenomena whether magically healing wounds or concocting love potions.1
Jewish sorcery, however, is not confined to the wisdom of alchemy or the paranormal.
Like many other shamanic traditions, the Jewish shamanic tradition teaches about the Four
1
The Crucified Jew, by Dr. David Cohn-Sherbok [William B. Eardmans Publishing Co. in association with
American Interfaith Institute and the World Alliance of Interfaith Organizations] 1997; page 59
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Sacred Fragments – Explorations of Jewish Belief
Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism, R. Gershon Winkler
Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
Directions,2 and the medicine attributes of animals, plants, and minerals.3 It also emphasizes the
sacredness of the earth, and that all organisms, even stars and planets, are imbued by the Creator
with a divine consciousness.4 Every blade of grass is empowered by a spirit being.5 All trees
speak to one another,6 and all rocks and plants have healing powers that can be accessed through
their spirits.7 Now, here again it’s a matter of semantics. If I would say “angels” instead of
“spirits” it would sound more kosher to a lot of people. In the Hebrew written and oral traditions,
however, angels are often referred to as ruchot, or “spirits.”8 Not unlike many other shamanic
traditions, Judaism believes in a parallel universe, that the spirit realm and the physical realm
share the same reality,9 separated only by what Jewish tradition calls the par’gawd, or: “veil of
illusion.”10
These are not just abstract teachings or theoretical homiletics for you to now explore via
the clues furnished in my endnotes. They are real teachings by real people who were real,
practicing Jews who actually lived and thought this way of being in the world, who had the
consciousness of experiencing magic in everything. They drummed and chanted themselves into
ecstatic states, and invoked spirit beings to access the spirit realm. Because these entities flow
constantly between both realms as the Creator’s messengers, capable of delivering from one
realm to the other with great ease. Accordingly, the Hebrew word for angel is mal’ach, which
means: “messenger.”
When I walk in the wilderness around my home and I pass a stone, and the stone catches
my eye, I can simply notice it and keep walking, or I can acknowledge a still small voice deep
deep inside me that beckons me toward that stone, that is communicating to me the desire of that
stone to have me engage it. If I pay attention in that moment to that ever so gentle, almost
dormant “pull” toward the stone, and then sit by the stone or lie down beside it, I will enter into
relationship with its spirit. Because that stone exists only because it is enlivened by the same
breath of Creator that is willing me, too, into being. The act of the manifestation of that will is, in
essence, the messenger, or spirit, of the Source of that will.
Jewish shamanism involves, therefore, engaging various spirit beings, either through
meditative trances or through the invocation of any variety of Sacred Names that serve to call
into being specific changes in the external environment. Jewish shamanism is also about a way
of thinking, a way of being in the world, a way of consciousness that perceives magic in the
ordinary, miracle in the “natural course of events” Where most people will be awestruck at the
sight of a passing comet, the Jewish shaman will be awestruck at the sight of a fallen leaf. It is
about engaging the Creator in clear and open relationship in the course of which the veil between
spirit and matter grows thinner and thinner. It is also about engaging the Creation in clear and
open relationship during the course of which we no longer experience ourselves as observers of
2
Sefer HaZohar, Vol. 1, folio 130b
Midrash Tana D’bei Eliyahu 1:8
4
Maimonides’ Mishnah Torah, Hil’chot Y’sodei Ha Torah 3:9
5
Sefer Gematri’ot; Sefer HaZohar, Vol. 1, folio 251a
6
Midrash B’reishis Rabbah 13:2
7
Sefer HaZohar, Vol. 2, 80b
8
Book of Psalms 104:4
9
Maharal in G’vurat Hashem, Hak’damah Sh’niyah, p.7
10
Babylonian Talmud, B’rachot 18b; Sefer HaZohar, Vol. 2, folio 255b
3
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Sacred Fragments – Explorations of Jewish Belief
Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism, R. Gershon Winkler
Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
this wondrous planet, but as integral components of it. …
What [the remaining kabbalistic and mystical] texts most importantly demonstrate is that
in its aboriginal form Jewish spirituality has less to do with religion than it does with direct,
uninhibited experience with Creator through Creation. To the contrary, religious dogma and
practice are given a back seat to the more immediate emphasis on divine experience through the
magic of living, of breathing, and of all the elements of existence in both their spiritual and
physical manifestations. Religion as a focus is a whole new experience for Judaism whose
primordial shapers would have found the concept totally alienating and antithetical to the very
soul of their message.
By the eighteenth century, writes Professor William Nicholls, “Religion, in the new
narrow sense borrowed from Christianity, became central to [the Jewish people’s] understanding
of what it meant to be Jewish, in ways in fact not traditional for them at all.” What was once a
holistic spirit path that encompassed all the nuances and dynamics of the spirituality of earth and
body had over the centuries mutated into a parochial focus on religion as an institution by itself.
… The Jewish people is an earth-based femini-conscious people that believes in a God
who cares as deeply for a worm as for a person, and as deeply for a person who does not believe
in God as for one who does.11 We are a people blessed with a very ancient and rich shamanic
tradition and consciousness, with numerous practices that promote respect for the earth and her
creations, such as leaving the land to rest every seventh year,12 leaving your horse or ox to rest
every seventh day,13 waving palm branches with myrtle and willow twigs to the four directions
during the autumn celebration of the harvest season,14 jumping and chanting under the stars at the
first sliver of the new moon phase,15 and so on. This was once a very shamanic religion, one that
in its raw original form would today be pronounced paganistic and pantheistic, and rightfully so.
The Israelite does not distinguish between a living and a lifeless nature. A stone is not
merely a lump of material substance. It is, like all living things, an organism with
peculiar forces of a certain mysterious capacity only known to him that is familiar with
it.... The earth is a living thing....
The Israelites do not acknowledge the distinction between the psychic and the corporeal.
Earth and stones are alive, imbued with a soul, therefore able to receive mental subjectmatter and bear the impress of it. The relation between the earth and its owner is a
covenant-relation, a psychic community, and the owner does not solely prevail in the
relation. The earth has its nature, which makes itself felt and demands respect.16
Mystery of the Void
There are two basic kinds of religious systems: one seeks to discover God in the great
unknowable beyond; … others seek to discover God within the very fabric of Creation …
11
Midrash Asseret HaDibrot, Ch. 2, end of para. 1
Book of Leviticus 25:2-5
13
Book of Exodus 20:11
14
Book of Leviticus 23:40; Maimonides Mishnah Torah, Hil’chot Lulav 7:9
15
Babylonian Talmud, Sof'rim 20:2
16
Johannes Pederson in Israel: Its Life and Culture [Oxford University Press, 1959], pp. 55 and 479
12
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Sacred Fragments – Explorations of Jewish Belief
Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism, R. Gershon Winkler
Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
Judaism began in the path of the latter as the ancient rabbis taught and practiced a way of
consciousness that was very much rooted in down-home earthiness. They saw the physical as
sacred, as the very vehicle, or merkava of the spiritual. The divine, they taught, could be
experienced only through its physical manifestation, this being the earth and all her creatures,
and the stars that glitter in the evening sky. They considered the earth and her children far more
representative of the so-called Word of God than the excessively revered scriptures penned by
their prophets: “By the resonance of Infinite One were the skies made, and by the wind of Its
breath were all of their forces created.... For [Creator] spoke, and it came into being; [Creator]
instructed, and it arose.”17
Said Rabbi Tan chum bar Chiyya (third century): Greater is the falling of rains than the
Giving of the Torah, for the Giving of the Torah was a joyful event to the Israelites alone,
while the falling of the rains is a joyful event for all the world, for the domestic animals,
the wild animals, and for the birds, as is written: “You fulfill the earth and her
desires.”18
Sadly, merkava mysticism has over the centuries gotten translated to imply mysticism
confined to the celestial domain rather than to the earthly domain. “The whole earth,” wrote the
fifth-century B.C.E. Yeshayahu the Vision Bringer, “is filled with the Glory of Infinite One.”19
… Not by accident is the ancient Hebraic word for universe olam the same as the Hebraic word
for concealment, for Infinite One is concealed within the universe:20 “For I am Infinite One,
Who dwells in the innermost parts of the earth”21
Said Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai to Rabbi Eliezer ben Arukh (first century B.C.E.): “If
you are going to share the mystery teachings of the merkava, then I must get off of my
donkey and sit upon the earth.”22
Rabbi Yochanan’s consciousness wore no fig leaves of separation between spirit and matter,
between Creator and Creation. Rather, his perception of the divine was mud and rock. The
donkey was a creature of the earth, not the earth herself. To remain seated on the donkey while
listening to the mystery teachings of the merkava, of the physical vehicle that garbed the divine,
was to remain separated from her core truth. Therefore he felt a dear need to sit on the earth
herself. Moses, too, was instructed to remove the impediments that separated him from the
sacredness of the earth, even if it was only the sandals on his feet: “Remove your sandals from
your feet, for the place upon which you are standing is sacred earth."23
The ancient Hebrew scriptures … heralds the human being not as an anthropocentric
creature superior to all of creation but as a creature comprised of all of creation. Commenting on
the scriptural verse: “And Source of Powers said, ‘Let us make the earth being in our image.”24
17
Book of Psalms 33:9
Midrash Tehilim 117:1 and Book of Psalms 65:10
19
Book of Isaiah 6:3
20
Jeremiah 23:24; Sefer HaBahir 10; Midrash D’varim Rabah 2:26
21
Book of Exodus 8:18
22
Babylonian Talmud, Chagigah 14b
23
Book of Exodus 3:5
24
Book of Genesis 1:26
18
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Sacred Fragments – Explorations of Jewish Belief
Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism, R. Gershon Winkler
Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
the ancient rabbis taught that “When it came time to create the human, the Creator addressed all
that had been made until that moment, both in the sky and in the earth, and said to them: ‘This
final creature is too complex for any of you to bring forth alone. Therefore, let us all join
together in its creation. All of you join in making its body and I will join you in making its
spirit.’”25
This implies that the Creator addressed all of creation before making the human,
meaning that in creating the human, Infinite One incorporated all of the attributes of all
the animals and plants and minerals and so on that had been created up to this point. In
each of us, then, are the attributes and powers of all the creatures of the earth.26
A lot of bible-babblers find such concepts pantheistic and pagan. But ancient Judaism is very
comfortable with it, even in its bible, for it does not view Nature as expendable to human
spiritual growth but as essential for it. The ninth-century B.C.E. Hebrew chieftain, Sh’lomo, was
lauded for his expertise in the ways of both flora and fauna. The Jewish scriptures recount how
this spiritual giant whom God called “My beloved son”27 became a renowned teacher not of
theology and divinity, but of botany and zoology: ‘And he spoke of trees, from the cedar that is
in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that sprouts forth from the wall; he spoke also of the beasts,
and of the birds, and of creeping crawlies, and of fishes:28
Another ancient teacher, Ee-yowv (fourteenth century B.C.E.) wrote:
But ask now of the wild animals and they shall teach you; and the birds of the sky shall
tell it to you; or speak to the earth, for she shall guide you; and the fishes of the sea will
declare it to you...29
The Hebrew scriptures throughout promote a consciousness about how trees and animals
and snowflakes and rocks all relate to the Creator no less than does the hoity-toity human: “All
of your creations praise you;”30 “Praise the Creator, O sun and moon, all you stars of light, you
skies above the skies, you waters above the heavens; and praise the Creator from the earth, all
you sea monsters and all creatures of the deep; fire, hail, snow and vapor, stormy winds fulfilling
Its word; mountains and hills, fruit trees and all cedars; beasts, cattle, creeping-crawlies, and
winged beings ... all of them praise the Infinite One;”31 “The mountains and the hills shall break
forth into song before you, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.”32
The Hebrew scriptures also emphasize how the Creator’s concern extends to all creatures:
“God gives to the beast its food, and to the young ravens who cry,”33 providing rain, for example,
not solely in the merit of humans but for the sake of the earth herself. “You have remembered the
earth, and watered her, enriching her with the river of the Source of Powers that is so full of
Sefer HaZohar, Midrash HaNe’elam 16b
Seventeenth-century Rabbi Moshe Cordovero in Shi'ur HaKomah, Torah, beginning of Ch. 4
27
Book of 2 Samuel 12:24-25; Book of 1 Chronicles 22:10 and 28:6
28
Book of 2 Kings 5:13
29
Book of Job 12:7-9
30
Book of Psalms 145:10
31
Book of Psalms 148:3-4 and 7-11
32
Book of Isaiah 55:12
33
Book of Psalms 145:9 and 147:9
25
26
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Sacred Fragments – Explorations of Jewish Belief
Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism, R. Gershon Winkler
Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
water ... watering her ridges abundantly ... you make her soft with showers; you bless the growth
thereof ... The pastures, the meadows, the hills and the valleys – they shout with joy, yea, they
sing!”34; and “Who prepares rain for the earth; who makes the mountains spring with grass.”35
And for those who assume that these quotes indirectly imply rains for the sake of the
human, the ancient rabbis noted that rain falls even for the exclusive sake of a single blade of
grass in the far reaches of the earth far from any human inhabitation.36
When King David completed his composition of the psalms, he bragged to God and said:
“Creator of the Universe! Is there any creature in your world that has sung praises unto
your Name more than I have?” Suddenly, a toad leaped up on a rock in front of him and
croaked: ‘Don’t let it go to your head, for I sing far more praises to God in a single day
than you could in a lifetime!”37
Jewish shamanic tradition is replete with teachings about how the mysteries of the human
life journey are concealed in the ways of animals. The thirteenth-century Rabbi Shlomo ibn
Aderet put it this way: “The souls of animals are sparks of human souls.”38 The sixteenth-century
Rabbi Moshe of Cordova wrote: “All humans are endowed with the attributes of all animals.”39
According to the Book of the Zohar, dating at least to the thirteenth century and largely based on
millennia of earlier oral kabbalistic traditions, the souls of animals and humans are imprinted in
each other.40 Each of us, taught the second-century Rabbi Yosei the Galilean, walks this earth
endowed with the powers and attributes of all creations, of every horse, of every leaf, of every
rock; of both spirit and matter, of sky and land, even of wind and water.41
The first-century B.C.E. Hillel the Elder is recorded to have mastered communication
with trees, grasses, spirits, and animals.42 The eighteenth-century Rabbi Shlomo of Karlin taught
that to fully serve God one has to also serve God in the language of all the grasses, the animals,
the trees, and the stones.43
The physical universe is not secondary to the spiritual, is not dispensable to our soul
journey. It is essential. It is a requisite. It is the mean by which we germinate. It is the rich soil in
which the seed that we are can sprout to its fullest realization. Don’t take this realm of matter
lightly. To your eyes it might come across as mundane. But concealed within its dynamics are
the clues you need to bring yourself to spiritual enlightenment; the sustenance you need to
nourish your soul. It can’t be done in some otherworldly Heaven or Paradise.
They asked Rachumai (first century):
“Rabbi, where is Paradise?”
34
Book of Psalms 65:10-14
Book of Psalms 147:8
36
Jerusalem Talmud, Ta’anit 3:2 and 3; Book of Job 37:13
37
Midrash Yalkot Shim’oni on Psalms 150:6
38
Manuscript Parma—de Rossi 1221, folio 288b
39
Shiyur Komah, p.23
40
Sefer HaZohar, Vol. 1, folio 20b
41
Babylonian Talmud, Avot D’Rebbe Natan, end of chapter 31
42
Babylonian Talmud, Sof'rim 16:9
43
Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim [Schocken Books], Vol. 1, p. 275
35
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Sacred Fragments – Explorations of Jewish Belief
Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism, R. Gershon Winkler
Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
He replied: “Here.”44
The Jewish shaman, then, sees this world not as a brief one-night stand, a “quickie” for
the soul, but as a sacred, very magical realm of experience not otherwise available on other socalled loftier planes. Because life is a gift, not a task. If we see it as an assignment, and not as the
magnificent gift that it is, then we walk the journey blindfolded, and at the end of our life we will
remove the blindfold only to discover that we haven’t gotten anywhere.
Reincarnation would then go something like this: If I were to leave this lifetime never
having tasted a good knish, some part of me will feel a knish-void once I’ve left the physical
world, and will yearn to come back and haunt some deli, either as a dybbuk or as a nudnik. A
dybbuk is a soul that refuses to leave the physical world because it feels a knish void. And so it
roams the planet looking for some hapless schmeggeg who is also looking for a good knish, and
possesses that person. Maybe together they stand a better chance of finding the right deli. A
nudnik is the one who’s running amok with a compulsive lifetime obsession with the Search for
the Holy Knish. Nudniks and dybbuks attract one another. And to some extent, we all go through
life juiced by a little of both these qualities.
In a like manner, transmigration would go something like this: If during my sojourn on
this plane I do not experience the magic of the corporeal beyond any other vehicle of experience
than my hoity-toity human consciousness, I will leave this world wanting, hungering, thirsting,
for the experience of this life in the consciousness of a rock, a tree, a goat, or whatever –
however many lifetimes it would take. I’ve got nothing but time because I am infinite.
Conventional Judaic mysticism teaches that we come back again and again in order to “fix”
something that went amiss in our soul development on this plane; shamanic Jewish mysticism
teaches that we return to experience what we didn’t, not as some punitive make-up assignment
but as an opportunity to fulfill a personal yearning. In everyday here-and-now life as well, we
don’t know what we’ve missed until we no longer have access to it. And then we wish we did.
… How many times have you walked right by an opportunity to salivate with delight, to
enjoy something delicious, to flavor a gift of the Universe, the fragrance of a flower, the touch of
a lover? In the future, taught the third-century Rabbi Zechariah, we will have to account before
the Creator for all the pleasures that we wanted to enjoy, were permitted to enjoy, and had the
opportunity to enjoy, but didn’t.45
The down-home physical universe, therefore, is magical, not “natural.” Natural is an
excuse to not explore any further. After all, it’s natural. Magical, on the other hand, lures us into
the realm of possibility, nurtures our fantasy and fires up our imagination; it brings us to
aliveness. Being alive does not mean learning the rules and sticking to them. It means learning
the rules and dallying beyond them, walking the path and daring to also see what is beyond the
path. Moses does not get his revelatory experience herding his flock where he was “supposed to”
It happens to him when he wanders off the beaten path to discover the Magic: “And the Creator
saw that he strayed from the path in order to see the spectacle of the flaming bush that was not
being consumed, and then spoke to him....”46
Had Moses seen the burning bush from a mindset of “natural” he would have just run
44
Sefer HaBahir, Mishnah 31
Jerusalem Talmud, Kidushin, end of chapter 4
46
Book of Exodus 3:4
45
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Sacred Fragments – Explorations of Jewish Belief
Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism, R. Gershon Winkler
Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
over to throw some sand on the fire and gone about his business sheep herding. But Moses was a
shaman. He had been trained during his forty years as an Egyptian prince, and during his years as
a warrior in Ethiopia, and now as a son-in-law and apprentice to Jethro the Shaman of Midian.
His eyes had been trained to see beyond the obvious, to look for allusion in all illusion, to
discover meaning in all subtlety, mystery in all conspicuousness, sacredness in all mundaneness.
And so he looked not at a bush engulfed in flames but at a bush and at a fire dancing their
separateness in unison. He saw both their distinctiveness and their oneness. And in that way of
perceiving, the Spirit that harmonizes all opposites spoke to all of him, to Moses the finite person
and to Moses the infinite spirit: “And the Creator called to him from within the bush, and said
‘Moses, Moses!’”47
Moses does not respond with, “Yeah, who is it and what do you want?” The shaman does
not ask of the mystery but responds to it with a conscious sense of presence in relationship to the
mystery. Moses’ response, accordingly, is simply: “I am here.”48 The shaman in the Judaic
tradition does not rush into a spiritual experience like a famished desert traveler arriving at an
oasis. Moses is not desperate for a vision because he knows that looking for one often gets in the
way of seeing one.
When we put all our energies into seeking we risk not finding, we risk rushing right past
it. “If you grab for a lot, you’ve come away with nothing.”49 Joseph Campbell used to put it this
way: “Religion often gets in the way of religious experience.” …
… It is through the vehicle of our spirits that we achieve transcendence, but it is through
the vehicle of our bodies that we facilitate it. And the spirit lives by a completely different modus
operandi than does the body. It does not determine its experience solely by what is seen or heard,
by what is sensed, as does the body. The spirit determines experience by resonation. The sound
of wind, for example, sounds to our bodies but resonates to our spirit. …
There is no speech, there are no words, the voices are not heard.50
Aboriginal Judaism is a mindset that views the earth and all of Creation as organic, as
alive, as holding within it pieces to the great puzzle we’re all trying to complete during our life
journeys. Everything, this mindset implies, is a sacred conduit for divine revelation. The Creator
Spirit, in other words, communicates with us through the medium of Creation, not just through
“prophets” For the Jewish shaman, the Creator communicates in ways that are hidden, that are
more like gestures, through the unknowable, the undefinable, the mystery. It could be the
flapping of a raven’s wings that catches your attention, or a stone rolling down a hill, or a sudden
gust that forces you to hold on to your toupee. It is a communication that “is uttered not in
sounds but in thoughts, in signs that [humans] must learn to perceive.”51 …
To live one’s life having interpreted the experience in only one way is linear, is
antithetical to the infinity nature of soul. Our life, like the Torah scroll, has no vowels. It is left to
each of us to determine our life pronunciation, our story, our interpretation of every turn of our
47
Book of Exodus 3:4
Book of Exodus 3:5
49
Babylonian Talmud, Er’chin 4b
50
Book of Psalms 19:3
51
Abraham Joshua Heschel in God in Search of Man, p. 145
48
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Sacred Fragments – Explorations of Jewish Belief
Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism, R. Gershon Winkler
Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
life cycle. To live solely as a human is to live half-assed. We must at times also get into the
consciousness of a mountain, a valley, a sagebrush, a fly, for all creations mirror something
about us that is germane to the fullest realization of our Self.
One of the most ancient and therefore most unintelligible text of Jewish mysticism is
Sefer Yetsirah, or “Book of Formation.” … [It] begins with a brief narrative of the very
beginning of existence:
The Infinite One ... hollowed out existence with thirty-two pathways of wondrous mystery
wisdom and then sculpted the universe within three spheres: sefer, s’por, sippur – text,
number, and story.
… Where Text is the fact of life, and Number is the process of life, Story is the mystery of
life.
… This mystery teaching alludes also to the Four Worlds mentioned often in kabbalistic
literature: atz’ilut, b'riyah, yetsirah, aseeyah – Emanation, Formation, Creation, and Animation.
Thus the opening teaching of Sefer Yetsirah would read like this:
Infinite One hollowed out existence with thirty-two pathways of wondrous mystery
wisdom (emanation), and then sculpted the universe in three spheres: text (creation),
number (formation), and story (animation).
Shamanic practice requires a consciousness of all four worlds or dimensions of existence.
While you walk the earth in animation, be aware that you are being formed, and that your
formation is being created, and that your creation is being emanated. At your very root, then, you
are simply a thought. You’re not as sophisticated as you’re cracked up to be, and not nearly as
complicated as your therapist suggested. You are a thought. A figment of God’s imagination.
The Four Worlds are simultaneous phases, not successive. They are each translations of
the other. We exist in all four realms simultaneously. As you are reading this, in other words,
you are being thought, willed into existence, and hollowed out, carved, sculpted, and stirred,
animated, moved. You are text, number and story. You are creation in process, a flower
unfolding, a seed sprouting. You are a living paradox of no-thing and some-thing, of “what” and
“without what” of mah and b’lee mah. …
In the ancient language of the Jewish people, the four directions are referred to as ar’ba
ruchot, or “the four winds” and are not described in terms of latitudes or longitudes like north,
south, east, and west, but in terms of attributes. What we call North is tsahfon in Hebrew, which
means “[the place of] concealment”; West is ma’arav, which means “from [the place of]
blending”; South is nehggev, which means “[the place of] cleansing” or da'rom which means
“[the place] of rising”; and East is meez'rach, which means “from [the place of] shining, or
kehdem which means “[the place of] beginning.”
Each of the four winds, are also assigned an animal and a color: the eagle and the color
red in the Place of Concealment [north], the bull and the color black in the Place of Blending
[west], the human and the color white in the Place of Cleansing/Rising [south], the lion and the
color yellow in the Place of Shining/Beginning [east].52 Upward is ma’aleh, or, literally: the
52
Thirteenth-century Rabbi Yitzchak of Acco in Sefer M’irat Eynayim, Bamid’bar, beginning; eighteenth-century
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Sacred Fragments – Explorations of Jewish Belief
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Climbing Place, and Downward is mahtah, or, literally: the Tribal Place. The life-beings of
Upward are of the tsowmeyach, the “Sprouting Beings” as in trees, grasses, and flowers, whose
direction of evolution is skybound. The life beings of Downward are of the dowmem, the “Still
Beings” as in stones, mountains, and minerals, whose direction of evolution is earthbound.
Flourishing in the spheres between sky and earth are the chayyah, or “Wild Life” and the nefesh
m’dahber, the “Speaking Soul,” or human.
All of the four winds join together to form the singular spirit that animates all of
creation.53 The ancient rabbis taught that the human is created from the spirit of the four winds
and from earth taken from all four corners of the planet.54
Judaic shamanism is not solely about spirituality because its discussion of spirituality is
contingent upon its acknowledgment of physicality, that both are interdependent with one
another in the earth realm, that both are nurtured from the realm of nothingness, the realm of
b’lee mah of Without What, even while they thrive in the realm of somethingness. Because,
again, the Four Worlds of existence are simultaneous. In other words, the Creator did not say “let
there be” six thousand years ago or fifteen billion years ago, but is rather saying it right now.
Every moment, we are being emanated, willed into existence across the simultaneous stages of
unfolding known as the Four Worlds.
According to the eighteenth-century Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Barditchev, the YH of the
tetragrammaton connotes nothingness, and the VH connotes somethingness.55 Somethingness
represents the plane of existence that we know as the natural world, and nothingness represents
the plane of existence, that is the spirit world. …
[Creator] formed substance out of chaos, and made what was not into what is.56
The nothingness is the world of the shaman, and it is found in the mystery, in the not
knowing. Again, the Hebrew word for the physical universe is olam, which also means “hidden”
because the universe hides the Creator,57 who can be discovered in the discovery of the marvels
of the universe, and therefore only sought, not found, because the marvels of Creation can never
be fathomed in a single lifetime. Even after thousands of years of discovery and wonder about
nature, neither has been exhausted. There will always be more to uncover, more of nature left to
wonderment. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it: “It is within man’s power to seek [God];
it is not within his power to find Him.”58
“There are ten sephirot (ever-spiraling spheres of divine manifestation)” reads the most
ancient of Jewish shamanic texts, “without What. Silence your mouth from speaking of it, and
your heart from thinking of it. And if your mouth runs to speak it, or your heart runs to think it,
return to The Place.”59 Jewish mystery wisdom is then about not knowing, not trying to peg
something down, not giving form to that which has none, not designating finiteness to that which
Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna in his commentary on Sefer Yetsirah.
53
Sefer HaZohar, Vol. 1, folio 235a and 239a, based on Book of Ezekiel, Ch. 37:9
54
Sefer HaZohar Vol. 1, folio 130b, and Vol. 2, folios 13a and 23b
55
Kedushat Levi, B’reishis, p. 5
56
Sefer Yetsirah 2:6
57
Jeremiah 23:24; Sefer HaBahir 10; Midrash D'varim Rabah 2:26
58
God in Search of Man, p. 147
59
Sefer Yetsirah 1:8
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is infinite. The mystery of bird is to be discovered in not trying to identify what kind of bird it is
but in hearing or seeing the bird as is, period. “And if your heart runs” if you become distracted
from that kind of consciousness by the more dominant consciousness of definition and name,
with which you were reared and schooled all your life – ”return to The Place”; as soon as you
become aware that you’ve gone from kabbalist to zoologist – go home. Return to your Center.
Not that there is anything wrong, shamanically or otherwise, in studying scientifically the
nature of bird, for example, but to experience without the knowing attained from study, is to
experience a whole other dimension of being, in self and in other. This is the way of the shaman:
that regardless of the amount and depth of knowledge one has, that one realizes it is only
speculative, only guesswork, only theory; that even when proven, it is subject to disproof that
even when proven beyond all mathematical testing, it is absolute only in the realm in which it
was proven, but that the bigger picture includes a realm that is beyond the givens, beyond the
axioms, beyond the immutable facts of life: the realm of Story. This realm is accessible only
when we relinquish the absoluteness of the known, even if for a moment, in order to create space
for the unknown.
The mystery is in the not knowing, in the non-thinking, in the non-doing. Each time we
classify something, we weaken our grasp of it. If we say the sky is blue, we become in that
moment color blind. If we say we’re all one, we begin to splinter. If we say we’re all different,
we turn into an indiscernible glob.
The power lies in the mystery, in that which is unfathomable, in that which is
unknowable, in that which is concealed. Too much definition, study, pinpointing and pegging
down therefore diminishes the power because it diminishes the mystery, the awe, the wonder.
Judaism was therefore against only such occult arts that endeavored to break the code and
fathom the mystery.60 Nor is the mystery contained in nature, but rather nature herself is part of
the mystery.
The Jewish prayer recited before one eats bread does not include the wheat or the baker
or the yeast or the process that makes grain coalesce into bread. Rather, it acknowledges solely
the mystery of bread itself, not the why's and how's but the Wow!; not the process but the story.
Translated from the Hebrew, the prayer reads: “Source of blessing are you ... who brings forth
bread from the earth!” Poof! The consciousness evoked here is the magic of transformation, of
earth becoming bread, a quality of consciousness that brings us to a place of pure simplicity,
achieved by not getting hopelessly entangled in the process to the neglect of the purpose. A lot of
us get stuck in the “how to” and “have to” and miss out on the magic.
The “No Thing” is the void where space is left for us mortals to so connect ourselves
with the Creator that we can evoke supernatural feats from splitting seas to healing to
resurrecting the dead. This void is known, again, as the b’lee mah or “that which is without
anything."61 More than a magical space in non-space, it represents a consciousness that all
existence is illusion, a figment of the Creator’s imagination, so to speak, and that in reality eyn
zu-lo-to, “there is nothing else but [God].”62 Our reality, in other words, exists solely in
relationship to the existence of the One who created it and is therefore contingent moment-toMidrash B’reishis Rabah 1:5
Sefer Yetsirah, throughout
62
Book of Deuteronomy 4:39
60
61
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moment upon the Creator’s constant willing and imaging of our existence. Were God to cease for
a moment to think of you, you would be non-extant in that moment – Woosh! The concept of
“without what” originates in the scriptural Book of Job: "The earth hangs upon Without What.”63
When a man creates a structure of a sort from wood, the builder does not at that moment
create out of his own power the wood, but rather takes from trees that have already been
created and then arranges them into a structure. And after the completion of the construction, although the builder removes his power from it and walks off the structure
remains standing nevertheless. But the Sacred Wellspring (God) – just as at the onset of
creation brought forth worlds into being from absolutely nothing – likewise from then on,
every day and every moment, the whole cause of their existence, arrangement, and being,
is dependent solely upon the fact that the Creator is willfully influencing them every
single moment with the power to exist and with the nurturance of ever-renewing divine
light. And if the Creator were to withhold from them the power of the divine influence
even for so much as a fraction of a moment, all would be nothing and desolate.64
The shamanic mind does not assume anything, does not fall into the trap of the
Something that often appears to us in the guise of the Nothing. Rather, when you have seen the
face of God, know that you have not. When you have grasped the Mystery, gotten a handle on it,
know that it is only an illusion, that all that is graspable and experiential is illusion. One can
therefore live in the illusion of spiritual enlightenment without actually having achieved it. For
example, the ancient rabbis taught that the difference between Moses and the other Hebrew
prophets was that “the ‘Glass [separating the physical world from the spiritual world]’ was more
clear for Moses than for other prophets,”65 to which the eleventh-century Rabbi Shlomo ben
Yitzchak comments: “Other prophets looked through the ‘Glass’ and believed that they had seen
God when they had actually not, while Moses looked through the ‘Glass’ and knew that he had
not seen God.”
It takes an incredible clarity of mind, body, and spirit to know that you are not seeing
what you think you see. When you can’t quite peg it down, you are that much closer to having it,
because in that moment you are present with it, in the realm where such an encounter is possible.
You are then, in that moment between moments, dancing in the Mystery of the Void. It is there
that you will find the Power. It is there that you will find your Essential Self, as opposed to the
Molded Self fashioned by society, religion, education, and environmental influence.
The Jewish shaman, then, tries to walk always in the awareness of both the Something
and the Nothing; of that which is sensed and known, and that which is neither sensed nor known.
All of the shaman’s actions are rooted in the intention of harmonizing the paradox of the
Something and the Nothing, of the b’lee and the b’lee mah, of the What and the Without What,
the What being all the “stuff” that comprises our physical universe, and the Without What
referring to the Creator Spirit who is beyond stuff, beyond the time, space, and matter that
constitutes the physical universes. The ancient teachers therefore used the term yesh m’ayin –
63
Book of Job 26:7
Eighteenth-century Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin in Nefesh HaChayyim, 1:2, para. 1
65
Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 49b
64
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"Something from Nothing” – to describe creation.66 Somewhere between the yesh and the ayin
between the Something and the Nothing, lies the mystery of Life and the power to sidestep the
laws of nature, the Text, in order to effect supernal transformation, or Story, whether it is
achieving Nirvana or healing someone.
This mysterious Void Place is also known in Jewish mystical tradition as teheru67 a space
in non-space that is both void of God and yet filled with God. If teheru was only filled with God,
then nothing but God could exist, and if it was only void of God, then, too, could nothing exist.
So it is both void and filled, in the sense that it is just sufficiently void of God in order to allow
for the possibility of existence, and just sufficiently filled with God in order to allow for the
happening of existence.
The Creator Spirit itself is therefore referred to as being simultaneously hidden and
revealed.68 What we supposedly “know” about the Creator or attempt to describe regarding
“attributes” of the Creator, are but finite graspings at a mega-fraction of what we call God. Even
the infamous tetragrammaton – YHVH – the ineffable sacred Name of God in Judaic tradition,
pronounced only once a year in ancient times and only by the High Priest and only in the Holy of
Holies in the Great Temple of Jerusalem,69 is but a finite attempt to peg down the infinity of
God. But in no way does Judaism consider it THE name of God, for no name can hold within it
that which is infinite. God, Judaism teaches, is un-name-able, un-peg-able, un-define-able,
because not only is God infinite but also dynamic, eluding all attempts to attain a snapshot of a
moment or essence of what is God. Therefore, when Moses asked the Creator to divulge the God
Name, the Creator’s response was ehyeh asher ehyeh,70 which translates simultaneously: “I was
what I was, I am what I am, and I will be what I will be.”
You wish to know my name? According to the nature of my actions am I called. At times I
am called el shadai, or tz’vaot, or elo-heem. When I judge the creations, I am called eloheem; when I battle wrongness, I am called tz’vaot; when I suspend the sins of humanity,
I am called el shadai; and when I exercise compassion upon my worlds, I am called yhvh.
In other words, I was what I was, I am what I am, and I will be what I will be – according
to the nature of my actions am I called.71
The sacred tetragrammaton, believed by most Jews to be THE ultimate name of God, is a
word that at the same moment means the one that was, is, will be and is’es. In other words, it
describes the Creator as an Is-ing God, not a static God. Even so, writes the eighteenth-century
Rabbi Chayyim of Volozhin:
The Self-Essence of the Blessed Endless One is hidden beyond all that is hidden, and we
must not – heaven forbid! – purport to describe this Self-Essence even with the
tetragrammaton, and even with the yud within the Y of the YHVH. And that which is
comprehended somewhat by us, and we decorate this grasping with various God-Names
66
Sefer HaZohar, Vol. 3, folio 257b
Sefer HaZohar, Vol. 2, folio 277a
68
Sefer HaZohar, Vol. 1, folio 39b
69
Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 66a
70
Book of Exodus 3:14
71
Midrash Sh’mos Rabbah 3:6
67
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and Divine Attributes and the like – as we find in our Scriptures and in the various forms
of our prayers – these reflect only God’s relationship with the universes, and the
causative powers of Creation with which they are continuously imbued from the time
Creation first began.... And even [in invoking] the essential, singular Name YHVH itself
we are not connecting with the Selfhood-Essence of God but with that aspect of the
Blessing Source that is in relationship with the universes [as their Creator], as the Name
itself connotes: “The One Who Was, Is, Will Be, and Is’es All” – meaning that the Sacred
Wellspring is engaged willfully and intentionally with the universes to Is them and to
maintain their existence every moment.72
This explains the baffling response which the Hebrew ancestor Ya’akov receives from
the spirit being with whom he wrestles, after asking it to divulge its name to him: “Why do you
ask me for my name?”73 – about which the second-century Rabbi Abba Arecha comments in the
name of Rabbi Yosei bar Dowstai: “The angels have many names, according to their calling [in
the moment].... [Said the angel to Ya’akov] ‘I am puzzled [that you ask me my name] for I do
not know what my name is changing into in this very moment!”’74
The tetragrammaton, then, is the name not of God but of God’s relationship with the
universes as Creator with Creation. It was therefore the attributive God Name pronounced to
invoke the influence of Creator upon the nature of Creation, as in kabbalistic sorcery, and as in
the High Priest’s calling forth divine compassion on the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur. The
name YHVH is therefore considered extremely potent since it transcends the chash’mal, the fine
line where finiteneness ends and infinity begins, where Creator and Creation touch.
When one recites a prayer acknowledging God as the Source of whatever it is one is
about to partake of, it becomes in that moment more than a mere Blessed Art Thou but a drawing
out of life blessing from the source of all blessing. The Jewish tradition does not teach that God
is the source of life, but that the source of life is with God: “For with You dwells the wellspring
of Life”75; that the primary source of life is but a single aspect of God, who is in essence far
more than our finite experience of life and its source. “The matter of reciting a blessing implies
in no way a blessing-praise of God’s Selfhood-Essence – heaven forbid! heaven forbid! – for
God is far above any blessing-praise."76
… The meaning is more like: “Source of Blessing77 are You, the One Who Was, Is, Will
Be, and Is-es all existence, Who…” And by acknowledging the Creator as the Source, what gets
invoked, so to speak, is the dynamics of the Creator’s relationship with Creation vis-à-vis
whatever it is that needs to be manifested in the universe in that very moment.
Reciting a blessing over an apple you’re about to eat can be a mere “thanks” or it can be a
powerful incantation to draw forth the blessing of food to the planet from the Source of Blessing.
... Prayer is then a kind of welcoming of the Creator’s Will to be in relationship with
Creation. The more that Will is invited by prayer – which in one form or another is an
72
Nefesh HaChayyim 2:2, para2
Book of Genesis 32:30
74
Midrash B’reishis Rabbah 78:7
75
Psalms 36:10
76
Nefesh HaChayyim 2:2, para. 2
77
Sefer HaZohar, Vol. 2, folio 135b
73
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acknowledgment of God as Primary Source and Primary Cause – the more it becomes
manifested, the more the blessing chutes are opened. It isn’t that God needs acknowledgment or
else becomes slighted. Rather, it is that we need to engage a consciousness of acknowledgment
in order to access the gifts that are already awaiting us. A gift is a gesture of sentiment whose
intention is often far greater than the means chosen to express it. If I acknowledge the gifts of my
beloved, I experience far more than its finite physical expression. If I don’t acknowledge the
gifts of my beloved, then they are given to me nonetheless, but I lose out on untold myriad of
dividends that otherwise would have come with accessing the intention and quality of the gift
source.
The Creator’s blessings are constantly showering upon the planet and into our lives, but it
is our responsibility to invoke them, to acknowledge them with a quality that will manifest not
merely a sense of bare survival but a sense of love and relationship flow from and to the Source.
Water for drinking is bare necessity, water for a Jacuzzi is Blessing. Anything that is more than
what you essentially require for survival is the beginning of Blessing.78 No wonder that there are
people who live in material poverty and still feel “blessed” while there are people who have
more than what they need and feel lacking. The former receives what they have with
acknowledgment of its Source, and thereby experience the gift plus the much greater intention it
so poorly expresses, while the latter receives what they have without acknowledging its Source
and end up only with the expression, not the sentiment, not a sense of the aliveness of
relationship between God and them that is bubbling inside the gift. It is therefore not enough to
recite a blessing over a pizza as a way of thanking God. It is also important to hear in every bite
of the pizza a divine “Hello” the Creator reaching out to the Creation.
Therefore, sacred tasks and shamanic rites are performed only after reciting an invocation
of one’s intention to unify Creator with Creation, the Nothing with the Something: (l’sheym yeechud kud'sha b'reech hu u'shecheentey ahl y’dey ha-hu tah-mir v’ne-elam bid’chilu ur’cheemu
l’yacheyd shem yud-hey b’vav-hey) – “For the sake of unifying the Sacred Wellspring with the
shechinah (the divine feminine presence in the earth), through this act, disguised and concealed,
performed in awe and in love, to unify the name yh in vh.”79
[This] is a very powerful shamanic invocation used before one is about to perform a
sacred deed, whether visiting someone who is sick, setting out on an important journey,
experiencing a life cycle event, making love, and so on. It is important to clarify that in the
Judaic tradition sacredness is by no means synonymous with religiosity but connotes anything
that contributes to the aliveness and well-being of oneself or of others or of the planet. Going to
the bathroom, for example, is sacred. Making love because you truly love your partner, is sacred.
Taking in a sauna because you really cherish the gift of your body, is sacred. Cheering up a
sullen friend because you really care about them, is sacred.
… One should … not mistake Jewish shamanism as an ascetic, transcendent life path that
hones in on the Nothing to the dismissal of the Something. Again, the Jewish shaman walks the
fine line between both, recognizing the important roles that both realms play in the journey of the
Spirit. Neither realm is the main focus. Rather, it is the interplay of both that creates the magic of
16th century Rabbi Yehudah Loew of Prague in Tiferet Yisro‘el, Ch. 34, folio 99
17th century Rabbi Yeshayahu ben Avraham in Sh'nai Luchot HaB'rit, Sha'ar HaOti‘ot, Ot Aleph, Emet
V’Emunah (No. 18)
78
79
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Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
either. The Jewish shaman remembers always the paradox of teheru. There is no experience of
light without the experience also of darkness, and vice versa (see chapter on The Sanctity of
Darkness). Likewise, there is no experience of Nothing without the experience also of
Something. Therefore, it is only through the physical experience, however illusory, that we can
come anywhere near the experience of the spiritual. “Without the desires of the physical senses”
taught the thirteenth-century Rabbi Yitzchak of Akko, “we have as much a chance at spiritual
enlightenment as a mule does at getting pregnant”80
Shamanic Judaism, then, challenges us to discover sanctity in the ordinary, magic in the
obvious, galactic abyss in the mundaneness of moment-to-moment trivia. It dares us to weave
from the finite mind to the infinite mind. Only then, in the broad expanses of cosmic
consciousness, safe from the critical eye of givens and definition, can we find the space to dance
the wild liberating dance of possibility. Only then can we feel confident enough to step down
from the definitions of Text and the givens of Process and to weave the magic of Story.
The Soul Knows: Shamanic Healing in the Judaic Tradition
A stone of healing hung from the neck of Abraham our Father.
Anyone who gazed upon it became healed instantly.81
… Kabbalistic healing presupposes notions that are alien to the annals of modern western
medicine and to the givens of contemporary scientific knowledge. Caught between the two are
not the “alternative healers” but the individuals seeking their services, who, on the one hand
earnestly desire to believe in the effectiveness of the latter, and on the other hand are hopelessly
programmed to trust more the laboratory tested methodology of academically-degreed
professionals than the hocus-pocus of hand movements and smudgings.
What both a lot of healers and patients don’t realize, however, is that on a fundamental
level there exists very little if any discrepancy between shamanic healing and modern medicine.
The “placebo effect” frequented by contemporary medical science is but a laboratory replication
of what has always been an underlying principle of shamanic healing from ancient times to the
present. Placebo does not imply fooling the patient into believing something is happening that is
actually not. On the contrary, it is “medicating” the patient with faith in what could happen if
allowed to happen. Because what most obstructs any attempts at healing is the patient’s
skepticism that it will work. This lack of faith is what sabotages even the most scientifically
proven cures or modes of surgery for the simplest forms of illness. Placebo has the same effect as
a bona fide medication because it opens the person’s mind to possibility, which is usually all the
body needs in order to activate its own healing forces. It isn’t the Placebo itself that
accomplishes this, but the act or ritual of accepting it, of swallowing it. The same applies to an
actually medicated pill, which efficacy, again, is largely dependent upon the patient’s openness
to the possibility of it. The term “psychosomatic” may be new to modern westerns but to the
aboriginal it is the most potent reality and it determines everything.
Shamanic rituals for healing are therefore not about any magical cures, but about helping
the patient break through the psychic and emotional barriers that stand between their illness and
80
81
Quoted in Reishis Chochmah, Sha’ar Ha’Ahavah, Ch. 4, end
Babylonian Talmud, Baba Batra 16b
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their wellness. Ancient and early-medieval Jewish healing rituals include drumming, chanting,
blowing the ram’s horn, or shofar, shaking myrtle branches around the patient, smudging them
with herbal smoke through a shofar, drawing circles around them, hanging stones or amulets
around their neck, and so on. These ceremonies, then, become very powerful experiences for the
patient that shatter their resistance to the healing forces within their own body because they
“shock” the patient out of their prevalent state of being, thinking, and assuming.
Even the use of herbal remedies, extremely common in ancient Jewish medicine, is not
solely for the healing powers of the herbs but also for the particular herb’s ability to draw forth
or reinforce the already-extant healing capacity of the patient’s body. The kabbalists consider not
only which herb would treat the ailment before them but also – and often more importantly –
which herb would best trigger the body’s own healing mechanism. This explains why, for the
exact same symptoms, the Talmud and other ancient sources offer any variety of treatment
options that differ radically from one another. Were it only about treating the illness, there would
be one or more like methods. But since it is about awakening the dormant power of healing that
every body possesses, it would understandably vary person to person.
… In ancient Israel, if you got involved with death, such as fighting in a war or burying a
corpse, you would not be allowed back into the community for seven days, during which you
underwent a cleansing ceremony on the third and seventh day called parah adumah, or “Red
Cow.” … Such rituals for soldiers returning from war were not peculiar to the ancient Israelites,
to this day they continue to be exercised by many Native American tribes for their veterans,
thereby avoiding the ills of post-traumatic stress syndrome and other very destructive emotional
aftershocks of combat. …
In the first century, they asked Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakai about this seemingly obscure
ceremony of the Red Cow. His response sums up the above conclusions concerning the
relationship between the ritual and the malady: “In actuality” he replied, “the dead do not
contaminate, and the waters do not purify.”82 Rather, he explained, these dynamics occur by
virtue of the way each is set up in relationship to the other in consonance with the premises of
our particular tradition …
Healing requires us to be open to the magic of alchemy, to the possibility of changing
ourselves and our situation to someone and something so totally different that we begin to finally
discover and bring to fruition our own dreams as opposed to the fruition of dreams that others
have been defining for us.
… Essential for healing [is] the benefit of the exercise of seeking and discovering the gift
of the illness. Like snake venom to a snake bite, the malady itself is the very circumstance that
wields the cure. ... What you ought to do when suffering befalls you” taught the ancient rabbis
some two thousand years ago, “is to evaluate your lifestyle.”83 … Your ailment is
communicating to you. It is an e-mail from your soul or a megaphonic announcement from your
body. We can respond to it by turning it off, or by seeing what it is it wants.
… In the mystical mindset illness is frequently due to the body’s sense of disconnection
with the soul, or vice-versa. Jewish spiritual practice therefore requires the involvement of the
body in spiritual ritual and the involvement of spiritual rites in the experience of the body.
82
83
Midrash Tanchuma, Chukat
Babylonian Talmud, B’rachot 5a
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Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism, R. Gershon Winkler
Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
Prayers are said to Creator before partaking of food or drink,84 and after relieving oneself,85 or
upon seeing a rainbow,86 or when donning new clothes,87 or when observing the stars and
planets,88 or when straightening one’s back, opening one’s eyes, and standing up when rising
from sleep89 – or a host of other daily physical experiences we take for granted. We involve our
bodies in our spiritual pursuits by praying with our bodies, for example,90 swaying to and fro or
from side to side. One of the most least known yet most powerful means of spirit journeying in
the Jewish tradition is weeping: the shaman journeys by means of the body welling with intense
feelings to the point of weeping.91 Other purely physical circumstances employed in shamanic
journeying and vision questing requires a yoga-like positioning of the body, most often a fetallike contortion,92 and, of course, drumming and chanting, which was and still remains the most
common method.93 The connectedness of body with soul is therefore a vital prerequisite to not
only physical well-being but also spiritual well-being.
It is through their understanding of the complex anatomy of the human soul, therefore,
that the ancient rabbis exercised their healing of the human body. … This [currently]
unconventional form of healing combined the personal spiritual power of the healer with the
faith of the patient. As powerful in spirit as they were, they nonetheless attributed the success of
their healing to Creator. “All healing is in the hand of the Sacred Wellspring,” taught the secondcentury Rabbi Eliezer ben Shim’on, “and while some healing is in the hands of intermediaries, it
is only so during designated moments”94 It wasn’t a matter of hocus-pocus but rather the merit of
the kind of life they led, their keen knowledge of the science of Soul, and of the medicine of
animals, plants, and minerals95; it was their ease with and faith in the power of prayer, and their
dear sense of the empathy that Creator feels with someone who is suffering,96 and that the
Creator is imminent at the very bedside of the sick: “When visiting a sick person one should not
sit on a chair or on the bed but one should rather enwrap oneself with a prayer shawl and sit at
the same level as the one who is ill, for the shechinah (Feminine Presence of the Divine) hovers
above their head.”97
For the rabbis, then, healing involved the calling forth of the Creator’s Will for healing to
happen, and manifesting that will into the person who was suffering; it was the act of declaring
one’s readiness to serve as the messenger of the Creator’s Will to heal, whether one was
exercising shamanic healing powers or administering medicinal herbs. Judaism sees the human
not only as creation but also as partner-in-creation, and therefore does not see any discrepancy
Babylonian Talmud, B’rachot 12a and 36a-b
Babylonian Talmud, B’rachot 60b
86
Babylonian Talmud, B'rachot 59a
87
Babylonian Talmud, B'rachot 54a
88
Babylonian Talmud, B'rachot 59b
89
Babylonian Talmud, B’rachot 60b
90
Psalms 35:10
91
Sefer HaZohar, Vol. 3, folio 166b
92
1 Kings 18:42
93
Maimonides’ Mishnah Torah, Hil’chot Y’sodei HaTorah 7:4
94
Sefer HaZohar, Vol. 3, folio 304b, end
95
Midrash Tana D’bei Eliyahu Rabbah 1:8
96
Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 46a
97
Babylonian Talmud, Shabat 12b
84
85
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Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
between the belief that everything is in the hands of the God Will, and the human’s right to take
matters into their own hands. “All is preordained, taught the second-century Rabbi Akiva, “and
the choice is yours to make”98 There was no discrepancy therefore, in performing healing on a
sick individual even though the Creator may have decreed that they ought to be ill: “Said Moses
to the Holy Blessed One: ‘You have already made me a healer. So if you will heal [my sister
Miriam], fine. But if you will not, then I will.”99 …
The Judaic stance is clear: it is not our domain to know or to judge or to determine who is
stricken ill by divine ordination and who by careless personal health management. And so, not
surprisingly the scriptural mandate of restoring a lost item to its owner100 was interpreted by the
ancient rabbis to also imply a responsibility to heal someone who is ill, “that we must restore to
them their lost wellness.”101 The ancient teachers therefore considered it extremely important for
people to visit the sick, believing that the power to heal was inherent in everyone, not just
mystics and doctors. “When you visit someone who is ill,” they taught, “you remove from them
one-sixtieth of their illness.”102 Or: “When you visit someone who is ill, you restore them to
life.”103 They even claimed that the responsibility of visiting the sick represented the very
foundation and motif of the Sacred Covenant which the Creator forged with the ancestral father
of the Hebrews, Abraham: “Because I have known him to be someone who will instruct his
children in My ways – meaning in the deed of visiting the sick.”104 But visiting the sick was
insufficient, the rabbis taught, if it was not also accompanied by the act of faith healing, by the
act of the visitor opening themself to becoming right then and there an open channel for the
Creator’s Will to heal. Taught the sixteenth-century Rabbi Moshe Isserles: “Whoever has visited
someone who is ill and has not prayed for them, has not fulfilled the sacred act of tending to the
sick”105 But as with all else in Judaism, the great deed of visiting the sick, too, has its situational
exceptions: “One should not visit someone who suffers from a head ache, eye ache, stomach
ache, or any other ailment that makes it difficult for them to socialize effortlessly”106 Rather, one
should in such circumstances “approach as far as their door, inquire about their well-being, listen
to their groans, and pray for mercy on their behalf.”107
Of course, it was never assumed that attempts at healing through faith or prayer were
guaranteed to work all of the time. In the final analysis it was still up to the Creator whether
healing would actually happen, whether it was the right time for this particular individual to
come out of her or his malady whether the healer was the appropriate messenger for the task at
hand, or whether the medicinal cure will work altogether: “Not from everything does a person
merit healing"108
But, again, Judaism never designated the power to heal as the exclusive domain of the
98
Babylonian Talmud, Avot 3:15
Midrash Devarim Rabbah 6:6
100
Book of Deuteronomy 22:2
101
Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 73a
102
Babylonian Talmud, Baba Metsia 30b
103
Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 40a
104
Midrash B’reishis 49:5
105
gloss on Shulchan Aruch, Yorah De’ah 335:4
106
Babylonian Talmud, Nedarim 41a
107
Shulchan Aruch, Yorah De’ah 335:8
108
Jerusalem Talmud, Ketubot 13:2
99
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Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
miracle-working rabbi or the physician. The stricken individual can just as well be healed
through no one’s effort or merit but their own. Accordingly, the third-century Rabbi Acha
prescribed a prayer for healing oneself with medicines and herbs: “May it be your will, Infinite
One, Source of my Power, that I be healed through this [act, or medicine], and that you will heal
me, for you are a faithful healer and your healing is authentic.”109 Therefore, praying for
someone who is sick is even more powerful when you are also able to get them to pray on their
own,110 perhaps the reason behind the teaching that in the presence of a sick person one ought to
pray in the language they understand best.111 …
The second-century Rabbi Akiva was quick to point out, however, that the Creator’s will
to heal is not reserved solely for those who “believe”:
They asked Rabbi Akiva: ‘And what about such and such who is lame and emerges from
a house of idolatry healed, or such and such who is blind and emerges from a house of
idolatry able to see, or such and such who is deaf and emerges from a house of idolatry
able to hear?” Explained Rabbi Akiva: “... So this is what happens, The Holy Blessed
One says, Shall I withhold this man's healing just because his designated time for healing
coincides with his foolish visit to the house of idolatry?’”112
Ancient Hebrew literature is replete with stories of faith healing113 and of bringing dead
people back to life.114 Faith healing amongst the rabbinic contemporaries of Jesus is also alluded
to in the classic dispute between the disciples of Hillel and Shammai on whether it was permitted
to do so on the Sabbath: the school of Hillel permitted it and the school of Shammai forbade it.115
It is likely then that the school of Shammai was most visibly represented among the particular
group of Pharisees who challenged Jesus on the issue.116 A more practical example is the
Talmudic account of the third-century Rabbi Hiyya bar Abbah and Rabbi Yochanan who take
turns healing one another and others through touch: “He bared his arm and light radiated from it.
Said he to him, ‘Give me your hand and rise [from the bed]: He gave to him his hand and rose [in
wellness].”117 The first-century Rabbi Chanina ben Do’sa went about healing people, sometimes
in absentia.118 The third-century Rabbi Shim’on bar Chalaf’ta used to go around healing
wounded animals.119 The second-century Rabbi Shim’on bar Yochai resurrected the dead120 as
did his colleagues Rabbi Chanan’ya ben Hakinai121 and Rabbi Chanina ben Chama,122 and the
Babylonian Talmud, B’rachot 60a
Midrash B’reishis Rabbah 53
111
Shuichan Aruch, Yorah De’ah 335:5
112
Midrash Asseret HaDibrot, Ch. 2, end of para. 1
113
e.g. Book of 1 Kings 13:6; Babylonian Talmud, B’rachot 5a
114
e.g. Book of 1 Kings 17:21-22 and 2 Kings 4:34; Babylonian Talmud, Shabat 152b
115
Babylonian Talmud, Tosefta Shabbat 17:14
116
Christian Scriptures, Gospel of Mark 3:4
117
Babylonian Talmud, B'rachot 5b
118
Babylonian Talmud, B’rachot 34b
119
Babylonian Talmud, Shabat 51a
120
Midrash B'reishis Rabah 79:6
121
Babylonian Talmud, Ketuvot 62b
122
Babylonian Talmud, Avodah Zarah 10b
109
110
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Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
fourth-century Ravva.123 …
But faith and miracle healing was only a small part of it. To the rabbis it was more
science than miracle: the science of the Life Breath of the Creator and its relationship with the
body. To their mind, the natural was considered no less the Creator’s handiwork, and no less a
cause for celebration or appreciation, than the miraculous. For example, they equated God’s task
of matching compatible couples with that of splitting the Red Sea,124 and the phenomenon of rain
with that of divine revelation.125 More to the point of our subject, they saw healing someone of
an illness as a greater miracle than the three defiant Hebrew captives who survived
Nebuchadnezzar’s molten furnace.126 “Greater is the miracle that happens to someone who is ill
than the miracle that happened for Hanan’ya, Misha’el and Azar’ya in the flaming furnace, for
the latter were engulfed in fires of the earth which can be extinguished by anyone, while the
former is engulfed in fires of the heavens, and who can extinguish them?”127
Seeing everything in creation as the workings of the Creator, the same teachers who
dabbled in “faith healing” also dabbled in conventional down-to-earth remedies as simple as a
good night’s sleep,128 or sexual intercourse.129 While the Talmud and the Kabbalah contain
myriad remedies from herbal to sorcery, it is interesting to note that a large portion of these were
preserved through the teachings of a highly regarded Jewish medicine woman, Eyma D’Abbaya,
foster mother to one of the greatest rabbis of the third and fourth centuries, who quotes her
teachings throughout the Talmud.130 …
In other teachings, one discovers similar sorts of responses to various ailments or life
issues, responses that may or may not be supported by contemporary medical science but which
obviously addressed a realm not ordinarily addressed by modern science, the realm of spirit. The
trick was to attack the dis-ease in the person at the appropriate spiritual or physical or emotional
“pressure point” A number of these rituals and remedies have been translated into English131 but
hundreds more were passed down orally over thousands of years, some of them to be found in
ancient and early medieval Hebrew manuscripts that are slowly making their way into print,
albeit in Hebrew. …
Yet, again, the kabbalistic healer never lost sight of the correlation between the
experience of the Creation and the Will of the Creator, the nature – so to speak – of the spirit and
that of the physical vehicle for her manifestation. Illness, then, was at times viewed as
symptomatic of some sort of imbalance between soul and body between that part of one’s being
that was spirit and that part which was matter. Healing would require a realignment of both,
accomplished by meditating on the revelatory experience of the Creator through what is called
Torah: “Says the Holy Blessed One: ‘There is no affliction that does not have a cure. And if you
wish to determine its cure and its potion, engage in Torah, for she is a healing for the entire
123
Babylonian Talmud, Megilah 7b
Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 2a
125
Midrash Tehilim on Psalms 117:1
126
Book of Daniel 3:24-25
127
Babylonian Talmud, N’darim 41a
128
Midrash Pirkei D’rebbe Eliezer, Ch. 12
129
Eighteenth-century Rabbi Yaakov Emden in Mor Uk’tsiyah, No. 240
130
Babylonian Talmud, Shabat 66b & 134a, Yoma 75a, Mo’ed Katan 12a Gitin 67b, Eruvin 29b, Ketuvot 10b & 50a
131
Divination, Magic, and Healing by Rabbi Ronald Isaacs (Jason Aronson, 1998), pp. 101-114
124
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Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
body”’132 Literally, Torah means “the showing” or “the teaching” It is the act of engaging the
Creator revealed in the Creation either through study, meditation, or experience.
The Hebraic term torah represents the particular Judaic religio-spiritual teaching gleaned
from the “showing” as experienced by a particular people at a particular moment in their
historical unfolding, and the ever-continuous process of interpreting that collective historic
experience for other times and for differing situations. But in its broader and more universal
sense, Torah also connotes the raw, unstructured experience, learning, and spiritual nourishment
to be gotten from meditating on the God Presence in nature without the aid of specific religious
context or regimen. Both are Torah. Both are manifestations of the Creator’s Self-Revelation to
the human: one through the word of God, the other through the work of God; one through the
learning received by prophets and visionaries, the other through the marvel and mystery of
Creation itself. “If we did not have the Torah;’ taught the third-century Rabbi Yochanan, “we
could have learned it all from the animals.”133 Because no less than the Creator teaches us
through the Vision Bringers and their scriptures, the Creator also “teaches us through the wildlife
of the earth, and makes us wise through the birds of the sky.”134
… One can discover the Creator revealed in the study of the natural sciences, the
observation of flora and fauna, but the experience and the learning becomes Torah when one
marvels at majestic mountains and awesome canyons without studying them, without attempting
to put the experience into words, into form, but instead simply allowing the mystery and the
experience of it all to stir into clarity one’s consciousness of the macrocosmic harmony between
Creator and Creation, and thereby restore also an inner sense of the microcosmic harmony
between soul and body, for “as the Creator fills the universe, so does the soul fill the body”135
It is the relationship of soul with body, then, that determines ones personal sense of well
being. The ancients kept this in mind when they performed healing, whether it was through the
magic of faith and prayer or the magic of medicinal herbs and potions. A person suffering a
physical ailment, for example, can take all the medicines they are prescribed with the most
utmost loyalty and meticulousness, yet still remain as ill as before. Because if there is also
unresolved spiritual conflict going on, their healing would require more than conventional
clinical intervention, it would require realigning the interface of spirit with body, kind of like
resetting a dislocated joint.
The sixteenth-century kabbalistic master Rabbi Isaac Luria emphasized the importance of
bitul ha-yesh, literally “nullifying that which is;” a meditation aimed at clearing out all the bulk
of our minds and spirits that are holding us back from experiencing newness, from allowing fresh
growth and process from happening. Often illness is a result of the conduits between spirit, mind
and body being dogged with gook, with obstacles in our path of personal transformation that
might range from anxiety, self-criticism, voices not our own that define our reality, and fear of
moving forward into the unknown and the uncertain. This malady is often referred to as ruach
ra’ah, or “Bad Wind;’ as in the chaotic whirlwind that holds our dreams and hopes dangling
teasingly before us, daring us to take that treacherous first step. The meditation of bitul ha-yesh
can therefore be used as a cleansing, a weeding out of the gook that obstructs our Life flow, thus
Midrash Tanchuma, Yit’ro, Ch. 8
Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 100b
134
Book of Job 35:11
135
Babylonian Talmud, Berachot 10a
132
133
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Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
also bringing immense healing where we need it.
The bitul ha-yesh concept is not unique to Lurianic kabbalah. It is very ancient, traced all
the way back to the oldest and most mysterious of the Jewish mystical texts, the Sefer Yetsirah,
or “Book of Formation,” which dates back well over two thousand years. … Virtually every
mishnah, or teaching of the Sefer Yetsirah alludes to the b’li mah, literally “without what;’ or the
“no-thing” The b’li mah is a fundamental principle of ancient kabbalistic belief: there is no
reality but that of God. All else is illusion, its existence contingent solely upon the Will of the
One Who Is’es. This implies that illness has no existence of its own, no power beyond what the
stricken individual gives it through her or his illusory experience of it. The only reality is God,
and tapping into that awareness imbues one with a reality that then overrides that of the person’s
subjective reality, including the illness one might be experiencing. The meditation of b’li mah is
tantamount to blasts of chemotherapy, as it is an invocation of the vividness of the Creator’s
Presence in Creation, the realization of which – in that moment – nullifies that which is. Thus,
bitul ha-yesh. These meditations should not be performed without a guide. They can prove
dangerous and swallow up a person into the void, into a total consciousness of nothingness. No
wonder, then, that the Hebraic word for “I am” – ANiY – is comprised of the same letters that,
when juxtaposed, can also read “nothingness,” – AYiN
It is then a very fine line we walk between our sense of Self and our soul-deep knowing
of the void; between knowing we are, and knowing we are not. Somewhere in between the Is and
the Is Not lies the mystery of the One Who Is’es, and with that mystery lies the power to
reformat what is happening in our own subjective reality that is keeping us stuck, whether it is
psychic or physical dis-ease. Inside that “between” place we encounter God encountering us. The
fine line that separates our reality from the Ultimate Reality is, however, illusory. It is known in
ancient kabbalistic lingo as the par’gawd, or the Veil of Illusion. This is the illusion that
separates our spirit self from our body self, that fosters disharmony between our soul and our
body only when we experience it as a line of demarcation rather than one of integration. The
par'gawd is experienced as either a partition between us and Creator or as a meeting of lips, as in
a kiss. Which one it is, depends on our choice, and determines the power of our prayer and
ceremony. How real you feel that God is to you will determine how real you feel that you are to
God. Faith Healing is then more than just some prayer or miracle that works. It is the act of
channeling the God Will to heal that is placed before us always, only waiting for us to access it
by believing it is real. …
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“Re/Membering Nature”, R. Rami Shapiro
Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
“Re/Membering Nature”, R. Rami Shapiro
Trees, Earth and Torah: A Tu B’Shvat Anthology,
Ari Elon, Naomi Mara Hyman, Arthur Waskow, Ed.
From The Wisdom of the Jewish Sages
Rabbi Jacob says:
If you are walking lost in wonder,
empty of self and mindful of Reality,
and suddenly you interrupt this peace to exclaim:
“How beautiful is this tree! How magnificent this field!”
you forfeit life.
The intrusion of self and the imposing of judgment
separates you from Reality
and snares you in the net of words. Be still and know.
Embrace all in silence.
Mishnah Avot 3:9
Re/Membering Nature
A story is told about a rabbi and a gardener.
The rabbi was working with his gardener friend as the latter set out to plant several trees
about his property. In the midst of their planting they heard a great tumult arising from the city,
about a mile to the east.
Outside the city gates a massive cloud of dust arose as hundreds of people made their
way out to the surrounding fields and farms. The rabbi and the gardener stopped their work to
watch the approaching throng. Men, women and children were dancing joyously; their faces
lifted skyward; their voices ringing with praise.
As the crowd drew near, its leaders called out to the rabbi and his friend: “Come quickly!
The Messiah has arrived and we go out to greet him!”
The gardener tossed his hoe aside and made to join the crowd, but the rabbi laid a heavy
hand upon the other’s shoulder and bade him wait. In time the throng passed, and the two men
were alone.
“How dare you keep me from the Messiah,” the gardener cried out, his voice cracking
with anger and despair.
The rabbi picked up the fallen hoe and handed it to his friend. “Messiahs come and go,”
he said softly, “but the task of planting never ceases.”
Thus Rabbi Nathan reminds us: If you are planting a tree and they come to you saying:
“Come and greet the Messiah,” first plant the tree and then go meet him. Redemption is in the
very act of planting.
Rabbi Nathan’s pithy comment is the basis for this little tale. I imagine Rabbi Nathan half
listening to a group of sages argue over when it is proper to greet the Messiah. One after the
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other, the masters of Torah offer objections to each other’s positions. Their delight is in the
quickness of their responses, the sharpness with which they deflate what on the surface seems a
reasonable proposition.
Two things the sages take for granted: the first is that the Messiah will probably never
show up; the second is that we must go out to greet him when he does.
This is the wonderful paradox at the heart of Jewish teaching. The world is not a case of
either/or: either sin or redemption, either right or wrong, either good or evil. The world is not
either/or but and: sin and redemption, right and wrong, good and evil. The God of the Jews is
the imageless “And” that is infinite possibility.
When we forget the “And,” however, we seek to impose the either/or idolatry of limited
human reasoning. When the either/or takes hold, we take ourselves far too seriously, and inflict
much unnecessary suffering on the world. When we insist that the world is either/or, we divide
person and planet; we invent scarcity and the national boundaries needed to enforce it; we see the
stranger as enemy and the other as stranger. When we fall into the trap of either/or, we replace
virtue with law, symbol with sacrament, aggadah with halacha.
When our sages get caught up in the minutiae of their own either/or reasoning, their
words become more important than the reality to which they once referred. It is then that the law
becomes God and God is reduced to law. It is then that the simple reality of everyday living is
lost beneath the pseudo facts of legal fiction.
So I imagine Rabbi Nathan, a sage of “And,” half listening to the either/or wranglings of
his friends. Do we greet him first, or second? What if we are reciting the Shema? Or what if we
are in the privy? Or what if we are planting a tree – “Enough!” Nathan shouts, no longer able to
ignore their foolishness. “First plant the tree,” he yells at them. “Just plant the tree!” For a
moment his friends stare at him, open mouthed, their attention pulled away from themselves and
their cleverness.
“What are you saying, Nathan?”
“Listen: if you are planting a tree and the people come and tell you the Messiah has
arrived, finish planting before you go to see him. That’s all. Finish the planting.”
“So, Mister Big Shot Sage, that’s all? Just finish the planting? And where is this
written?”
Rabbi Nathan smiles. He enjoys rattling his friends. He knows that they are just playing
with this kind of either/or talk, though he fears that what is fun for them now will one day
become deadly serious for their heirs. “People will remember our words,” he would often caution
his colleagues, “but who will pass on the laughter that accompanied them?”
“Messiah comes in response to one of two situations,” Rabbi Nathan says to his friends.
“If we fulfill our nature, Messiah will arrive. And if we totally degrade our nature Messiah will
arrive. Now the question is: What is our nature, and what does it mean to fulfill or degrade it?
“What is our nature? Our nature is to plant. Is this not what Torah tells us? Adam, the
human, from adamah, the earth. Adam the earthling raised up out of the dust to plant, till, and
tend the Garden. When we cease to tend we cease to be adam. When we cease to be adam; we
pervert our true nature.
“We fulfill our nature when we plant. We degrade it when we uproot. We plant when we
live in a manner that reveals the connection between all things. We uproot when we live in a
manner that separates and divides. We fulfill our nature when we make plain the
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interdependence of all things. We degrade our nature when we pretend to independence.
“We plant when we take our place in the world, recognizing that we are adam from
adamah, earthlings at one with earth. We degrade ourselves when we insist upon being
homeless, without place, aliens and strangers rather than gardeners and tenders. This is why we
call God haMakom, the Place. Do we call God That Place, as if there was some place devoid of
God? No! God is the Place, this Place, every place we happen to awaken to the interdependence
of each and all.”
Rabbi Nathan looked from one face to the other. His friends were listening, but were they
hearing? For a moment he felt a terrible urge to make it all a joke, and let them get back to their
discussion. He could tell himself that humor is the greater teacher. True enough, but Nathan was
no humorist. He frowned instead of smiling, and plunged ahead.
“Messiah will come when we have totally lost our Place, for then we will have
completely degraded nature, ours and everything else’s. But even if Messiah did come then, we
would be unable to go out to greet him. Why? We would no longer be able to recognize him. So
long would we have devoted ourselves to rooting out the stranger that we would no longer
recognize the face of the Friend. So busy would we be carving the earth into parcels upon which
to build fences and house armies, that we would have no time to build a gate and welcome the
other. The Messiah would arrive and none would care.
“But if we maintain the planting, if we attend to tending, we will attend to ourselves, to
our true nature, and to the true nature of all things. When we attend to ourselves we see that we
are adam, earth-lings. When we see we are adam we suddenly see we are also adamah, earth.
We will see that we are not alien to this world, but an expression of it. Just as the fig tree figs, so
adamah adams, God peoples.
“When we see that adam is adamah, we cease to be separate from our Place. Ceasing to
be separate, we cease to war within ourselves. Ceasing to war within ourselves we cease to war
among ourselves. Taking our Place, or better discovering that the Place is every Place, we are no
longer blinded by the false scarcity we invent to maintain the illusion of us and them, ours and
theirs. No longer driven by the fear of having less, we can help all to have more.
“Coming to Place is coming to our senses. Coming to our senses is awakening to the
wonder of being adam/adamah. Our whole being is alive as an expression of God. We suddenly
know that God is all and all is God.
“And then we would have no need to stop our planting to greet the Messiah. For then we
would greet the Messiah in each seedling we plant, in each sapling we water, in each tree we
prune and harvest, in each face we meet. If you need to stop the planting to greet the Messiah,
you are already lost, for you have already mistaken the Messiah for someone else. For the
planting is Messiah. So too the planter and the planted. Finish the planting and then greet him, if
indeed you still feel the need.”
Rabbi Nathan turned back to the task at hand: bundling wood for kindling. His friends,
stood quietly looking – first at Nathan, then at each other, then again at Nathan, and then again at
each other. At last one of them spoke:
“But, what if you’re planting and the High Priest comes to you and says, …”
Tu B’Shvat is not Jewish Earth Day. Tu B’Shvat is not a call to go back to Nature. Nature is not
nostalgic. Nature doesn’t long to go back to anything. To what would Nature return? Nature is
Rachmiel Langer, www.heartfirehealing.com
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Sacred Fragments – Explorations of Jewish Belief
“Re/Membering Nature”, R. Rami Shapiro
Session 7, Jewish Shamanism
acutely present. Nature tends to what is.
Tu B’Shvat is a call to return to our nature. Tu B’Shvat is an opportunity to recognize
that we are adamah; to remember (literally to re-member, to put back together) the supposedly
shattered self that pretends to be other than Nature. Tu B’Shvat is an opportunity to plant
ourselves firmly in the Place that is every place, and to awaken to the fundamental unity of God,
woman, man and Nature.
You and I are Nature! We are Nature’s way of looking at herself, of thinking about
herself, of recreating herself. We are Nature’s way of tending; Nature’s way of doing what must
be done. If we are to fulfill our nature, we must reclaim the ability to attend. To attend means to
be at the task of tending, to be at the work of doing what needs to be done.
How do we reclaim the ability to attend?
We must learn to take root. Socially, politically, and economically this means to take
responsibility for the place in which we live: to hold fast the soil of community. Spiritually, it
means to quiet the mind and be still.
We quiet the mind when we do what needs doing without self-conscious hesitation.
When we act without hesitation we act without ego, without pride, without prejudice, without
error. When we act without hesitation we act from the Whole for the Whole. When we act
without hesitation we act as Messiah.
When we act this way we have no need to stop the planting to greet the Messiah. We
know that Messiah neither leaves nor arrives. With Rabbi Nathan we know that redemption –
awakening to the unity of each and All – is in the very act of planting.
Rachmiel Langer, www.heartfirehealing.com
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