Astrocat
04-15-2008, 11:51 AM
I am a frequent reader of many of the new spiritual books put out there these days, and there is a glaring absence from all of them. They all draw extensively on the major world traditions, but there is one that is always absent, the Jewish tradition. Oh sure, Kabbalah is thrown around commonly, but always separated from its true context as an integral and central part of the Jewish tradition. This loss is tragic because the concepts of Kabbalah become disembodied and confused, made impotent by being taken by one hand for personal use while pushing away the people from which it came.
This is by no means a phenomenon exclusive to the New Age world. It has been going on in intellectual Europe since the ascent of Christianity to popularity. Good recent examples of this is the theory, originated by Whitehouse, that the Chumash, the most sacred text in the Jewish tradition, was written by several authors and was pasted together disjointedly. To prove this theory, they looked into the King James Bible, which is a translation of the Latin, which is a translation of the Greek, which is a translation of the original Hebrew, the Latin and English translations being done by Christians. This theory is still taught in colleges as the leading theory, despite being disproven over and over again and from a common sense angle, simply not making any.
First of all, in a book which is dedicated to prophecy, wouldn't it make sense to look to the approach of the Jewish tradition to the prophets? Such a thing is not discussed by Daniel Pinchbeck. What does get discussed, for example, is Carl Jung's theory on the Jewish "God." Of course, as all modern scholars agree when they look into the primitive Jewish tradition, their idea of God was immature. Look at how their God acts improperly, as swayed by rage and a jealous God. Clearly Jesus was the one to set everything right, making right the ideas of those primitive Jews and their silly God.
An excellent place to start would have been Abraham Joshua Heschel's "The Prophets," an excellent piece of scholarship that really delves into the difficulties that Western thinkers have with the Hebrew Bible. Among them, most of all, is the idea that emotion could be a divine attribute. The assumption is that being swayed by emotion, overcome by emotion, is a character flaw. The ancient Greeks referred to being overcome with emotion and passion as being overcome with demons, distorting the saving power of the intellect. And so, seeing God emotionally reacting to the actions of people, and mistranslating the texts to bring out the seeming misbehavior of God based on God's emotions, shows clearly God's just not sophisticated enough to be cold and numb to us puny fallible humans.
Many of the questions that Pinchbeck raises are addressed in the Jewish tradition, most pointedly the question of the calender, which is central to the Jewish tradition. It is a lunar calender, each month being the duration from the first appearance of the moon after a new moon until the moon's reemergence, beginning the next month. The calender is kept in conjunction with the solar calender perfectly by instituting leap months 7 out of 19 years, making that particular year a 13 month year.
Pinchbeck does make a single nod to the Jewish tradition, all be it in a mistaken way, about the Tzaddik. The tzaddik is a constant phenomenon, existing in every generation, embodied in every person. It is said that there are 36 tzaddikim in every generation, and on their merit the world is sustained. The process of descending to the depths does not just happen in the end, but it is something that has been going on since the beginning of this world, and is something that we do now. According to the Jewish tradition, the end of this world is made entirely by our actions now, not just as the cycle is reaching its conclusion, but throughout the entirety of history, and the "shift in consciousness" is nothing more than our realization of the full repercussions of our actions, whether to bring the divine into physical reality or obstruct the flow of the divine to the physical world. Thus, the culmination is what we put into it, and has been put into it from the very beginning, not just us. Yes, we have the power of our ancestors guiding us through these birth pains, but it is also their actions when they were alive that create a vessel for the transformation.
There is much more to be said about this. As a tradition Jew who is an avid dreamer of the approaching changes in the world, I am in despair over the exclusion of the Jewish tradition from the "cross cultural and world uniting movement."
This is by no means a phenomenon exclusive to the New Age world. It has been going on in intellectual Europe since the ascent of Christianity to popularity. Good recent examples of this is the theory, originated by Whitehouse, that the Chumash, the most sacred text in the Jewish tradition, was written by several authors and was pasted together disjointedly. To prove this theory, they looked into the King James Bible, which is a translation of the Latin, which is a translation of the Greek, which is a translation of the original Hebrew, the Latin and English translations being done by Christians. This theory is still taught in colleges as the leading theory, despite being disproven over and over again and from a common sense angle, simply not making any.
First of all, in a book which is dedicated to prophecy, wouldn't it make sense to look to the approach of the Jewish tradition to the prophets? Such a thing is not discussed by Daniel Pinchbeck. What does get discussed, for example, is Carl Jung's theory on the Jewish "God." Of course, as all modern scholars agree when they look into the primitive Jewish tradition, their idea of God was immature. Look at how their God acts improperly, as swayed by rage and a jealous God. Clearly Jesus was the one to set everything right, making right the ideas of those primitive Jews and their silly God.
An excellent place to start would have been Abraham Joshua Heschel's "The Prophets," an excellent piece of scholarship that really delves into the difficulties that Western thinkers have with the Hebrew Bible. Among them, most of all, is the idea that emotion could be a divine attribute. The assumption is that being swayed by emotion, overcome by emotion, is a character flaw. The ancient Greeks referred to being overcome with emotion and passion as being overcome with demons, distorting the saving power of the intellect. And so, seeing God emotionally reacting to the actions of people, and mistranslating the texts to bring out the seeming misbehavior of God based on God's emotions, shows clearly God's just not sophisticated enough to be cold and numb to us puny fallible humans.
Many of the questions that Pinchbeck raises are addressed in the Jewish tradition, most pointedly the question of the calender, which is central to the Jewish tradition. It is a lunar calender, each month being the duration from the first appearance of the moon after a new moon until the moon's reemergence, beginning the next month. The calender is kept in conjunction with the solar calender perfectly by instituting leap months 7 out of 19 years, making that particular year a 13 month year.
Pinchbeck does make a single nod to the Jewish tradition, all be it in a mistaken way, about the Tzaddik. The tzaddik is a constant phenomenon, existing in every generation, embodied in every person. It is said that there are 36 tzaddikim in every generation, and on their merit the world is sustained. The process of descending to the depths does not just happen in the end, but it is something that has been going on since the beginning of this world, and is something that we do now. According to the Jewish tradition, the end of this world is made entirely by our actions now, not just as the cycle is reaching its conclusion, but throughout the entirety of history, and the "shift in consciousness" is nothing more than our realization of the full repercussions of our actions, whether to bring the divine into physical reality or obstruct the flow of the divine to the physical world. Thus, the culmination is what we put into it, and has been put into it from the very beginning, not just us. Yes, we have the power of our ancestors guiding us through these birth pains, but it is also their actions when they were alive that create a vessel for the transformation.
There is much more to be said about this. As a tradition Jew who is an avid dreamer of the approaching changes in the world, I am in despair over the exclusion of the Jewish tradition from the "cross cultural and world uniting movement."