RECLAIMING INDIGENOUS PRE YAHWIST JUDAISM

I’ve had a couple of people ask me recently what kind of a Jew I am.  It’s the perk of moving to a new place and people not knowing me, or maybe it is that I’m ready to be more open.

I have jokingly responded that I’m an apikoros.  This is a word that means heretic, derived from the Greek Epicurus, a philosopher who valued pleasure above all. It’s often applied to Elisha ben Abuyah an early Rabbi. There’s a wonderful novel about him called As a Driven Leaf by Milton Sternberg.  INSERT PICTURE 

I am a heretic. It’s not a comfortable place to be.  There are people who like being outsiders, but that’s not me.  I have said to people that I wish I could have been the kind of thinker/teacher who walked a well worn path, offered a few of my own twists but basically stayed on the path. But that’s not me.

 I am a heretic because I reject monotheism. 

Rejecting monotheism is actually consistent with our ancestors’ beliefs before the destruction of the first Temple in 586 BCE. Let me tell you why I want to reclaim the belief system of our ancestors and then share a little history.

The greatest exile I feel is an exile from the land and from the more than human world. I crave a right relationship, to take my place amongst all the other creatures of the world.  I think our inherited God language gets in the way of this realignment, this return because we believe that there is something outside the system, above and beyond the land, the sky, the waters, the stars that is driving everything.  I believe that as long as we believe in some kind of divine being who is in some way not part of the world, we are going to turn our eyes towards the divine (usually upwards), instead of looking down at our feet as we walk on the sacred land. That path, at least for me, leads to an alienation from the world and from myself.

Further, worshipping outside feels radically different to me than worshipping inside. It makes much more sense to my body to worship in a sacred grove and to actually worship and learn from the grove itself than it does to read words from a book while I sit in a pew.  The first place Abram went to when he entered the land in Genesis Chapter 12 was Alon Moreh, the teaching tree.

This reclamation project is an embrace of the losers of the intellectual battle.  It’s a kind of decolonization project, if that language speaks to you.  Why did our God and Goddess worshipping ancestor lose to the Yahwists?  That’s unclear to me.

But their loss has had devastating consequences because far too many people have justified the destruction of both other humans and the more than human world secure in their [misguided] belief that they have the one TRUTH and can thus act however they want. Monotheism, it seems to me has been mostly bad for humanity and for the more than human world. As I said, I’m a heretic.

Over the centuries of writing the Bible, there was a fierce religious theological battle.  On the one hand there were the Yahwists who were dedicated to this new deity YHVH, originally a desert sky deity according to scholars. On the other hand, there was a broad range of indigenous Gods and Goddesses including Baal, Asherah, Astarte. 

The first demand of the Yahwists was to put aside the worship of the other Gods and Goddesses and worship only YHVH.  This is the plain meaning of the first of the ten utterances. “I am YHVH your God….You shall have no other Gods before me” Our Biblical ancestors knew there were other Gods who were worshipped both by other people and by their fellow Israelites.  The writers of the Hebrew Bible demanded monolatry, the worship of only one God, YHVH.  It is not monotheism, despite what we’ve been taught and the assertion of umpteen Rabbis over the centuries.  Monotheism is the assertion that there is only one God whom we Jews call YHVH. That’s just not what the text says.

This religious battle continued all through the time of Hebrew sovereignty in the land prior to the destruction of the first Temple. There are forty named Kings in the 2 books of Kings and 37 of them tolerated or encouraged the worship of other indigenous deities along with the worship of YHVH. The writers of Kings only really approved of 2 of the 40 kings—Hezekiah and Josiah (insert a reference to Tziony Tzevit).

We know that our ancestors worshipped these other deities through two main sources. These are archaeological remains of figurines of the Goddess and in the condemnation of the Yahwists. There are literally hundreds of demands in the Bible to destroy the sacred groves and representations of Asherah, the Goddess. And here’s one of my favorite passages in the Hebrew Bible. 

“Thereupon they answered Jeremiah—all the men who knew that their wives made offerings to other gods; all the women present, a large gathering; and all the people who lived in Pathros in the land of Egypt. We will not listen to you in the matter about which you spoke to us in the name of GOD. On the contrary, we will do everything that we have vowed—to make offerings to the Queen of Heaven and to pour libations to her, as we used to do, we and our ancestors, our kings and our officials, in the towns of Judah and the streets of Jerusalem. For then we had plenty to eat, we were well-off, and suffered no misfortune. But ever since we stopped making offerings to the Queen of Heaven and pouring libations to her, we have lacked everything, and we have been consumed by the sword and by famine.” (Jeremiah 44:15-18)

Note that this isn’t just the women. It isn’t just the folk, which is why calling this “folk religion” as scholars do is just wrong. It’s the great majority of the people and their leaders. Our Yahwist ancestors were a minority group of priests, scribes, prophets and ideologues who won an intellectual battle. I’m siding with the losers.

Two more notes in this long blog post.

Baruch Spinoza was a Jew who also rejected the idea of a divine being outside the system. His famous line “God is nature” was his way of rejecting his intellectual inheritance of monotheism. Unlike mystics of a range of traditions, he wasn’t arguing that the material world is an illusion, at least as I understand his thinking, he was arguing that the view that there was a God who was apart from material reality—that was the illusion. For his refusal to stay silent, Spinoza was excommunicated from his Jewish community, but he was born and died a Jew.

I also want to say that there are plenty of people who are seeking to reclaim the Goddess and the sacred feminine without rejecting monotheism.  There’s a plausible pathway to do this within the context of Rabbinic Judaism because the Goddess morphed into Shekhinah, the indwelling feminine expression of the divine.

I am a committed Jew.  It’s my primary identification. I’m just not a monotheist. Some of my ancestors were monotheists and some were not. Why should I not have that choice as well?