Jewish Culture and History
Abstracts
of articles in Issue 8.3
- Celia E. Rothenberg, New Age Jews:
Jewish Shamanism and Jewish Yoga
- This article examines the teachings and practices
of Jewish shamanism and Jewish yoga to demonstrate New Age Judaism’s two key characteristics.
First, New Age Jews firmly believe in and work to construct a Jewish ‘core’ or
essence within their explicitly syncretic practices and philosophies.
Second, New Age Jews emphasise the achievement of individual healing
through embodied practice as the goal of their spiritual practices.
New Age Judaism can be understood as a religious product of American
values,
New Age spirituality, and Jewish history and thought.
- Anne Vallely, Jewish Redemption by Way of the Buddha:
A Post-modern Tale of Exile and Return
- This paper explores the religious life of those
for whom Judaism has become an important part of their identity, after – and through – their
encounter with Buddhism. It is an account of a modern form of Jewish ‘Exile
and Return’ set in the context of contemporary global religious revivalism.
The paper is primarily an attempt at a theoretical examination of the relationship
between ritual and identity, as well as an exploration of how new-age interpretations
of Jewish practices bring us back to the ancient and vexing question of ‘Who
is true Israel? ’ – or
what does it mean to be Jewish?
- Ayala Fader, Jewish Spirituality and Late Capitalism
- This article, drawing on ten months of ethnographic
research, examines two parallel changes occurring in a Manhattan synagogue,
B’nai Jeshurun (BJ): an increasing engagement with Jewish spirituality
in prayer and structural changes in synagogue institution building. I
contextualise these changes in the synagogue within broader economic,
political and cultural processes, particularly the upward mobility and
shifting professions of residents on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
A synagogue ethnography which attends to religious practice and institution
building, contextualised in broader economic and political processes,
can provide insight into the emergent study of Jewish forms of spirituality,
and more broadly, how Jewish religious subjectivities are being formed
in a late capitalist urban centre.
- Chava Weissler, ‘Women of Vision’ in the Jewish Renewal Movement:The
Eshet Hazon [‘Woman of Vision’] Ceremony
- Since the 1960s, ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal – has envisioned
a Judaism that affirms the spiritual power and creativity of women. The
challenges raised by this commitment – how to formulate and foster
women’s gifts within Judaism – are exemplified in the Eshet
Hazon [Woman of Vision] ritual, first celebrated in 1982. Incorporating
Jewish texts and symbols, this ritual transformed their meaning to express
a vision of women inspired by Shekhinah, the divine feminine of Jewish
mysticism. The evolution of this ceremony since 1982 shows how views of
women’s spirituality have changed in relationship to the growth in
membership and organisational complexity of ALEPH, and the increasing availability
of other options, especially rabbinical ordination, for women’s spiritual
leadership. Influenced by the feminist spirituality movement, the Women
of Vision hold a ‘gender-differentiated’ model of women’s
spiritual leadership, while others in Jewish Renewal have taken a more ‘gender-neutral’ approach.
- Marie-Josée Posen, Beyond New Age: Jewish
Renewal’s Reconstruction of Theological Meaning in the Teachings
of Rabbi Z. Schachter-Shalomi
- Descriptions of the Jewish Renewal movement which
relegate it primarily to the category of ‘New Age’ limit understanding of its contemporary
importance because it cannot be thought of only in those terms. This paper
examines the key themes of the Divine and Redemption in the written works
of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founding figure of the Renewal Movement.
Schachter-Shalomi’s Renewal theology is firmly rooted in mystical
and Hasidic Jewish traditions, and builds on Jewish Reconstructionist thought
to develop a post-Holocaust Jewish theology. In keeping with New Age thought,
however, Renewal theology reinterprets the classical Jewish themes of creation,
revelation and redemption within the framework of an emergent Gaian cosmology.
This revised theology aims at renewal of Judaism’s universalist mission
and repair of its covenant.