Judaism
Lost Horizon, Deadly Paradise – Quaternity Tales (Part 3)
May 23, 2013
“Conway went to the balcony and gazed at the dazzling plume of Karakal; the moon was riding high in a waveless ocean. … He was only partly unhappy, but he was infinitely and rather sadly perplexed. He did not know whether he had been mad and was now sane, or had been sane for a time and was now mad again.”
- Lost Horizon, chapter 11 (the scene where Conway makes up his mind to leave Shangri-La with Mallinson)
How does Lost Horizon end?
Shangri-La, from "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" (2004)
My old friend Professor Marc Bregman, to whom I owe the impetus to read Lost Horizon–and whose reading of the book is quite different from mine–tells me that the movie version ends without too much ambiguity. As in the book, Conway leaves Shangri-La with the Mallinson equivalent (Conway’s brother George, in the movie) and the Lo-Tsen equivalent. The wintry journey is grueling; the porters abandon them. Lo-Tsen (“Maria,” in the movie) falls down in the snow. The men turn her over to find her dead–and that she’s become an old woman.
The lamas were right after all. “Maria’s” youth, preserved for decades by the magic of Shangri-La, has been shattered by her departure. “George” goes mad and jumps to his death. Conway’s the sole survivor. At movie’s end, we find him struggling to find his way back to Shangri-La, the paradise from which he’s foolishly banished himself.
Thus far the movie. The novel’s entirely different.
Recall what I said in the first of these posts: it’s a story within a story, a third-person narrative framed by a prologue and an epilogue. The third-person narrative, the body of the book, consists of the novelist Rutherford’s recollections of the story Conway told him, on the basis of Conway’s once lost, now recovered (more or less) memory of his time in Shangri-La. Rutherford writes his recollections down, then hands the manuscript to the unnamed narrator of the prologue and the epilogue. In the epilogue, Rutherford and the narrator together try to puzzle out what happened to Conway, Mallinson, and Lo-tsen after they left Shangri-La. This is the part of the story that remains, perhaps permanently, lost to Conway’s memory.
Conway’s story ends with the line I quoted in my last post. He and Mallinson have reached the porters’ camp, where Lo-Tsen meets them. Plainly she’s in love with Mallinson, eager for their departure. “It seemed to him [Conway] that the little Manchu had never looked so radiant. She gave him a most charming smile, but her eyes were all for the boy.” What happens next? No one knows–and in that mystery lies the book’s profundity and power.
What’s known is that Conway turned up, feverish, at a French mission hospital in Chung-Kiang (Chongqing?), China, without any papers or memory of what had happened to him. The Chinese doctor who admitted him remembered that he’d been brought in by a woman, Chinese, who herself died of fever shortly afterward. Of course Rutherford, who at the end of the book has managed to track the doctor down, asks him: “About that Chinese woman. Was she young?” And is told: “Oh, no, she was most old–most old of any one I have ever seen.”
So Lo-Tsen has turned into an old woman, as Conway and the lamas said she would? (Take her beauty away from Shangri-La, Conway tells Mallinson, “and you will see it fade like an echo.”) That’s the impression the book gives, and it seems to be what the narrator believes. But this is very unclear. The old woman could be someone Conway met in the course of his wanderings, young Lo-Tsen either dead or gone off with (or without) Mallinson to someplace no one knows. When you think about it–is it really likely the old woman is Lo-Tsen? If Lo-Tsen indeed came to Shangri-La in 1884 at age 18, as Conway’s been told, she’d have been born in 1866. That would make her 65, or conceivably 66, at the time of Conway’s reappearance. “Most old of any one I have ever seen”? As one who’s 65 myself–I sure don’t think so.
So where does the truth lie? Was Conway sane at Shangri-La, insane before and after–or the other way round? We’re left to speculate, and thereby to search out on our own the mystery of Shangri-La.
Here’s one solid, or more or less solid fact: Lo-Tsen seems eager to go off with Mallinson. Surely she must know she’s really young? But not so fast. Perhaps she knows, or at least suspects, she’ll age as soon as she leaves with him–and goes anyway, believing with Robert Ingersoll that love is worth the price of mortality? Or as a self-sacrifice, a supreme act of devotion, to redeem the man she loves from a place she knows he hates, knowing also that he’s apt to reject her once she’s no longer the youthful beauty he imagines?
Howard Schwartz's novella, "The Four Who Entered Paradise," with commentary by Marc Bregman (1995). The ancient story continues to inspire.
The possibilities are endless. This open-endedness is a mark of great art, secret of its immortality. It leaves us with no fixed lesson, no cut-and-dried answer to the great human questions. With its ambiguities, its unsolved riddles, it teases us to go wandering on our own.
Which brings us back to the original Four Who Entered Paradise. (Or whatever it was that they entered.)
Reread the ancient rabbinic story, which I quoted at the beginning of my first post. Mysterious, hauntingly evocative, like Lost Horizon carried to the nth degree. As in Lost Horizon, the issue of sanity and insanity, the question of where true reality lies, comes into play. It’s represented through the “madness” of Ben Zoma. It’s emphasized in an addition to the story found in the Babylonian Talmud, Hagigah 14b. Rabbi Akiba says to the other three as they set forth on their expedition: “When you draw near the stones of pure marble, do not say, ‘Water, water.’ For it is written, ‘He who speaketh lies shall not be established in My sight’ [Psalm 101:7].” The “stones of pure marble” apparently create an illusion of water; Akiba warns us not to fall for it.
3+1 patterns everywhere. Three live, the fourth dies (Ben Azzai). Three bear the wounds of their unearthly experience; the fourth emerges safe and sound (Akiba). Three, who are named, remain within the accepted bounds of Judaism. The fourth, cryptically called “the Other One,” breaks through those bounds. He “mutilates the young plants,” “suffers his mouth to bring his flesh into guilt”–and it’s left to us to imagine what these metaphors hint at.
Within the overall Four-ness of the story, there’s a polarity of the godly and the godless, the pious and the heretic. These are embodied in Akiba and in his shadow, “the Other One.” If I’m not mistaken, this is the same polarity as we find in Lost Horizon between Conway and Mallinson. Conway is devout, faithful, trusting in the revelations of that supreme master of faith, the High Lama of Shangri-La. Over against them Mallinson brings his reason, his senses, the evidence of his eyes and his flesh. Thus confronted, Conway’s faith dissolves. He leaves with Mallinson.
Who is right? We never really find out. We are Conway–he’s the hero, the point-of-view character. But this doesn’t guarantee that he sees reality as it is, nor does it rule out the possibility that illusion may have a higher value than reality. (Whose illusion?) The “Other One,” even if ultimately wrong, speaks a truth that must be heard.
In the story of the Four in Paradise, we are Akiba. He’s the good guy, the orthodox teacher, the one with the white hat. But the “Other One” also, even when his mouth brings his flesh into guilt, is a full-fledged member of the Four. What comes out of his mouth are words that the faithful need to hear.
But what were those words? What did “the Other One,” a.k.a. Elisha ben Abuyah, say? What did he do?
I’ll post on this next week.
by David Halperin
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Posted in Belief, Judaism, Psychology, Religion | 
Tags: "Lost Horizon", Conway, Elisha ben Abuyah, four who entered paradise, James Hilton, Lo-Tsen, Mallinson, merkavah mysticism, paradise, Rabbi Akiba, Shangri-La | 
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Lost Horizon, Deadly Paradise – Quaternity Tales (Part 2)
May 16, 2013
(Continued from last week’s post:)
The secret of Shangri-La is this: Living there, you age with preternatural slowness.
Unlike in the archetypal paradise of Eden (at least according to some interpretations), you’re not exactly immortal. Sooner or later you’re going to grow old and die. But the process can take centuries rather than decades, and you preserve your youthful vigor and appearance for much of the process. The High Lama, who reveals all this to the Englishman Conway–whom he’s picked as his successor–turns out to be the same French priest who established Shangri-La in 1734, when he was 53 years old. Do the arithmetic: he was born in 1681, died in 1931 at the age of 250.
James Hilton, "Lost Horizon"--entering the world of Shangri-La
Exactly what accounts for this miracle is never made clear. It seems to have something to do with the air of the valley, combined with the meditational and narcotic practices of the lamasery. What is clear is that if you should be so foolish as to leave Shangri-La, the effect vanishes with devastating speed. Your chronological age catches up with you, with a vengeance.
Conway’s naturally curious about Lo-Tsen, the beautiful Chinese girl who plays classical piano for the four newcomers’ mealtime delectation, and on whom both he and Mallinson are developing a crush. Turns out she stumbled into Shangri-La in the year 1884, at age 18. Which makes her currently 65.
So Shangra-La is about as close to Eden as this world can possibly get. Where’s the downside?
Lo-Tsen exemplifies it–at least for some of us. Chang, who serves as the travelers’ host and guide at the lamasery, explains to Conway:
“Lo-Tsen gives no caresses, except such as touch the stricken heart from her very presence. What does your Shakespeare say of Cleopatra? — ‘She makes hungry where she most satisfies.’ A popular type, doubtless, among the passion-driven races, but such a woman, I assure you, would be altogether out of place at Shangri-La. Lo-Tsen, if I might amend the quotation, removes hunger where she least satisfies. It is a more delicate and lasting accomplishment.”
“And one, I assume, which she has much skill in performing?”
“Oh, decidedly–we have had many examples of it. It is her way to calm the throb of desire to a murmur that is no less pleasant when left unanswered.”
Which doesn’t mean you have to be celibate at Shangri-La. The lamas’ motto is moderation in all things–virtue included. The American among the four visitors is periodically taken by Shangri-La’s porters down to the valley below, for bouts of indulgence with the local liquor and the local women. (Whereas Miss Brinklow, if she has comparable impulses, will presumably need to content herself with cold showers.) But for many of us in the “passion-driven races,” this choice between the “lovely cold vase” that is Lo-Tsen, on the one hand, and faceless prostitutes on the other, is bound to be pretty grim.
I’m reminded of the remark I read somewhere in Robert Ingersoll: that given a choice between a world subject to death but with love, versus one from which both love and death had been banished, he’d pick mortality. I don’t know what Ingersoll would say about a place like Shangri-La, where love and death are present but in pale, muted, shadowy forms, stripped of all dread and ecstasy. My guess is he’d be less than enthusiastic.
Like the young Englishman Mallinson, who unlike his three companions hates, hates, hates Shangri-La and can’t wait to be away from it. And who’s discovered a side to Lo-Tsen of which old Chang has never dreamed.
Here’s where the book started getting good for me. I have to admit that when I read Lost Horizon, which I did for the first time about a month ago, I was bored and irritated through most of it. It wasn’t until the very last chapter, when Mallinson is finally given his voice, that I realized the novel’s depth and power.
“Come on, Conway, we’ve till dawn to pack what we can and get away. Great news, man … The porters are about five miles beyond the pass–they came yesterday with loads of books and things … tomorrow they begin the journey back. …. It just shows how these fellows here intended to let us down–they never told us–we should have been stranded here for God knows how much longer. … I say, what’s the matter? Are you ill?”
Conway, unbeknownst to Mallinson, is the new High Lama of Shangri-La, the old one having died hardly more than an hour ago. He knows what Mallinson doesn’t know: that the porters will never agree to conduct them to the outside world. Except that Mallinson assures him they have agreed. They’ve already been paid in advance for their service.
Conway protests:
“But–I don’t understand ….”
“I don’t suppose you do, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Who’s been making all these plans?”
Mallinson answered brusquely: “Lo-Tsen, if you’re really keen to know. She’s with the porters now. She’s waiting.”
“Waiting?”
“Yes. She’s coming with us. I assume you’ve no objection?”
And now Mallinson, who’s been made to seem so petulant and boyish, reveals himself as the thoughtful, passionate, ethical man he is. When Conway calls Lo-Tsen “very charming,” Mallinson bursts out:
“Charming? … She’s a good bit more than that. … Admiring her as if she were an exhibit in a museum may be your idea of what she deserves, but mine’s more practical, and when I see some one I like in a rotten position I try to do something. … After all, if you’re rescuing people from something quite hellish, you don’t usually stop to enquire if they’ve anywhere else to go to.”
Hellish? Shangri-La?
“There’s something dark and evil about it. The whole business has been like that, from the beginning–the way we were brought here, without reason at all, by some madman–and the way we’ve been detained since, on one excuse or another.”
Which is completely true, and someone’s finally saying it. A paradise that kidnaps its recruits and then lies to them has something wrong with it.
Masaccio, "The Expulsion from Paradise." Something to weep about?
“It’s unhealthy and unclean–and for that matter, if your impossible yarn were true, it would be more hateful still! A lot of wizened old men crouching here like spiders for any one who comes near … it’s filthy …. Oh, why won’t you come away with me, Conway? I hate imploring you for my own sake, but damn it all, I’m young and we’ve been pretty good friends together–does my whole life mean nothing to you compared with the lies of these awful creatures? And Lo-Tsen, too–she’s young–doesn’t she count at all?”
Because what I’ve called “the secret of Shangri-La” is for Mallinson “a fantastic rigamarole.” “Believing in people hundreds of years old just because they’ve told you they are”! Does Conway have one scrap of evidence for the advanced age of the people at Shangri-La, beyond the word of Chang and the High Lama? Conway has to concede the point: he doesn’t. “I suppose the truth is,” he admits, “that when it comes to believing things without actual evidence, we all incline to what we find most attractive.”
Which brings us back to Lo-Tsen.
She’s not young, he tells Mallinson. Reiterating the lovely-cold-vase theory of Lo-Tsen, he declares her beauty “a fragile thing that can only live where fragile things are loved. Take it away from this valley and you will see it fade like an echo.”
To which Mallinson retorts with the equivalent of an eight-letter hyphenated obscenity:
“Oh, what stupid nonsense it all is–about her not being young! And foul and horrible nonsense, too. Conway, you can’t believe it! It’s just too ridiculous. How can it really mean anything?”
“How can you really know that she’s young?”
Mallinson half turned away, his face lit with a grave shyness. “Because I do know…. Perhaps you’ll think less of me for it, but I do know. … She was cold on the surface, but that was the result of living here–it had frozen all the warmth. But the warmth was there.”
“To be unfrozen?” …
Mallinson answered softly: “God, yes–she’s just a girl. I was terribly sorry for her, and we were both attracted, I suppose. I don’t see that it’s anything to be ashamed of. In fact in a place like this I should think it’s about the decentest thing that’s ever happened …”
So Lo-Tsen is a creature of the flesh after all, a human being and no museum piece. Without another word, Conway is persuaded. He and Mallinson leave the lamasery and, at dawn, reach the porters’ camp. There, just as Mallinson had said, Lo-Tsen is waiting. “It seemed to [Conway] that the little Manchu had never looked so radiant. She gave him a most charming smile, but her eyes were all for the boy.”
So Mallinson is right. Conway was wrong. The High Lama was a liar, Shangri-La no paradise but a cushioned prison, from which Conway, Mallinson, and Lo-Tsen have a chance of escaping and finding a real life.
But the story’s not quite over …
(To be continued next week.)
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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Frank Capra's "Lost Horizon"
Posted in Belief, Judaism, Psychology, Religion | Tags: "Lost Horizon", agelessness, Conway, immortality, James Hilton, Lo-Tsen, Mallinson, paradise, Shangri-La | No Comments »
Lost Horizon, Deadly Paradise – Quaternity Tales (Part 1)
May 8, 2013
“Four entered Paradise. One looked and died; one looked and went mad; one mutilated the young plants; one entered safely and came out safely.”
No, this isn’t a plot summary for James Hilton’s wildly popular novel Lost Horizon, turned by Frank Capra into a somewhat less popular film. It’s the opening of one of the most famously cryptic passages in all rabbinic literature, preserved in slightly different versions in a number of ancient Hebrew writings. And I cheated in my quotation. The Hebrew word pardes doesn’t really mean “Paradise.” But maybe it does.
Poster for Frank Capra's "Lost Horizon" (1937)
I’ll explain in a minute. But first let’s listen as the ancient rabbis themselves decode their story:
“Ben Azzai looked and died. Of him it is written, ‘Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His saints’ [Psalm 116:15]. Ben Zoma looked and went mad. Of him it is written, ‘Hast thou found honey? Then eat only that which is sufficient for thee, lest thou become filled therewith, and vomit it’ [Proverbs 25:16]. The ‘Other One’ mutilated the young plants. Of him it is written, ‘Suffer not thy mouth to bring thy flesh into guilt’ [Ecclesiastes 5:5]. Rabbi Akiba entered safely and came out safely. Of him it is written, ‘Draw me, we will run after thee’ [Song of Songs 1:4].”
The four men named were rabbis of the early second century CE. The best known of them is Rabbi Akiba–scholar, martyr, possibly political activist–one of the great heroes of rabbinic Judaism. “The Other One” is a hushed designation for the man who was Akiba’s polar opposite: Elisha ben Abuyah, as learned as Akiba, but somehow gone bad–a notorious heretic, libertine, and blasphemer. Ben Azzai and Ben Zoma are more obscure. There’s a story, apparently relevant to this passage, about how another rabbi finds Ben Zoma sitting in what seems like a trance. To the rabbi’s question of what’s going on, Ben Zoma gives the distinctly spacy answer: “I beheld Creation, and between the upper and the lower waters there is only the space of a handbreadth.”
The kind of talk, in other words, that you’d expect from someone who’s gone insane.
As for the word pardes, it normally means “garden” or “orchard.” But the Persian word from which it’s taken is also the source of the Greek paradeisos, from which we get our word “paradise.” In the New Testament, 2 Corinthians 12:2-4, Paul speaks of himself as having been “caught up to the third heaven–whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows … caught up into Paradise … heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.” In this passage paradeisos is apparently the same as the third heaven, or maybe located in the third heaven. (And the Greek verb harpazein, which Paul uses twice, really means “seized,” “abducted.”) Maybe the four rabbis were believed to have had a similar experience, and their pardes was “paradise” after all. Some versions of the story, actually, say that Akiba “went up safely and descended safely,” which would suggest his pardes was envisioned as somewhere up above.
Now cut to Lost Horizon. The year is 1931. Four people are abducted in a hijacked airplane into a paradise called Shangri-La, somewhere in the Himalayas. The foursome is made up of three men and one woman, three British and one American; there are probably other 3+1 patterns if we look for them. Jungians out there will know what I’m driving at: the archetype of the quaternity. I’m assuming the basic story is archetypal, and that’s what accounts for its power. That’s what makes it possible to do a comparison between two imaginative creations from such different historical contexts.
The four abductees are Mallinson, a hot-blooded young English diplomat; Conway, a somewhat older and mellower diplomat; Miss Brinklow, a not quite stereotypic missionary lady; and an American who initially introduces himself as Barnard, which turns out not to be his real name. (He’s a wanted man–a high-finance swindler of the Bernie Madoff variety.) The story is told from Conway’s point of view, he being, like Rabbi Akiba, the only one of the four who’s survived, or at least who’s come back alive.
Originally, it seems, Conway lost his memory of his stay in Shangri-La. It comes back to him, though in fragmentary fashion; and he spends a night telling his story to a novelist named Rutherford, who writes it down (in third person) and subsequently gives the manuscript to the unnamed narrator of the prologue and the epilogue. The story in between is that manuscript, which is to say, Rutherford’s recollection of what Conway told him. These details underscore the haziness of the story. We’re never quite sure how much to trust what Conway says–or, indeed, even if it is what Conway says, as opposed to Rutherford’s distorted memory of it.
Book jacket for James Hilton's "Lost Horizon" (1933)
The four end up at Shangri-La, a lamasery high up in a fertile, pleasant valley sheltered from the Himalayan cold. There they receive a magnificent welcome. Shangri-La might as well be a resort hotel, with central heating and modern plumbing, plus a stunning view of a conical mountain on the horizon called “Blue Moon.” But it’s also a center of learning, with a library rich in European as well as Asian classics. Conway is almost immediately drawn to the place. Young Mallinson, by contrast, can’t wait to leave. Boorishly he demands of their impeccably courteous Chinese host that porters be provided for them. When told it’ll be months before any are available, he rages like a child. Miss Brinklow and the American, meanwhile, make their own accommodations to life in Shangri-La. (Which, we slowly discover, will go on longer than any of them can possibly imagine–they’re never going to get away.) Like the four rabbis of old, each responds to this paradise in his or her individual way.
The High Lama of the place takes an interest in Conway, at first unexplained. In one of a series of private conversations, he confides to the Englishman that Shangri-La will be a refuge for human culture, preserving it through the new and worse Dark Ages that are coming. (Lost Horizon was published in 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor of Germany.) Soon, says the Lama, there will be such a storm “as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage till every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled in a vast chaos. … [T]he Dark Ages that are to come will cover the whole world in a single pall; there will be neither escape nor sanctuary, save such as are too secret to be found or too humble to be noticed. And Shangri-La may hope to be both of these.”
After speaking this prophecy, the High Lama dies. He leaves Conway as his successor, the new High Lama of Shangri-La. Almost immediately Conway has to face the restive Mallinson, who has his plan of escape all worked out–and a beautiful young Chinese girl from the lamasery ready to go with him, as his lover.
Except that lovely Lo-Tsen may not be so young. Shangri-La has secrets that Conway is beginning to understand, and Mallinson doesn’t.
Unless it’s the other way around.
(To be continued next week.)
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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Posted in Belief, Judaism, Psychology, Religion | Tags: "Lost Horizon", 2 Corinthians, Elisha ben Abuyah, four who entered paradise, Frank Capra, James Hilton, merkavah mysticism, paradise, pardes, Paul, Rabbi Akiba, Shangri-La | 3 Comments »
“Crucify Him!” – The Long Trauma of Easter
March 27, 2013
Easter. Not my holiday.
In an earlier post I’ve written about how, as a Unitarian Universalist of Jewish heritage, I’ve taken to celebrating Christmas. Not Easter, though. Too much historical baggage there for me.
The Christmas story is warm, inclusive, expansive. The poor Jewish shepherds of Luke’s Gospel join the rich Gentile intellectuals of Matthew’s–plus, in popular renditions, the stable animals–in kneeling before Hope newborn. By contrast Easter’s story is harsh, dramatic, apocalyptic. By all odds it’s the most powerful story ever told. There are definitely Bad Guys in it. And me–I’m one of the Bad Guys.
From the 12th-century Bury St. Edmunds Cross: the high priest and Pilate squabble over the inscription to be placed over Jesus, "King of the Confessors" (not "King of the Jews," as in the Gospels)
“Therefore when they [the Jewish crowd] were gathered together, Pilate said unto them, Whom will ye that I release unto you? Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ? … They said, Barabbas. Pilate saith unto them, What shall I do then with Jesus which is called Christ? They all say unto him, Let him be crucified. And the governor said, Why, what evil hath he done? But they cried out the more, saying, Let him be crucified” (Matthew 27:17-23).
No wonder Easter was a time of dread for my ancestors in Eastern Europe. It can’t have been easy to sit still, after hearing a story like this read in church, about the torment and killing of the purest and best human being the world had ever known. You’d feel the need to go out, do something about it. And beating up on the local Jewish population was a natural choice for “something” to do.
Well-meaning, ecumenically minded modern people often deal with this side of the Passion stories by saying, Well, it didn’t really happen. Not quite the way the Gospel writers say it did. And it’s true: those stories, compelling as they are, have a lot of loose ends. It’s impossible to get a clear picture, for example, of just what information Judas betrayed about Jesus that was worth 30 pieces of silver. (Jesus was a public figure; lots of people surely could have identified him.) The alleged practice of releasing a condemned prisoner at Passover has left no trace in either Jewish or Roman records. And the Roman governor Pontius Pilate doesn’t come across in other sources as any tender-hearted humanitarian. Surely the Gospel writers have drawn him after the model of what they hoped the Roman officials interrogating them would be like: patient, fair-minded, sympathetic. Which means that Somebody Else must have demanded the crucifixion. Voila: blame the Jews.
Yet reading the Gospel accounts of how the Jewish crowd allegedly behaved, I can’t escape the sense that they ring true. This is how human beings will act, have always acted, when they gather in masses of the hopeful and desperate.
It seems to me to confirm this, not contradict it, that those Jewish crowds had such different feelings toward Jesus not long before. “And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way; others cut down branches from the trees, and strewed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before, and that followed, cried, saying, Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest” (Matthew 21:8-9).
All’s sunshine and affection and enthusiasm. But beware. Very powerful emotions, especially if rooted in deep yearning, have a tendency to morph into their opposites. (“Then Amnon hated her with exceeding great hatred; for the hatred wherewith he hated her was greater than the love wherewith he had loved her”–2 Samuel 13:15.) “Odi et amo,” says the Roman poet, I hate and I love. Which side of the emotion winds up dictating behavior, depends on the flip of the coin.
That coin was tossed, I think, during the incident that’s come to be known as “the Cleansing of the Temple.”
“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it into a den of thieves” (Matthew 21:12-13).
Cleansing the Temple … hmmm, where have we heard that before?
Yes, that’s right–in the story behind the Hanukkah festival. 200 years before Jesus, more or less, Judah the Maccabee and his guerrilla fighters had cleansed the Jerusalem Temple of the “pollutions” (never clearly defined) introduced by the land’s Greek rulers. It was the first act in the liberation of Jewish Palestine from its alien occupiers. If I were a Jew in Roman-ruled Jerusalem, that Passover season when Jesus and his band came to town, my heart would have leaped in thrilled anticipation. This has to be the Maccabee, come back to life! Can the longed-for redemption, of my land and people and faith, be far behind?
And then the letdown comes. It’s not going to happen.
My latter-day Maccabee is in the hands of the Romans. The redemption that I was sure was going to come–that I’ve convinced myself he promised me was going to come–is one more exploded dream. Bad enough that this guy can’t fight off their soldiers, which is pathetic. The truth is even worse. He can but he won’t.
“Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels? But how then shall the scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?” (Matthew 26:53-54).
Perverse. Evil. The worst betrayal of all.
As that awful Passover night wears on, my initial disbelief turns to despair. My despair, to blaming. Blaming, to murderous rage.
When I gather the next day, with hundreds or more likely thousands of people whose dearest hopes have been trashed in exactly the same way mine were, I’m not going to be in a generous mood.
Have you ever been part of a lynch mob–like, on the playground? I don’t think I have. But I think I can imagine the feeling. I have before me the embodiment of all that pollutes and degrades my world–all that’s false, disgusting, treacherous. This earth, life itself, can never be clean or safe or decent until he (or she, or they) is hustled out of it. Swiftly. Brutally.
“And they cried out all at once, saying, Away with this man … Crucify him, crucify him” (Luke 23:18, 21).
(But I don’t believe what Matthew 27:25 tells me, that they said, “His blood be on us, and on our children.” To say that, they’d need to have taken moral responsibility for what they were doing. Which a lynch mob, by its nature, can’t do. No–they’re good and pure and true. It’s the victim who crystallizes all evil, within his loathsome frame.)
I imagine the mood passed. I imagine the next morning, many of those who’d screamed the awful words had second thoughts. Regrets. Wished, maybe, that things had turned out differently. Maybe, even, that they’d done differently. But next morning was too late.
Too late–for a charismatic preacher from the Galilee, whose dazzlingly off-center take on his inherited tradition promised a stunning new understanding of what it meant to be Jewish, what it meant to be human.
Too late–for two faiths that might have remained one, or at least might have walked through the centuries hand in hand, not one’s hand at the other’s throat.
Too late–for the thousands or ten thousands or millions of innocents who perished in Easter-triggered violence, when new lynch mobs went out to purge the latest human pollutants from the fair face of their existence. And often succeeded.
Too late ever to bind up this wound? I don’t think so. In the last half-century Jews and Christians have come a very long way. Nowadays the ancient pain has become more like a dull, throbbing ache, which most of the time we don’t even feel.
When Easter comes around, I feel it.
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by David Halperin
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Posted in Belief, Judaism, Religion | Tags: anti-Semitism, Cleansing of Temple, crucifixion, deicide, Easter, Gospels, Hanukkah, Jewish-Christian conflict, Judah the Maccabee, Judas Maccabeus, Pontius Pilate, Temple | No Comments »
Best Book in the Bible – Akiba, Ingersoll, and the Song of Songs
March 21, 2013
Here’s a riddle for you: What did Akiba ben Joseph, the great rabbi of the 2nd century CE, and Robert Ingersoll, the great agnostic of the 19th century about whom I posted last week, have in common?
Answer: they both thought the Song of Songs (a.k.a. “Song of Solomon”) was the best book of the Hebrew Bible.
"Song of Songs," illustrated by Jossi Stern. Printed by Kshatot Arts
Ingersoll’s granddaughter, Eva Ingersoll Wakefield, quotes him as having approved the Song because it’s “a drama of love–of human love” (The Letters of Robert G. Ingersoll, p. 227). As for Akiba, the rabbinic book called the Mishnah represents him and his colleagues debating the Song of Songs and the Book of Ecclesiastes. Some claimed it’s the consensus that the Song of Songs is part of the Bible, while Ecclesiastes is kind of iffy. (Read the Book of Ecclesiastes, and you’ll see why.) Others said that Ecclesiastes is actually to be dropped from the Bible, and it’s the Song of Songs that’s iffy.
Whereupon …
“Rabbi Akiba said: God forbid that anyone ever had doubts about the Song of Songs! For all the world is not equal to the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel. For all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is Holy of Holies.” (Mishnah, Yadaim 3:5)
Strong words, for a little book (less than 7 pages, in the old “American Jewish” translation of the Bible) that at first glance seems to be mostly about sex. I peeked into the Song of Songs when I was 12 years old. I remember snickering to my friends: “He describes his lady love–naked!!!” Then I didn’t read it again for many years. I somehow sensed it wasn’t yet appropriate for me.
What can you make of a book like this, at age 12? The only thing I had to compare it with were my infrequent, furtive peeps into Playboy. I couldn’t have grasped, at that age, the gulfs that lay between Playboy and the Song of Songs.
Four years ago I was privileged to sit in on a wonderful seminar on the Song of Songs at Duke University, jointly taught by my friends Professor Ellen Davis and Professor (also rabbi) Laura Lieber. Ellen quoted a friend of hers, a Trappist monk, as saying that without the Song of Songs his Cistercian Order could hardly have existed.
I doubt if in another 2000 years anybody’s going to say that about Playboy.
The Song of Songs is thoroughly, unabashedly erotic. Yet it’s not a work of erotica, as we normally understand the word. I doubt if anyone’s ever had the Song of Songs in his or her mind while masturbating. Its lush eroticism is somehow not carnal–I’d call it “spiritual” if that word weren’t so inadequate. Not the eroticism that stiffens or moistens the flesh, but that snatches the breath (“soul”) away with its gorgeousness.
In the course of the seminar, Laura remarked that the Song of Songs is the only book of the Bible that doesn’t have a p’shat, a simple, literal meaning. She was referring to the theory of medieval Jewish Bible exegesis, that Biblical passages have four levels of interpretation, ranging from their obvious p’shat to their deeply hidden, Kabbalistic mystical significance. At first it sounds paradoxical to say the Song of Songs doesn’t have a p’shat. Come on! It’s about sex, plain and simple! About two eager young lovers in the springtime, when “the rain is over and gone … and the vines in blossom give forth their fragrance.” (Song 2:11-13. Which is why the Song of Songs is read in the synagogue at Passover–and which prompted me to post about it now.)
But once you try to say any more about this p’shat–who the lovers are, for example, or what the Song tells about the course of their love–you find yourself wandering in obscurities.
There seem to be two main speakers. The love-smitten girl, whose words begin and end the Song, is called “Shulamit,” or more exactly “the Shulamit” (7:1). Translators like to give this as “the Shulammite,” although it’s hard to see what that would mean, since no “Shulammites” are mentioned anywhere else in the Bible. Her boyfriend is apparently a shepherd. King Solomon is also involved; it’s never clear just how. One theory that used to be popular is that the Song is a drama in which Solomon and the shepherd compete for Shulamit’s affections, with the shepherd winning out. She resists the temptations of royal luxury, sticks with her rustic lover in the fields. But the action of this drama is barely visible in the Song; you can’t find it without a great deal of imagination. Alternatively, Solomon and the shepherd may be somehow the same. “Somehow”–because the historical King Solomon, unlike his father David, was never a shepherd.
I told you it didn’t have a p’shat.
Add to this that the names Solomon (Hebrew “Shelomoh”) and Shulamit are a natural pair, as if “Shulamit” is the feminine version of Solomon. Both come from the same root as shalom, “peace.” This connection may be hinted at in Shulamit’s speech near the end of the Song:
“I am a wall,
And my breasts like the towers thereof;
Then was I in his eyes
As one that found Shalom.” (8:10)
So Solomon and Shulamit both search for Shalom, the “peace” that comes with fulfilled love? Do they find it? Maybe not. Shulamit doesn’t say she’s “one who’s found Shalom,” but only that in her lover’s eyes she’s like one who found it. And the Song appears to end with the lovers still parted and yearning.
The longest sequential narrative in the Song is the eerie, dream-like episode in 5:2-8. Here the sexual images are so blatant you’d have to be blind to miss them–the “hole,” the “bar,” the fingers dripping with myrrh. Yet to reduce this passage to an obliquely symbolic account of copulation just won’t work. There’s too much else going on, and the ruling theme is separation and loss, not consummation. Shulamit is the speaker:
Marc Chagall, "Song of Songs IV"
“I sleep, but my heart waketh;
Hark! my beloved knocketh:
‘Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled;
For my head is filled with dew,
My locks with the drops of the night.’
I have put off my coat;
How shall I put it on?
I have washed my feet;
How shall I defile them?
My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door,
And my heart was moved for him.
I rose up to open to my beloved;
And my hands dropped with myrrh,
And my fingers with flowing myrrh,
Upon the handles of the bar.
I opened to my beloved;
But my beloved had turned away, and was gone.
My soul failed me when he spoke.
I sought him, but I could not find him;
I called him, but he gave me no answer.
The watchmen that go about the city found me,
They smote me, they wounded me;
The keepers of the walls took away my mantle from me …”
Who are the “watchmen”? Why are they so hostile? Maybe the guardians of traditional morality, who can’t abide a young woman wandering about the city by night in search of her vanished love? The poet won’t tell us. Like a dream, the Song refuses to interpret itself.
The traditional morality of ancient Israel warned the young man: any woman who throws her arms around you in public, kisses you, and takes you home with her is bad news. Stay away, if you know what’s good for you (Proverbs 7:6-27). Shulamit, unlike the harlot-adulteress of Proverbs, is a good girl. Yet she hankers to behave in exactly the same way:
“Oh that thou wert as my brother,
That sucked the breasts of my mother!
When I should find thee without [outdoors], I would kiss thee;
Yea, and none would despise me.
I would lead thee, and bring thee into my mother’s house,
That thou mightest instruct me;
I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine,
Of the juice of my pomegranate.” (8:1-2)
“The juice of my pomegranate,” indeed. In a society that normally expected women to be passive and subordinate, Shulamit does her share, and more than her share, of the wooing.
Salvador Dali, "The Song of Songs: The Shepherd"
“Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field;
Let us lodge in the villages.
Let us get up early to the vineyards;
Let us see whether the vine hath budded,
Whether the vine-blossom be opened,
And the pomegranates be in flower;
There will I give thee my love.” (7:12-13)
To the traditional Jewish and Christian expositors, all this was allegory–of God and the Jewish people, of Christ and his Church. (Or alternatively, the Divine and the Soul.) These allegorical readings could be clunky and ham-handed. It’s difficult to read without smirking what the chapter headings in the King James Bible do with the Song’s catalog of Shulamit’s unclothed charms–that same passage (7:2-6) that so titillated me when I was on the brink of puberty. “A further description of the Church her graces.” Yet to dismiss these interpretations as inept fig-leaves, pasted on to cover over the Song’s scandalous sexiness, is to miss the point. Why was the Song selected as Holy Scripture in the first place? Both Synagogue and Church could have simply left it out–if they hadn’t intuited something profoundly sacred in it, something not quite in the mold of conventional Biblical piety and yet an essential supplement (or corrective?) to it. Something which the sacred Book, like the Cistercian Order, couldn’t do without.
“God is love,” people say. (Actually it’s the New Testament that says it, 1 John 4:8.) The Song of Songs says something near the reverse, that love is God. “A very flame of the Lord” (shalhevet-YAH, Song 8:6); and I think of the flame that Moses saw, that burned within the bush without destroying the bush (Exodus 3:2). The God = love equation, it’s often seemed to me, can be taken either theistically or atheistically. God is love: an infinite Benevolence that transcends us yet suffuses and redeems our existence. Or, God is love, meaning that the love we make, the love we show one another, is the only Deity we’ll ever have.
For either of these perspectives, the Song of Songs can serve as Scripture. That’s why “all the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is Holy of Holies.”
by David Halperin
Learn more about David Halperin on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidjhalperin
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Posted in Belief, Judaism, Religion | Tags: allegory, canon of the Bible, Ellen Davis, Laura Lieber, Rabbi Akiba, Robert Ingersoll, sex and religion, sex in the Bible, Shulamit, Shulammite, Solomon, Song of Songs | 2 Comments »
Love Goddess Stories – Esther, Ishtar, and the “Doe of the Dawn” (Postscript)
February 28, 2013
This is a P.S. to a three-part post, on the mythic background of Esther and the Purim story. You can read the earlier installments by clicking here, here, and here.
In 114 or 113 BCE, a Jew named Dositheus showed up in Egypt, carrying with him a Greek document which he called “the Letter of Purim.” He claimed this document “was genuine and had been translated by Lysimachus the son of Ptolemy, one of the residents of Jerusalem.”
This “Letter of Purim” is in fact a translation of the Book of Esther, and it’s come down to us in the ancient Greek Bible called the Septuagint. It contains several episodes–dreams, prayers, royal letters–missing from the Hebrew Esther, seemingly added as antidotes to the God-lessness of the original book. These are now found in the collection known as the Apocrypha, under the title “Additions to the Book of Esther” (Add. Esther for short).
The Apocrypha, Goodspeed translation
The Greek Book of Esther begins with a prophetic dream, ends with its interpretation.
“In the second year of the reign of Artaxerxes the Great, on the first day of Nisan, Mordecai the son of Jair, son of Shimei, son of Kish, of the tribe of Benjamin, had a dream. He was a Jew, dwelling in the city of Susa, a great man, serving in the court of the king. He was one of the captives whom Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had brought from Jerusalem with Jeconiah king of Judea. And this was his dream:
“Behold, noise and confusion, thunders and earthquake, tumult upon the earth! And behold, two great dragons came forward, both ready to fight, and they roared terribly. And at their roaring every nation prepared for war, to fight against the nation of the righteous. And behold, a day of darkness and gloom, tribulation and distress, affliction and great tumult upon the earth! And the whole righteous nation was troubled; they feared the evils that threatened them, and were ready to perish. They they cried to God; and from their cry, as though from a tiny spring, there came a great river, with abundant water; light came, and the sun rose, and the lowly were exalted and consumed those held in honor.” (Add. Esther 11:1-11.)
Compare this, polite reader, with the Zohar’s myth of the “Doe of the Dawn,” which I translated in the second installment of this post. At least 1400 years intervene between the Zohar and Lysimachus’s Greek translation of Esther. But the two have so many details in common, I can’t doubt they’re the same.
1) Two great dragons fight each other. Zohar: “As she [the Doe of the Dawn] travels in the Mountain of Darkness, a certain crooked snake appears at her feet and travels at her feet … the Blessed Holy One prepares for her another snake; he incites the two snakes against each other and she is saved.”
2) The “righteous nation” cries to God, and is answered. Zohar: “She goes up to the top of a high mountain, enwraps her head between her knees, and moans over and over again. The Blessed Holy One hears her voice and is filled with mercy, and takes pity on the world. … When the time comes for her to give birth, she moans and emits cry after cry. … The Blessed Holy One hears her and appears beside her.”
3) “Abundant water” flows from a tiny spring. Zohar: “[The snake] comes and bites her twice on her genital … water comes out, and all the animals in the mountains drink it. This is what is indicated by the Scripture: ‘And Moses lifted up his hand, and smote the rock with his rod twice, and water came forth abundantly … ‘”
4) All this happens just before sunrise. The Zohar’s story takes place “when the morning is about to come, when it is still night and the darkness starts to brighten. … When the darkness of the morning lifts away and the day brightens, she departs and is no longer seen.”
The Greek Book of Esther begins with the dream. It ends with its interpretation:
“And Mordecai said, ‘These things have come from God. For I remember the dream that I had concerning these matters, and none of them has failed to be fulfilled. The tiny spring which became a river, and there was light and the sun and abundant water–the river is Esther, whom the king married and made queen. The two dragons are Haman and myself. The nations are those that gathered to destroy the name of the Jews. And my nation, this is Israel, who cried out to God and were saved.’” (Add. Esther 10:4-9.)
“The river is Esther.” If I might be permitted a small suggestion, I think it’s the spring that is Esther. One of the multiple guises in which the Goddess manifests Herself.
She’s the spring. She’s the Doe. She’s Moses’s rock. She’s Venus, planet and goddess. She’s Ishtar. She’s Esther. The circle closes.
by David Halperin
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Posted in Belief, Judaism, Religion | Tags: Additions to Esther, Apocrypha, Book of Esther, Doe of the Dawn, dragons, Esther, myth, Purim, Septuagint, serpents, Zohar | No Comments »
Love Goddess Stories – Esther, Ishtar, and the “Doe of the Dawn” (Part 3)
February 28, 2013
This is the final installment of a three-part post. To see previous installments, click here and here. For a “P.S.” to the series, click here.
The snake’s name was … Sabbatai Zevi. He really did exist–in history.
This “snake” is the one who, in the Zohar, bites the “Doe of the Dawn” on her vulva, producing first blood and then healing, saving water. I’ll get back to this mythical snake in a minute. But first–the historical Sabbatai Zevi.
He was born to a Jewish family in Izmir, on the western coast of Turkey, in 1626. In 1665, when he was 39 years old, he became an international celebrity, setting the Jewish world wild with his claim to be the Messiah. Most Jews believed in him. Some Christians half-believed, and, like the English diarist Samuel Pepys, looked nervously toward what the year 1666 might bring.
Sabbatai Zevi on the cover of my book about him, from a 1669 portrait
On September 16, 1666, Sabbatai Zevi converted to Islam. He took the Muslim name Mehmed Effendi. He became a minor official in the palace of the Turkish sultan.
When his followers heard the news, most gave up believing in him. But a hard core remained faithful. These stubborn “Sabbatians” insisted that, by leaving Judaism for Islam, Sabbatai hadn’t betrayed his messianic destiny. Rather, he’d fulfilled it.
In an act of extraordinary heroism–so they said–the Messiah had plunged into the inky depths of an alien faith in order to rescue those sparks of divinity trapped inside. In particular, to raise up a very special Lady who’d become entangled in the nether darkness. This was the Shechinah, the Bride of God, or more exactly God’s female element. (In the Kabbalistic mystical tradition, out of which Sabbatai emerged, God is an androgyne, as hinted in Genesis 1:27.) She whom Leonard Nimoy, known to “Star Trek” fans as Spock, celebrated a few years ago in a volume of scorchingly erotic photographs of which the goddess Ishtar might have been proud.
To save the Shechinah, Sabbatai had to enter the “Mountains of Darkness” of the Zohar’s myth. In the form of a serpent. Where he encountered her in the form of a Doe.
The serpentine shape well suited him. Since the beginning of his messianic career, Sabbatai Zevi had conceived himself the “Holy Serpent,” and could invoke the sacred Hebrew language in his support. In Hebrew, the letters can serve also as numerals; and the word nachash, “snake,” has the same numerical value as mashiach, “Messiah.”
The serpent holy???!! Isn’t it demonic, evil, from the Bible story of Eden onward? Well, it is. Welcome to the world of Kabbalah, which is also the world of myth, where opposites fuse into a single potent image. Where the snake’s bite on the Doe’s tenderest part is also a kiss, an act of love that releases the healing juices locked up within her.
Where is Queen Esther in all this? She’s the Doe, remember; and to the Kabbalists she’s an embodiment of the Shechinah, in both her human and her animal form. She’s also Sabbatai Zevi, or more exactly a prophetic foreshadowing of Sabbatai Zevi, much the way the early Christians found foreshadowings (“types”) of Jesus throughout the Old Testament. Like Sabbatai she entered an alien palace, took a new and alien name (Esther 2:7), observed alien practices–all for the sake of redeeming her people. True, she’s a woman, Sabbatai was a man. But myth, which can sanctify a serpent, doesn’t balk at transgendering a Messiah.
The premise of Sabbatai’s heroic plunge into alien darkness is that the Shechinah has earlier made the same descent. Its a descent that the Goddess has made from time immemorial:
“She set her heart from highest heaven
on earth’s deepest ground,
the goddess set her heart from highest heaven
on earth’s deepest ground,
Inanna set her heart from highest heaven
on earth’s deepest ground,
milady abandoned heaven, abandoned earth,
went down to Hades,
Inanna abandoned heaven, abandoned earth,
went down to Hades.”
(“The Descent of Inanna,” translated by Thorkild Jacobsen)
This is Ishtar before she was named Ishtar, when she was still the Sumerian Inanna, “Inanna towards the place of sunrise” as the descent story calls her. In other words: Venus, the Morning Star.
Like the Shechinah, Ishtar/Inanna becomes trapped in the darkness she’s entered. She escapes by sending her lover Dumuzi–he of “Plow my vulva, man of my heart! Plow my vulva!”–to suffer in her place. (Sabbatai Zevi died in 1676, in lonely Albanian exile.)
Does the Goddess’s return bring salvation to those who believe in her? The ancient myth is unclear on this point. The Zoharic myth of the Doe is far more explicit. (” … water comes out, and all the animals in the mountains drink it.”) So is the Book of Esther:
“The Jews had light and gladness, joy and honor” (Esther 8:17).
A happy ending indeed, for a troubled, turbulent story. Imagine expanding it from “the Jews” to all the dwellers in this troubled, turbulent world–the Hamans and their offspring included. Imagine the Goddess shining forth in the sunrise, as I suspect She did in the mythic layers beneath the surface of the Biblical book, to all the thirsty ones languishing in darkness, bringing “light and gladness, joy and honor.”
Now that’s a Purim worth celebrating.
For a more technical version of these ideas, with sources and argumentation, click here. This is a paper I delivered in December 2008 before a conference of the Association of Jewish Studies.
To read an ancient Jewish-Greek source that closes the circle, bringing it all back to Esther, click here for a postscript to this series.
Sabbatian Seder (Passover) plate; with lion (upper right), gazelle (upper left) and serpent (bottom) as emblems of Sabbatai Zevi. Copper, from the collection of Itzhak Einhorn; photo from the cover of Pe'amim, Summer 1990. The lion is the "lion of Judah"; the gazelle, "zevi" in Hebrew, is Sabbatai Zevi's name; the serpent is the "holy serpent," about which I've written in this post
Posted in Belief, Judaism, Religion | Tags: descent of Inanna, Doe of the Dawn, Esther, goddess, Holy Serpent, Inanna, Ishtar, Leonard Nimoy, Messiah, myth, mythology, Purim, Sabbatai Zevi, Shechinah, Venus | 2 Comments »
Love Goddess Stories – Esther, Ishtar, and the “Doe of the Dawn” (Part 2)
February 21, 2013
This is the second installment of a three-part post. For parts 1 and 3, and a postscript to the series, click here, here, and here.
Once upon a time, maybe 1800 years ago, two rabbis went traveling in the Galilee. It must have been a long journey. They took care to get an early start.
Rabbi Hiyya the Elder and Rabbi Simeon ben Halafta were walking early in the valley of Arbel. They saw the light of the Doe of the Dawn break forth. Rabbi Hiyya the Elder said to Rabbi Simeon ben Halafta: “This is what the redemption of Israel will be like–bit by bit, continually growing greater. … At first, ‘Mordecai was sitting in the king’s gate’ [Esther 2:21]. Later on, ‘Haman took the robe and the horse and arrayed Mordecai’ [6:11] … and still later, ‘Mordecai went forth from the presence of the king in royal apparel’ [8:15]. And finally, ‘the Jews had light and gladness, joy and honor’ [8:16].” (From the Palestinian Talmud, Berakhot 1:1.)
The "Doe of the Dawn" in astral form, come from the Mountains of Darkness
What was this “Doe of the Dawn” that the two rabbis saw? A third rabbi, who lived long after these two, wants to make sure we don’t imagine it was the Morning Star. “If anybody tries to tell you that the Morning Star is the Doe of the Dawn, he’s a liar.” But with all due respect to the distinguished scholar, that’s exactly what I think the Doe of the Dawn was. What else could it have been–that light that’s seen before sunrise?
The phrase “Doe of the Dawn,” ayelet ha-shachar, is taken from the Bible, from a title given to the 22nd Psalm. “For the Choirmaster; concerning the Doe of the Dawn; a psalm of David.” This is odd, because the psalm that follows doesn’t seem to say anything about any “doe” or any “dawn.” Instead it laments the writer’s sufferings, begs God to come and help. “My God, my God,” it begins, “why hast Thou forsaken me?” Which, if we’re to trust Matthew and Mark, were Jesus’s last words on the cross.
So is the psalm about the Messiah? And is the Messiah the mysterious “Doe of Dawn” of the title? But then why a “doe”? Surely the Messiah can’t be female, can she?
Unless she’s a goddess.
Here let’s pause and catch our breath. Think back to what I suggested in last week’s post–that hiding somewhere behind the beautiful Queen Esther of the Purim story is a queen just as beautiful and vastly more powerful–the lubricious Ishtar, love-and-war goddess of the ancient Near East. And that Ishtar’s representative in the sky was the planet Venus, the Morning Star, shining before the dawn.
Rabbi Hiyya catches sight of this “Doe of the Dawn” as he hikes with his friend Rabbi Simeon, and thinks … of the Book of Esther.
A different Talmudic passage helps us understand how the “Doe” and Esther are connected:
“How was Esther like a doe? Just as a doe has a narrow vagina, and gives her mate as much pleasure each time as she did the first, so Esther gave Ahasuerus as much pleasure each time as she did the first. … How was Esther like the dawn? Just as the dawn is the culmination of the night, so Esther was the culmination of miracles.” (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 29a)
So the pearly beauty in the eastern sky is none other than Esther, mistress of miracle. Lady of erotic delight.
Did I say, “none other than”? Scratch those words; they don’t apply to myth. Myth doesn’t deal in nothing-buts and either-ors. It’s inclusive, not exclusive. Its net is spread to encompass all the world and all the ages–which is to say, the human unconscious, that universe we carry with us inside the few cubic inches of our skulls.
If Esther’s a part of the myth of Ishtar, Ishtar herself is part of a vaster web, stretching from the dawn of history in the Near East to Spain in the 13th century. And beyond.
It was in 13th-century Spain that the Jewish mystics we call “Kabbalists” wrote their classic text, the Zohar. It’s in the Zohar that the new-old myth of the “Doe of the Dawn” bursts forth. This myth shows the goddess in animal form–and in a kindlier, more nurturing and redemptive light than Esther’s manipulative scheming, or the sexual rapacity and cruelty of Ishtar. If you don’t believe the myth’s essentials are truly ancient, open the New Testament. Read chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation. Marvel at the similarities.
Zohar, vol. 3 of the standard edition, pages 249a-b. My translation:
“What is the ‘Doe of the Dawn’? A creature whose mercy is unparalleled among all the animals. When she realizes there is a state of emergency, and she needs food for herself and all the animals, she goes far off and brings back food. … When does she distribute food? When the morning is about to come, when it is still night and the darkness starts to brighten. …
“Where does she travel to? She goes 60 parasangs from the place she departed from, and enters the Mountain of Darkness. As she travels in the Mountain of Darkness, a certain crooked snake appears at her feet and travels at her feet. She goes from there to the Mountain of Light. When she gets there, the Blessed Holy One prepares for her another snake; he incites the two snakes against each other and she is saved. From there she gets her food. … When the darkness of the morning lifts away and the day brightens, she departs and is no longer seen.”
Just like Venus. But the myth goes on:
“When the world needs rain, all the other animals gather to her. She goes up to the top of a high mountain, enwraps her head between her knees, and moans over and over again. The Blessed Holy One hears her voice and is filled with mercy, and takes pity on the world. She comes down from the mountaintop and runs away to hide herself. All the other animals run after her, but they cannot find her. …
The pregnant Doe in human form, encountering her "snake" (William Blake, "The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun," 1805)
“When she becomes pregnant, she is closed up. When the time comes for her to give birth, she moans and emits cry after cry. … The Blessed Holy One hears her and appears beside her. He then brings forth a great snake from the midst of the Mountains of Darkness. It goes between the mountains, its mouth licking dust, until it reaches that doe. It comes and bites her twice on her genital. The first time blood comes out, and [the snake? or the Doe?] licks it up. The second time water comes out, and all the animals in the mountains drink it. This is what is indicated by the Scripture: ‘And Moses lifted up his hand, and smote the rock with his rod twice, and water came forth abundantly, and the congregation drank, and their cattle’ [Numbers 20:11].”
Plenty of snakes here. At first, it seems, they’re out to get the Doe, like the Great Red Dragon of Revelation 12:3. But then the snake turns into something more ambiguous, more mysterious, symbolized in the Bible by Moses’s rod (which has a certain tendency to turn into a snake). Its sexual “bite” frees the Doe’s healing energies. Water gushes forth from her to a thirsty world.
What is that snake? A devil? A god? A Messiah?
All three?
I’ll post about the snake next week, in my third installment.
Purim begins this Saturday evening. For those who do celebrate it–have a very happy one! In next week’s post, I’ll suggest a perspective from which Purim can be a holiday for us all, religiously observant or not, Jewish or non-Jewish.
Also next week, I’ll put up a P.S. to these posts, describing a piece of evidence I’d forgotten about when I planned the series, which to my mind conclusively ties the “Doe of the Dawn” myth to Esther. (It’s in the Greek version of the Book of Esther.) More next week!
And I’m always eager to hear your responses. Post them here or on my Fan Page,
https://www.facebook.com/JournalofaUFOInvestigator.
Posted in Belief, Judaism, Religion | Tags: Book of Esther, Book of Revelation, Doe of the Dawn, Esther, Great Red Dragon, Ishtar, Kabbalah, love goddess, Morning Star, myth, phallic god, planet Venus, sex goddess, snake, Talmud, Venus, Zohar | No Comments »
Love Goddess Stories – Esther, Ishtar, and the “Doe of the Dawn” (Part 1)
February 14, 2013
This is the first installment of a three-part post. For parts 2 and 3, and a postscript to the series, click here, here, and here.
The weekend after next is the Jewish festival of Purim. I don’t plan to celebrate. Purim is not one of my favorite holidays. The text on which it’s founded, the Book of Esther, is not my favorite book of the Bible.
At the heart of the Purim story is a quarrel over prestige that turns into massacre. A Jewish courtier in the palace of the Persian king Ahasuerus (known to the Greeks as Xerxes) refuses to show the powerful Haman the deference that Haman thinks is his due. Haman turns his wounded narcissism into a vendetta, directed not just at Mordecai the Jew but at all Mordecai’s people. He works on his amiable, pliable, rather dumb monarch–not the way history remembers Xerxes; the king’s name is practically the only historical datum in this work of fiction–and manages to obtain a royal decree, “to destroy, to slay, and to cause to perish, all Jews, both young and old, little children and women, in one day … and to take the spoil of them for a prey.” In other words–Holocaust.
Esther (Edwin Long, 1878)
This accomplished, “the king and Haman sat down to drink” (Esther 3:15).
So far, so bad. But Mordecai has an advantage Haman hasn’t dreamt of, which is that Ahasuerus’s queen Esther is not only Jewish–unbeknownst to everyone in the palace–but also Mordecai’s cousin. She has her own way of working on the king, with the result that the royal favor switches and Mordecai is exalted, Haman and his sons done to death. There’s a indeed a pogrom on the day appointed. Only, the Jews are the ones wielding the knives.
A happy ending, I guess. But one that leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Christian theologians and Bible scholars, from Martin Luther onward, have fallen over themselves to denounce the “spirit of hatred and revenge” pervading the Book of Esther–sometimes suggesting it’s pretty creepy of the Jews to like this book so much. Naturally. It’s a lot easier to tut-tut over Esther’s “vindictiveness” when you don’t come from a history littered with Hamans and Haman wannabes, some of them extremely successful. (Consult the years 1933-45 for an example.) And yet the criticism is legitimate. The story behind the Purim festival is mean and squalid, a tale of manipulation and murder, redeemed here and there by a few humane spots. (Like the suggestions in 3:15 and 8:15 that all the people of Persia’s capital city are dismayed by Haman’s anti-Semitic decree, relieved at its reversal.)
The squalor isn’t exactly relieved by the manner through which Esther obtained her influential position. She becomes queen of Persia by joining, with Mordecai’s approval and support, in an erotic circus involving Ahasuerus and a multitude of good-looking young women, each of whom spends a trial night with the king. (This is turned into a “beauty contest” in children’s versions of the story.) Esther is the one invited back for more.
Nowhere is the question raised whether a Jewish girl ought to do this sort of thing. Esther indeed, at Mordecai’s suggestion, doesn’t let on she’s Jewish (2:10). Not for her to make a fuss over kosher food, like the Judean exiles in Nebuchadnezzar’s court (Daniel 1:8-16); Esther doesn’t seem to care what she eats, who she sleeps with. The Jewish God appears nowhere in her book, at least by name. As if He’d whispered into the author’s ear: you can write whatever you want; it’s a free country. But leave Me out of it.
Yet there are gods in the Book of Esther–just not Jewish ones. Both its heroes seem to have the names of Babylonian deities. Esther is Ishtar. Mordecai is Marduk.
How odd. And it’s surely significant–no one else in the book has names like these. It points toward some mythological subtext of the story, the shape of which we can only guess.
Who were Ishtar and Marduk? Marduk was a Johnny-come-lately sort of god, originally the celestial protector of the city of Babylon. As Babylon rose in importance so did Marduk, until he’d become head of the pantheon. (The Babylonian creation epic, Enuma elish, explains how and why the gods submitted themselves to Marduk’s authority.) Ishtar, by contrast, was a goddess of venerable antiquity, from the remote past of the Sumerian civilization. Ancient yet perpetually young, almost but not quite irresistable to males, she was goddess of love and sex. War also. (Think of the violence into which the Book of Esther explodes.) Originally named Inanna, she was forerunner to the Greek Aphrodite and the Roman Venus. The raunchiest divinity of the ancient Near East.
“Plow my vulva, man of my heart! Plow my vulva!” she cries out to her lover Dumuzi (later called Tammuz), to whom she was to turn monumentally nasty once the romance had soured. Dumuzi may have been her first. He was far from her last. In this respect she’s an inversion of Esther–or, it’s probably more accurate to say, Esther is an inversion of her. Both are notable for sex appeal. But Esther’s only the most successful of Ahasuerus’s long string of bed partners. Ishtar has her own extended chain of fools, who’ve loved her and whom she’s loved–for the time being. When she’s through with them, she does things like turn them into animals.
Ishtar, from 18th-century (BCE) Iraq
The hero Gilgamesh, upon whom Ishtar’s wandering eye has alighted, knows better than to get tangled up with her.
“Your lovers have found you like a brazier which smoulders in the cold, a backdoor which keeps out neither squall of wind nor storm … a water-skin that chafes the carrier … a sandal that trips the wearer. Which of your lovers did you ever love for ever? What shepherd of yours has pleased you for all time?” (From N.K. Sandars’ translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh.)
Not that his prudence keeps Gilgamesh from getting burned. Ishtar, who could have taught her Jewish namesake a thing or two about vindictiveness, knows how to hit back where it hurts. At Gilgamesh–and hundreds of innocent people along with him.
One more thing about Ishtar. Like her Roman successor Venus, she was associated with the second planet of the solar system, which the ancients knew as Morning and Evening Star. The brilliant pearly light that sometimes precedes the sunrise, at other times appears in the west after the sun has set.
In this guise, perhaps, Ishtar penetrates the Bible once more–under the lovely, evocative title of “Doe of the Dawn.”
I’ll talk about this “Doe of the Dawn” in my next post.
by David Halperin
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Posted in Judaism, Religion | Tags: Ahasuerus, anti-Semitism, Book of Esther, Dumuzi, Enuma Elish, Epic of Gilgamesh, Esther, Gilgamesh, goddess Venus, Haman, Inanna, Ishtar, love goddesses, Marduk, Mordecai, planet Venus, Purim, sex goddesses, Tammuz, Xerxes | 6 Comments »
Maccabees, Taliban, and the Real Story of Hanukkah
December 11, 2012
I wrote this “Hanukkah Q&A” ten years ago for a web course on Judaism. Things have changed a lot since then, in the world and in myself. Back then I didn’t identify religiously, as I do today, as a Unitarian Universalist of Jewish heritage. But when I wrote, “there’s no holy book, ours or anyone else’s, in which the truth is frozen to keep it eternally fresh … there’s always something we can learn from people who don’t see things the way we do”–that was a very UU thought. All Scriptures contain truth; none is truth.
So some of what follows will sound a little dated, as we celebrate the eight days of Hanukkah 2012. But I think its essential point remains as valid as when I wrote it. And when you read it you’ll understand what I mean when I dedicate it to peace, to understanding, and to one of the great heroes of our time–Malala Yousufzai.
What is Hanukkah?
Most essentially, it’s the Independence Day of an ancient Jewish kingdom that was established in Palestine about 140 BCE. We call this kingdom the “Hasmonean state,” and it came about as the result of something called the “Maccabean revolt“–a revolt by the Jews of Palestine, led by a group of guerrilla fighters called the Maccabees, against the Syrian Greeks who until then had been ruling Palestine. When the Maccabees succeeded in getting Jewish independence, they invented for the Jewish calendar a new holiday to celebrate their triumph. That holiday is Hanukkah.
Mattathias kills the Jewish "apostate"; engraving by Gustave Dore
What ever happened to this “Hasmonean state”? It doesn’t still exist, does it?
No. It was swallowed up by the Roman Empire in 63 BCE.
By “BCE” you mean the same thing as “BC”, right?
Yes. It stands for “Before the Common Era,” a bit more religiously neutral than “Before Christ.” But functionally they’re the same.
So what you’re telling me is that Jews are still celebrating the Independence Day of a country that hasn’t existed for more than 2000 years?
That’s right.
Why do they do that?
Because Hanukkah, like Judaism itself, has been transformed in some very basic ways during those 2000 years. It now serves American Jews as a very useful and encouraging emblem of how we can become part of the culture around us–which is the culture of our country, after all–and still keep a sense of our spiritual independence and integrity. It also doesn’t hurt that now, for the first time since the end of the Hasmonean kingdom in 63 BCE, there is again an independent Jewish state in Palestine–the State of Israel, which got its independence in 1948–so Jewish national independence is a very up-to-date issue.
Becoming part of American culture and still keeping your independence and integrity–I assume you’re going to explain in more detail what you mean by that?
Yes, I am.
But before we get into that, what is the story of Hanukkah?
The story … Well, once upon a time there was a wicked Greek king named Antiochus. He persecuted the Jews fiercely and cruelly, and tried to force them to give up their Judaism and adopt Greek ways. Some of the Jews gave in, but others resisted. One of these resisters was a Jewish priest named Mattathias, who had five sons. After Mattathias died resisting the Greeks, his son Judah the Maccabee (or Judas Maccabeus, to use the Greek form of the name) became the leader of the revolt. Judah won some very dramatic victories against much larger Greek armies, and eventually liberated Jerusalem and purified the Jewish Temple, which the Greeks had polluted with their pagan rituals.
As part of the purification of the Temple, Judah and his followers (the Maccabees) wanted to re-light the Temple’s lamps. Unfortunately, only a small quantity of pure oil remained for them to do that with. By a miracle the little bit of oil, which should have lasted only one day, burned for eight full days. That’s why we commemorate the miracle each year on the eight days of Hanukkah, burning one candle on the first night, two candles the second, and so forth, until the Hanukkah candelabrum (the menorah) burns with eight lights on the eighth night of Hanukkah. (Plus an extra candle, usually in the middle, that is used to light the other eight.)
Did this really happen? Or is it just a legend?
The part about the miraculous oil is a legend. The rest of the story is mostly true, although it focuses only on the beginning of the revolt and the recapture of the Jerusalem Temple (in December, 164 BCE). Nobody wants to talk about the next 24 years of fighting and politicking, often sordid and usually brutal, that had to happen before the Hasmonean state got its independence. Also, the story as I’ve told it is heavily partisan. The Maccabees are the good guys, the valiant heroes; Antiochus is the bad guy, who persecutes Judaism out of pure malevolence. The historical reality wasn’t anywhere near that simple.
And some of its complications were … ?
To begin with, we now think of the Maccabees as fighters for religious freedom. Which they were. But only for the freedom to practice Judaism as they understood it, which was a fiercely fundamentalist kind of Judaism. Other kinds of Judaism, not to mention other religions, got no freedom at all.
One of our ancient sources on the Maccabean revolt says, in praise of the Maccabees, that they “struck down sinners in their anger and lawless men in their wrath … and forcibly circumcised all the uncircumcised boys they found within the borders of Israel” (I Maccabees 2:44-46). Who were the “sinners” and the “lawless men”? It turns out they were the people we call the “Hellenized Jews”–the Jews whose idea of Judaism went beyond Biblical fundamentalism, who tried to create a synthesis between the insights of Judaism and those of the Greek culture (“Hellenism”) that was sweeping the world in those days. The Maccabees hated Jews like that. Wherever they could, they eliminated them and their ideas.
Judah the Maccabee, as the 14th century saw him
And that business of circumcising people by force …
Not pleasant reading.
You know who these Maccabees remind me of? The Taliban, more than anything else! I hope I didn’t offend you by saying that.
No, you didn’t. I think it’s a reasonable comparison. Like the Taliban, the Maccabees were representives of a traditional society facing a world culture that had a lot to offer that society, but also threatened to shake up its traditions. The Hellenized Jews whom the Maccabees fought remind me of the Muslims today who try to read the Qur’an in such a way as to make Islam part of the modern world, rather than a backward force resisting the modern world. What these Muslims try to do with the Qur’an, the Hellenized Jews tried to do with the Torah. And I must say my sympathies are with the Hellenized Jews.
So there were really three sides in the conflict behind the Hanukkah story, and not just two?
Yes, indeed. There were the Syrian Greeks, there were the Maccabees, and then there were the Hellenized Jews. The Hellenized Jews tried to understand their Judaism in such a way as to open a window to the culture of the Greeks. But then the Greeks went too far, and under Antiochus IV they actually tried to stamp out Judaism, while the Hellenized Jews were trying to reform Judaism. Nobody knows just why Antiochus did that, actually. It was very rare, in the ancient world, to try to persecute other people’s religions. Whatever his reasons were, Antiochus’s persecution of Judaism was a fairly crazy policy. It soon blew up in his face when the Jews decided they weren’t going to sit still for it. Unfortunately the Hellenized Jews got blown up in the explosion.
So what happened to the Hellenized Jews, when the Maccabees got the power?
The sources don’t tell us. The Maccabees won the struggle, and it’s their historians who wrote those books that survive.
It would be sort of like if the Taliban got back into power in Afghanistan.
I imagine so. The Maccabees, like the Taliban, were not nice people. And they were more than a little fanatical. Which is not to say the Hellenized Jews were always angels: they weren’t. But I think they were on the right track, and it’s a pity their path came to an end with the Maccabean revolt.
Judah the Maccabee, as the 16th century saw him
So why is Hanukkah a celebration? It sounds like more of a tragedy! Religious fundamentalists take over, stamp out all non-fundamentalist ideas … Ugh!
Yes, I’d agree with you, if Jewish history had stopped in the second century BCE. But it didn’t. The second century BCE was the first time Judaism came into contact with an overwhelmingly attractive outside culture. But it was very far from being the last time this happened. In the eighteenth century CE–that’s the same thing as “AD”–Judaism met a new kind of “Hellenism,” in the form of Western culture. Like the ancient Hellenism, this modern “Hellenism” invited the Jews to join it, not at the cost of giving up their Judaism but at the cost of rethinking their Judaism. And this time we went for it! That’s why Judaism is today part of Western culture, part of the American scene.
In the second century BCE the Hellenized Jews were defeated and destroyed. But over the past three centuries their spiritual successors–the Jews who want to see Judaism change and adapt, who are open to the outside world–have succeeded. And I think we’re all better off for that.
Would all Jews agree with you?
There isn’t anything all Jews would agree on. But I think most Jews, here and in Israel, would at least be open to the ideas I’ve expressed to you. I think most of us realize that there’s no holy book, ours or anyone else’s, in which the truth is frozen to keep it eternally fresh; and that there’s always something we can learn from people who don’t see things the way we do.
I have to say, also, that although I don’t agree with the Maccabees and I don’t much like them, I can’t blame them for being as they were. To learn how to be yourself and still be open to others–that’s not an easy trick, for an individual or for a culture. It requires considerable balancing, considerable acceptance of ambiguity. No wonder we Jews didn’t do it perfectly, first time around. We’re not doing it perfectly today. But I think we’re doing it better.
So is there a new Hanukkah, to celebrate this new slant on Judaism?
Yes, there is, but it’s celebrated at the exact same time as the old one and with many of the same rituals. We still light the candles in the menorah, still sing songs about the Maccabees and the ancient miracle of the renewal of the Temple. But we also do new things, like give Hanukkah presents that look exactly like Christmas presents, send Hanukkah cards that look very much like Christmas cards, bake Hanukkah cookies that taste just like Christmas cookies, only they’re cut into shapes like the menorah or the Star of David … It’s our way of saying that we’re people just like the people around us, sharing in their joys, celebrating the renewal of the sun’s light at the same time they do, and in the same ways they do. I think that’s one of the meanings of the lighting of the Hanukkah candles–first one, then two, then finally eight–as if to say that even in the darkest time of the year the light is starting to come back.
The Feast of Lights; photo from the Jewish Museum Berlin
That “return-of-the-light” business sounds very pagan, very like nature-worship. Like something the ancient Greeks would have done.
Yes, doesn’t it? We’re human beings like everybody else–ancient Greeks, modern Christians, you name it. Yet we also have our own cultural separateness, as Jews, which won’t disappear and which we don’t want to disappear. When we tell the story of the ancient Hanukkah, and remember the heroism of the Maccabees and forget their fanaticism, we honor that impulse toward separateness. And when we go out and buy Hallmark Hanukkah cards we honor the opposite impulse, toward togetherness, toward being the same as our fellow-Americans and fellow-humans.
Both impulses are authentic, and both are necessary. And Hanukkah is an emblem of how they can be synthesized. And that’s why Hanukkah is such an important festival for Jews today.
Let me go back a little bit. You spoke about the “sources” for the Hanukkah story. Where are these sources? Is Hanukkah mentioned in the Bible?
Depends on which Bible you mean. It’s not mentioned in the Jewish Bible; that is, in the Hebrew books that Jews call the “Tanakh” and Christians call the “Old Testament.” It is mentioned once in the New Testament. John 10:22 calls it “the feast of the Dedication.” That means, of course, Judah the Maccabee’s dedication of the purified Temple.
But the full story of Hanukkah is in two books called “First and Second Maccabees,” which are part of the Apocrypha, a collection of ancient Jewish books preserved in the Greek language–
So the Maccabees fought against the Greeks, yet their story is told in the Greek language? What an irony!
Isn’t it? But there’s something more. For the Catholic Church, most of the books of the Apocrypha are holy Scripture, just like the rest of the Old Testament. So the full story of Hanukkah is not in the Jewish Bible, not in the Protestant Bible, but it’s there in “First and Second Maccabees,” in the Old Testament of the Catholic Bible.
So if it weren’t for the Catholic Church, we might not know the story of Hanukkah?
Probably not. It’s an interesting question why the rabbis who canonized the Jewish Bible left out the Books of the Maccabees. It appears that the story of the Maccabees made the ancient rabbis uneasy, although not quite for the same reasons it makes me uneasy. But the effect was that for centuries Jews had only a vague and garbled idea of the story behind Hanukkah, even while they continued to observe the holiday and to light the menorah. When at last they wanted to know the real story, they had to turn to the ancient Jewish books they had forgotten about, but which had been preserved through the centuries by the Catholic Church.
Irony! More irony!
There are plenty of ironies in the Hanukkah story, aren’t there?
You know what it sounds like to me? It sounds like the real Hanukkah story is the story of how Judaism is interwoven with the other cultures and religions of the world–how it sometimes fights them, sometimes becomes part of them. Sometimes it does both at the same time!
Not a bad way to put it.
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Posted in Israel, Judaism | Tags: Apocrypha, Catholic Bible, Hanukkah, Hellenism, Hellenized Jews, Judah the Maccabee, Judas Maccabeus, Maccabees, Malala Yousufzai, Mattathias, Taliban | 2 Comments »