Hi Linda! It's nice to see you around. This board has become quite milquetoasty in your absence, and due to the loss of several of our more outspoken members. I'm thinking particularly of Tao.
Hi Chris,
I'm sorry I took so long getting back to this wonderful post of yours. I just saved it in MS Word because I'm pretty sure I won't be able to answer every point you raised it one post, given my penchant for writing six long paragraphs in reply to three sentences. I do that all the time in my e-mails.
No matter how hard I try, I can't be everywhere at once. So if you don't see me around for a few weeks or months, you can safely assume that I'm making trouble and rattling cages elsewhere in cyberspace. The debate on Amazon I mentioned earlier is one of those places, although I've kind of neglected that in recent weeks also. One reason for that is because I've become active on Blogger over the past year. I don't have that many posts on my own blog, but I've developed a bad habit of posting extended comments on other people's blogs--basically treating them like discussion boards. I've been doing that for so long the writing seems to flow most easily for me in a discussion board format. I guess it's a conditioned-reflex kind of thing.
So far, the long-suffering Rabbi Rami Shapiro has been putting up with my long-winded comments on his blog without complaint. Rabbi Rami is an ultra-liberal syncretist rabbi Dauer turned me on to awhile back. I mean...any rabbi who goes to interfaith retreats at a convent of the Daughters of Wisdom and says the Hail Mary in front of an image of the Divine Mother (he also wrote a book about her) can't be all bad, can he?
Speaking of Dauer, where has he disappeared to? I don't see any recent posts by him on the Judaism board or elsewhere. I really liked reading his exchanges with BB, even though I had a hard time following them sometimes. I don't have a "classical" Jewish education (I can read the Hebrew alphabet but that's about it) and no academic background in philosophy either, so the going got a bit rough for me at times. But I enjoyed what I did understand.
Okay, so back to my comment on Rabbi Rami's blog. I posted it a few days ago and just re-read it earlier today. It was another of those spur-of-the-moment things, but I have to say it holds up pretty well and doesn't embarrass me when I re-read it. It's the long one following this post called "Mutant Judaism."
http://http://rabbirami.blogspot.com/2010/07/mutant-judaism.html
He's referring to Reform Judaism. I don't think Reform Judaism is a mutant (i.e. with no precedent in earlier forms of Judaism) and explained why in the comment. So far nobody has posted any replies or follow-up comments--I'm not sure if that's a good sign or not!
I can tell you a little about what brought it on, aside from Rabbi Rami's blog post. As I said at the beginning of this post, one thing has led to another over the past few weeks. And I started asking myself at the end of a long train of associations:
What is it that I really believe? When you boil it all down, what do I really and truly believe?
Because I had been thinking along these lines anyway, the answer came to me almost immediately:
I believe in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria.
What I mean is that I believe it's as true a model of how the Universe really works as anything anyone has ever come up with. You know I don't mean any of this literally because it can't be understood that way. But I believe there was a withdrawal, a
tsimtsum as they call it in Hebrew, to create a space where God was NOT. That's very important, because there has to be a negative space before anything else can happen. There has to be "the Void" or "the Deep" or whatever term you want to use, so that was the first thing to be created. Of course it isn't a "thing" but you know what I mean.
And then there were the emanations--the number and the names vary according to the system, but in Kabbalah there are 10 of them, with a mysterious added one called Da'ath between Chokmah and Binah that is sometimes there and sometimes isn't, but is never officially counted. In the Gnostic systems (and there are a lot of them!) the names and numbers vary, but they are generated in pairs, with a male and a female Aeon in each pair.
And then there is The Glitch--VERY important! There's an accident and something goes very wrong. The Gnostics call it the Fall of Sophia (which they explain in a couple of different ways) and the kabbalists call it the Breaking of the Vessels, when the first set of sephirot shattered from the impact of the divine light or energy pouring into them. And it fell into the realm of the
klipot--that's Hebrew for shells or husks, like a nutshell or any seed covering. It's the traditional term for the demonic realm or realm of evil, where the fallen sparks became trapped and imprisoned.
And that's what we're here for, us humans. That's why we were created. To liberate the fallen sparks from their shells. To pick up the pieces. That's
tikkun olam, the repair of the world. It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it!
Love and Light,
Linda
