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Renewal Judaism

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-2834058

2164-0041

Zalman Schachter-Shalomi,

Biblical Studies and Interpretation

Professor shaul magid is certainly correct in placing me in the paradigm-shift camp of Jewish Renewal. As he begins his essay, “Between Paradigm Shift Judaism and Neo-Hasidism: The New Metaphysics of Jewish Renewal,” in this Winter 2015 issue of Tikkun, he mentions the “Age of Aquarius.” At the time when this phrase entered the general conversation, I was strongly taken by the shift from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. It was for this reason that we called the flagship congregation in which we did much of our experimentation with liturgy and consciousness the Aquarian Minyan.From the Age of Aquarius, I reached back to the Age of Pisces and the Age of Aries and the Age of Taurus. Entering each of those earlier phases of Jewish history, I began to see the pre-patriarchal sources of Judaism in Ebla and Ugarit. I realized that during the Age of Taurus, people were addressing the deity as a powerful animal. The food of such animals, their sacrifice, was a human being. This was the idea of the akedah, the binding of Isaac. That came to an end with the Age of Aries in which deities were seen as anthropomorphic beings whose sacramental food was the animal. This view lasted until the destruction of the Second Temple when we could no longer offer animal sacrifices. Our worship turned from offerings on the altar to the verbal offerings of prayer. The statement “In the beginning was the Word,” in the Christian Gospel of John (1:1), begins to make sense at the beginning of the Age of Pisces (when early Christians identified one another by the sign of the fish).The paradigmatic shift from the Age of Taurus (deism) to the Age of Pisces (theism) represented a complete cultural overhaul of how the sacrificial, sacramental, and liturgical ways of serving gods were envisioned in these periods. Elsewhere, I have pointed out in the strongest terms how the Holocaust, the moon walk, and seeing Earth from outer space created an immense shift of consciousness for us. After these events, the reality map we had used up until that time could no longer be maintained. Since then, we have been forced to rearrange the way in which we integrate the magisterium of Torah with the emerging cosmology. Just as during the shift from Aries to Pisces we had to move from animal sacrifice to a verbal liturgy where we “pay for the bullocks with our lips” (Hosea 14:2), so too does a shift from Pisces to Aquarius demand a major shift from the usual synagogue service (where the verbal formula was “the coin minted by the wise”) to one of greater spontaneity and experienced feeling.But we have not yet fully entered the Aquarian Age; for even though we are taking an Aquarian approach in the style of our worship, we still use the words and the patterns of the old liturgies. What is becoming clear is that the true sacrifice of worship depends not so much on which words are being said as in how they are being said, with what fervor and feeling, and how much time one invests in the closeness to God.Lately, I have been feeling that the phrase “paradigm shift” is misleading, as it suggests an abrupt shift from one reality map to another. I would rather emphasize an “axial turning,” the process of shifting and the long arc of transition from one paradigm to another—with people at the leading edge, people still very much connected to the past, and a vast multitude in the middle. When Karl Jaspers spoke of the “Axial Age” (in which we find Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Mahavira, the Buddha, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu, and Confucius), he was emphasizing a process of turning. This is much more accurate than if one were to speak about paradigm shift as the crossing of an imaginary line between Pisces and Aquarius.I need to stress that in all this I did not approach my work as a philosopher of religion, but as a pastor. I found it important to provide the people with whom I worshipped experiences to which they could give themselves—experiences that they could bring with them into their own places of worship. This approach also has a bearing on how we understand Halachah in each one of those earlier periods and how we have to adapt the practice to the period in which we now find ourselves.I wish I could spend more time fleshing out these ideas. However, I received the draft of this article just a few days after I was released from the hospital, and this is the best I can do at this time. I am grateful to Professor Magid for his close reading of my writing and to Rabbi Michael Lerner for bringing it to the attention of his readers. If it engenders further conversation and responses from readers, I will be pleased.