Connecting to the divine feminine

November 26, 2016 5:22 PM

The Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, operating since 2006, trains women to become Jewish ritual leaders by tapping into earth-based spiritual practices that they believe harken back to pre-rabbinic Judaism. While it has attracted its share of criticism for being kind of "pagany,", its graduates regularly go on to positions of leadership, communal or religious, and bring the lessons they learned while studying there.
posted by heatherlogan (14 comments total)

From the third link:

Hammer rejects these criticisms. “Early kabbalists like the Baal Shem Tov also saw ways of finding God in the forest and fields, and they too used the language of Shekhinah,” she says. “Fear of paganism, which supposedly deifies the body and the earth in ‘bad’ ways, is fear of the body. And often, it’s fear of the female body.” She responds to questions about whether worshiping the earth is idolatry by pointing out that the word “idolaters” has been used by Jews, Christians, and Muslims throughout history to delegitimize people they don’t know much about. “Many of the customs the Bible calls ‘foreign idolatry’ are ancient Israelite customs that were abandoned by later generations,” she says. [my emphasis]

I think that's a very interesting and potentially productive way of looking at the Bible, and I wish the article had explored specific examples of suppressed feminist content which has left discernible traces in the texts we have inherited.
posted by jamjam at 9:25 PM on November 26, 2016 [4 favorites]

This is fascinating and if there were classes or retreats near me, I would try hard to gain admittance.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 10:00 PM on November 26, 2016

Whoa, this hits all my buttons. As a practicing, but not temple going, Jew, I view the Tanakh as a desert survival guide. It kept the tribe safe from food poisoning and ensured procreation. In this modern world, I will safely eat a pork tenderloin wrapped in bacon and feel no guilt. I'm not so much into Kabbalah, but I do appreciate the concept of Shekhinah, and, as I've grown older, I've felt more tapped into the concept of the witchy woman, in the sense of traditionally female folk wisdom. Looking at the main link, I'm not too keen on the henna use there, but otherwise I'm glad that Jewish women are embracing the feminine Divine that has always been there. I can't afford it, both monetarily and time off from work, but otherwise, I'd be all up in this.
posted by Ruki at 10:01 PM on November 26, 2016 [9 favorites]

Jamjam, you might enjoy When God Was A Woman by Merlin Stone.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 10:04 PM on November 26, 2016 [6 favorites]

Eh. I'm really struggling to find anything distinctively Jewish in this. Is there any actual connection to Jewish history and tradition here? Because it looks to me as if it's basically a bunch of things appropriated from other religions or cultures, and the label "Jewish" plonked on top.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:30 PM on November 26, 2016 [3 favorites]

Joe in Australia, I own The Jewish Book of Days, which was written by one of the co-founders. It is a very Jewish book. Rabbi Hammer has cred, from my experience.
posted by Ruki at 10:50 PM on November 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

So to not abuse the edit button, I didn't make the connection until I saw your comment and looked more deeply into the site. It just so happened that it's in my library.
posted by Ruki at 10:52 PM on November 26, 2016

Eh. I'm really struggling to find anything distinctively Jewish in this. Is there any actual connection to Jewish history and tradition here? Because it looks to me as if it's basically a bunch of things appropriated from other religions or cultures, and the label "Jewish" plonked on top.

Speaking as a (former) Christian, you can actually build a hell of a lasting religious system on top of just a bunch of things appropriated from other religions or cultures. Among the traditions often viewed as "quintessentially Jewish", the following can be easily classified as borrowings from other cultures:

1) circumcision (Egyptians)
2) henotheism (exclusive dedication to a single deity among a (usually small) population can be found throughout the ancient world, although the monotheism this can evolve into seems much, much rarer)
3) most of their names for God (Canaanite and ancient Syrian)
4) a primeval Eden, a worldwide flood (Mespotamian)
5) guardian angels (Persia)
5) those delicious potato things (potatoes are New World in origin)

And honestly, if you could go back to those hoary ancient days when the "men of renown" were sitting on Judean hillsides stapling all this shit together, they probably would have owned to it. Religion, for them, was what worked, and syncretism hasn't always been a dirty word.

If indeed these folks are just swiping someone else's religious stuff and filing off the serial numbers, they're performing perhaps the oldest of traditional religious activities.
posted by AdamCSnider at 11:04 PM on November 26, 2016 [20 favorites]

Growing up with a KoC uncle who was determined to save my soul, I am super duper aware of the pagan origins of many Judeo-Christian practices, because I trotted them out in self-defense. Are you Jewish? Are you a Jewish woman? If the answer to these questions is no, maybe you need to step back and recognize that you are not the target audience here.
posted by Ruki at 12:57 AM on November 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

Mod note: A couple deleted. Let's drop the derails about the jealous god, general religion, etc, or any particular insistence that one be "persuaded." This may not be the thread for you, and that's okay!
posted by taz (staff) at 2:44 AM on November 27, 2016

I mean, it draws from the neopaganism of Starhawk, who was raised Jewish, and was close friends with Christiana Hoffman Summers, who is Jewish, and a lot of the women involved in early neopaganism were Jews, like Diane Baker and Margot Adler and Marion Weinstein.

I love it. I don't think it's fair to describe this as cultural appropriation, because Starhawk was mostly drawing from European influence that may be pre-Christian in origin, but continued to exist as folk religion in Europe when Jews were there. And which European Jews likewise drew from and Judaized. If you look at a lot of the practices of Baa Shems, it was very similar to the folk magic of Christian Europeans, but undergirded with kabala.

Women were left out of that, and while they do have leadership places in modern Judaism in Reform and Conservative movements, it's a Judaism that was largely created without women's involvement. If contemporary Jewish women want to revisit Judaism using tools created by Jewish women to address the questions of the female on the divine, I think we're going to be enriched by this.
posted by maxsparber at 7:39 AM on November 27, 2016 [10 favorites]

I may be a little biased, though. My biological mother was Patricia Monaghan, one of the early authors on goddess religions and a friend to Starhawk, and the author of The Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines. I love the fact that there is a Judaism that connects with Patricia's work.
posted by maxsparber at 7:42 AM on November 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

This is one of those offshoots in practice that makes religious Jews a little nutty (see also: Kabbalah Center, Messianic Jews, Chassidism ;) - The Torah is really clear that Jews have pagan roots: "This is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: 'Long ago your ancestors, including Terah the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the Euphrates River and worshiped other gods." (That's from Joshua, there are other references). We even include the fact that our ancestors worshiped idols in the Hagaddah, so it's pretty front and center in mainstream Judaism. The covenants with Abraham and with Jacob, and the Torah were given as a "here's where you take this next." If you believe in G-d (not a given, more on that later), and you believe that that G-d is the God of the Torah (also not a given, also more on this later), then it's pretty explicit - that was what you used to do, these are the precepts that I am commanding of you now, and 'No worshiping idols / nature / other gods' is the first and primary commandment of Judaism. You used to, now you don't.

The Torah's view on witchcraft, meanwhile, is also really clear cut: It exists, it works (see Saul and the witches of Endor in Samuel 28); don't do it. This is one of those issues where the whole "jealous G-d" thing comes from (and I don't know what was deleted, hope I'm not contributing to the derail) - G-d acknowledges other forms of worship and rejects them in favor of monotheism and his laws.

Then there's the kohen thing... The priesthood was/is a hereditary group - as far as halacha is concerned you can't just decide to be one. Kohanim aren't even allowed to marry divorcees or converts, so there's no chance of a child calling him or herself a kohen and not being part of the genetic lineage. But since there's no Temple, there's no Temple service, and almost all of the Kohanim's work is largely irrelevant to Judaism today. Which makes embracing the "priesthood" element of this kind of odd - either they're doing it on purpose to say "we're part of the irrelevance too!", which doesn't make a lot of sense, or they're doing it on purpose to twit the segments of Judaism that make a distinction between who is and isn't a kohen (which is probably a part of it, but if you build something based on divisiveness it's a bit disingenuous to complain when people get divisive back). Or they hadn't thought it through when they came up with the name, and now have to juggle with it because it stuck. Or are they planning to take it to the next step and actually offer animal sacrifices, as most pagan systems with priests/priestesses also included (and as many religious Jews hope to do if the Temple is rebuilt)?

You do you is a pretty entrenched way of looking at Judaism, and if this is giving people meaning and making them feel connected to their heritage, it's probably a better way than Chinese food and movies on Christmas and general inchoate suffering. And there are plenty of Jews (including some religious Jews) who don't believe in G-d at all, and plenty more who don't believe that the Torah came from G-d to Moses and plenty more who think that all faiths are just a human way to connect with the unknowable and therefore equally valid. It feels like a natural progression (no pun intended).

Judaism as a faith doesn't have a lot of firm precepts, but the ones there are were literally set in stone. Praying to the four winds, fertility goddesses, etc., belong pretty clearly in the "no" channel, along with "also accepting Jesus as Messiah" and "praying to the Lubavitcher rebbe". All of the articles seem to quote the Dean of JTS about the movement's practices being only tenuously Jewish, and JTS isn't Orthodox. You don't have to agree with his assessment, but that doesn't mean it isn't a valid Jewish viewpoint, or that you haven't earned a bit of side-eye from people who are grounded in the texts. But so what? People clearly still find comfort and meaning in doing those things regardless. And always have. The matriarch Rachel smuggled her family totems with her when she left home, the Hebrews built a golden calf in the desert, and a lot of the Prophetic writings deal with Israelites re-embracing paganism in various forms. As a story of humans searching for the divine or for Truth, it is probably eternal. For a lot of people - possibly even more so for a lot of women - paganism works.

So as a woman and a feminist and as a Jew I think this is really intriguing and I love seeing stuff like this because Judaism does have room for a lot of it. And at the same time as a feminist and a woman who is also a religious Jew, I wonder why cloaking it in Judaism gives it more value for the people who embrace it. Surely paganism doesn't need Judaism to give it legitimacy, and surely once you've rejected what the Torah has to say about which practices make a Jew, you don't need to stick to its definition of who is one, or only look at your practices through its lens.

But it's always good to see more evidence that anti-semitism has gone so far underground in the US that people can find the religion and meaning that works for them without having to disavow Judaism to fit in or feel safe. That's huge progress, especially in the current political environment.
posted by Mchelly at 9:25 AM on November 27, 2016 [19 favorites]

It was a man’s world, but it will become a woman’s world. And, after a stormy career, full of struggle and suffering, man will at last return to the woman, and in her and with her he will find peace, rest, joy and happiness.-- The Philosophy of the Kabbalah / Harry Waton, p.112.

posted by No Robots at 9:56 AM on November 27, 2016 [3 favorites]