Creating a New Diaspora Judaism – Part 2
By Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Ph.D.
Dear companions,
HIERARCHY OR ECOLOGY?
I am among the second group. It is clear in the present crisis that we need a stronger framework for those people. The rest of this paper will address their needs and contributions.
First of all, a major intellectual and spiritual contribution to everyone’s thought about Diaspora has come from Rabbi Professor Shaul Magid of Dartmouth University. In The Necessity of Exile, he has shown how crucial it is to create Diaspora and Exile not just as a geographic distance from the Land of Israel, but as a spiritual distance from and attraction to the Messianic Age — always growing toward it, never “there.” Not yearning for a kingly Messiah, but “How do we get it together? Together!” — to quote Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.
Why? Because we keep learning how much more love is necessary for a life-giving Judaism to remember “not yet.” We must always embody the compelling impulse to take step by step the society-wide advance toward a messianic world.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow in conversation with Professor Shaul Magid, April 25, 2024. Visit theshalomcenter.org/events/newdiaspora for more info.
Turning now to my own work and that of The Shalom Center, newly informed and enriched by Magid: I want to urge a conscious change in the Name we give to God. To name God is not the same as naming a person “Joanna” instead of “Jerome.” We express a whole view of the nature of the world when we attach a Name to God.
The present usage in most Jewish and Christian life is to translate the Bible’s “YHWH” into “LORD,” followed in Jewish prayer with “Melech, King.” This language is a relic not just of living under the heel of various empires but of the conception of the world that is based on hierarchy.
More and more of us understand that the world is — as ecology teaches us — not a hierarchy. It is a network of interactive species and cultures. Ecology is not just biological. Within the human species it also stems from a jigsaw puzzle of many cultures, many identities, many political views. When one cluster of people tries to make itself hierarchical over the others, disaster follows. We are seeing this happen in the United States with the growth of a deliberately exclusive “white male Christian nationalism.”
So if “Lord” and “King” are dangerous ways of imagining what is sacred and unifies us, what would be language that would help us flower and flourish? There are a few attempts in the Jewish community that have won a modest degree of celebration and support.
One has been shaped by the poet Marcia Falk and has won very considerable support among Jewish feminists. That is Ein HaChayim, the Wellspring of Life.
The other came for me, drawing on the ancient Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey. In 1982, I found myself disobeying the orders my grandmother had given me when I was 11 years old and beginning to study Hebrew towards becoming Bar Mitzvah. She insisted I pronounce YHWH as “Adonai, Lord” — even though none of the letters pointed to that result. So as an adult seeker, I experimented with pronouncing it as it is written in Torah texts, YHWH with no vowels — not inserting them as in YAHWEH or YAHOVAH.
When I tried this, the sound that came out was not in English or any other language — or rather, it was in all of them. It was the sound of breathing. To my joyful astonishment, they became just a Breath. I inserted a breath or “Yahh” as a translation of “YHWH” along with “Ruach Ha’Olam” (Breath/ Wind/ Spirit of the World) instead of “Melech Ha’Olam.”
I hear thie “Breath” interpretation of “YHWH” as a true understanding, not the true understanding. Indeed, I am attracted to see the Name as having a different aspect in each of the Four Worlds taught by Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism.
First is the World of Asiyah / Physical Actuality. That is where the physical pronunciation of “YHWH” becomes Breath or Interbreath. Skipping the second World for the moment, in Briyyah/ Creative Intellect we find the grammar that sees “YHWH” as a Moebius strip in the verb “to be,” turning past/ present / future into a transformational “Eternal.” And in the World closest to the indescribable Infinite, the World of Atzilut/ Spirit/ Sheer Will to create, the four letters of the Name can be reversed, becoming “HWHY” or “Havaya,” Existence. That interpretation suggests that every quark, every black hole in every galaxy, every grasshopper, every mushroom, every naked hunter deep in tropical forest, every ethical sage, is Divine, is God and part of God.
That leaves us with the world of Yetzirah/ Relationship —Emotion, Ethics. Baffled, I asked my friend and teacher Rabbi Jeff Roth. “It’s a puzzle with a wonderful answer,” he said. “Substitute ‘Aleph’ for the ‘Yod’. Then you have ‘AHWH’ or Ahava, love.”
What a wonderful array of ways to understand “YHWH”! Breath or InterBreath, Love, Eternal, Existence. Not a Hierarchy in the whole bunch.
I do want to suggest that in our generation, maybe our epoch, it will be important to use InterBreath to inspire activism. (Side note: “Inspire” in English comes from words that mean “breathe into”.) As I will explain below, the existential crisis of Planet Earth is about the InterBreathing of life forms on all Earth. This crisis will be with us for a long time, so we might be well off to be clear that what we call the climate crisis is a crisis in the InterBreath Name of God.
HIERARCHY IN JEWISH STATE AND UNIVERSAL EARTH
I realized that the InterBreath of all life is what keeps life going on our planet. Animals Breathe in oxygen, metabolize it, and Breathe out CO2. Plants Breathe in CO2, metabolize it, and Breathe out oxygen.
What we call the “Climate Crisis” is a crisis in the maldistribution of CO2. Human corporations have invented machines that burn fossil fuels to make so much CO2 that there is no way even for all the plants in the world to turn it into oxygen. So the CO2 piles up. Since it is a heat-trapping gas, it makes the planet hotter and hotter, scorched, burning.
The “Climate Crisis” is really a crisis in God’s Name. And if we could recall that the true meaning of YHWH is the InterBreath of life, we could act to give new life to the ecological network that actually keeps life, animal and plant, humans and grasshoppers and frogs and redwoods and azalea bushes, alive.
The debate on whether to think about the world as a giant hierarchy or an imterlocking set of empowered cultures and species is as old as the Bible. I think that shepherds and farmers who made up the ancient people knew that all life was interconnected, and used “YHWH” to say so.
But for them, war was a different matter. Their experience was that nations with a king were more likely to be organized so as to win their wars. Samuel could only offer a counter-version of hierarchy in which God stood at the top.
“Israel Demands a King”. Taferelen der voornaamste geschiedenissen van het Oude en Nieuwe Testament en andere boeken, bij de heilige schrift gevoegt. (Scenes from the most important histories of the Old and New Testament and other books, added to the Holy Scriptures.)
In the debate between the Prophet Samuel, the people demand a earthly king “like all the other nations.” Samuel argues that they have a king, “Your king is in Heaven.” The People insisted. Samuel gave in, and the people later agreed to a constitutional monarchy, with the priesthood holding a weak controlling hand. They could appeal to Torah if the king broke the rules.
The same debate broke out early in Israeli statehood between Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Torah philosopher Martin Buber. Ben Gurion called for Mamlechtiyut, literally “kingly” power, to control the state and fight for it. Buber had argued for a binational state, and when that vision came undone urged a much more decentralized country, hoping that with peace there would no need for a king, and with no king there would be less support for subjugation and war.
Ben Gurion won. The suzerainty of God evaporated. Hierarchy became internally a government’s bid to nullify an independent judiciary, and externally a blood-soaked war.
So that is where I would begin in seeking to create a Judaism that would be life-giving for centuries to come. No “king,” earthly or “heavenly.”
Turn this from silent intellectual theology into warm sound. Hear a whole congregation, every time it comes to Hebrew or English YHWH, pausing to Breathe. Knowing it is Breathing in a myriad Breaths from every living creature, Breathing it out as well. “Sh’ma Yisrael — Listen up, You Godwrestlers: the Breath of life is our God, and that Breath is One!”
“Nishmat kol chai tivarech et shimcha — YHWH [Yahh] Elohenu The breath of all life praises Your Name, YyyyHhhhWwwwHhhh or ”Yahh" [or just breathing]. Our God. Not just the God of us Jews or the God of us humans, but the God of all life. For Your Name IS the Breath of all life.
I suggest that the InterBreath is a true understanding of the Name, not the true understanding. If the Name Itself were to manifest in the each of the Four Worlds of Kabbalah, the physical sound (in the Asiyah / Physicality world) of pronouncing YHWH would give us Breath. In the Briyyah / Intellect world that includes grammar, as many have noted, we might learn from “YHWH” a Moebius strip of the verb “to be” in past, present, and future. That would make the Name a transformational verb beyond time — therefore, the Eternal. In the world of Atzilut / Spirit, closest to the indescribable Infinite, reversing the letters gives us HWHY or Havayah, Existence —suggesting that every proton, every star, every gazelle, every sycamore is an aspect of God.
So that is where I would begin in seeking to create an ecologically rooted Judaism that could be life-giving for centuries to come.
THE STATE
But that is not enough. We have sorrowfully seen that one attempt to seek security for the Jewish people from pogroms and Holocaust — Zionism and the State of Israel — out of fear and trauma have turned into a modern equivalent of Pharaoh. I do not think it had to turn out that way; I think there were several moments when the State could have turned toward fulfilling its own Declaration of Independence to celebrate every language, every culture, every religion, every sexuality, every gender, every class and occupation.
But even at the beginning, the effort to make sure that Jews would be safe was turned into an insistence that others would not be fully included in the political body that might have made Jews safe and Palestinians safe and Russian immigrants and African immigrants safe.
There were several moments when the turn toward a fuller broader democracy could have been made. But fear and the trauma inherited not only from the Holocaust but from centuries of repression pushed the Israeli Jewish community to a domineering ethic and policy.
We don’t yet know whether living next door to a smoking slaughterhouse can lead to a different result, IF people realize the disaster. But I think we have learned that if even the centralizing and hyper-nationalizing effect of controlling a State is to change, it will take a wave of energy for crucial change from Jews who don’t live in the midst of it as well as some who do.
It will take the growth of a conscious Diaspora to help bring about decent change. That too will require an ecological mindset, not a hierarchical one. It requires a friendly and deeply critical human community that we understand and shape ecologically. It requires a Jewish community that has considerable empowerment in its own society but does not rule the roost.
ALLIES WITH THE NEWLY EMPOWERED
A deeply ecologically-minded Jewish community could ally itself with other communities and identities that became newly visible when they claimed full citizenship just 50 years ago.
Those diverse communities, could like the pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, fit themselves together. That community could choose to make one of its own major values the encouragement and protection and empowerment of itself and others.
Shalom,
Arthur
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