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Magic and Witchery in the Modern West: Celebrating the Twentieth Anniversary of 'The Triumph of the Moon' Shai Feraro
PALGRAVE STUDIES IN NEW RELIGIONS AND ALTERNATIVE SPIRITUALITIES
CONTEMPORARY ALTERNATIVE SPIRITUALITIES IN ISRAEL
EDITED BY SHAI FERARO AND JAMES R. LEWIS
Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities
Series Editors
James R. Lewis
University of Tromso – The Arctic University Tromso, Norway
Henrik Bogdan
University of Gothenburg
Gothenburg, Sweden
Aim of the Series
Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities is an interdisciplinary monograph and edited collection series sponsored by the International Society for the Study of New Religions. The series is devoted to research on New Religious Movements. In addition to the usual groups studied under the New Religions label, the series publishes books on such phenomena as the New Age, communal & utopian groups, Spiritualism, New Thought, Holistic Medicine, Western esotericism, Contemporary Paganism, astrology, UFO groups, and new movements within traditional religions. The Society considers submissions from researchers in any discipline.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14608
Shai Feraro • James R. Lewis Editors
Contemporary Alternative Spiritualities in Israel
Editors
Shai Feraro
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv, Israel
James R. Lewis
University of Tromso – The Arctic University Tromso, Norway
Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities
ISBN 978-1-137-54741-5 ISBN 978-1-137-53913-7 (eBook)
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
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The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York
1 A Sacred Time in the Sacred Land: Authenticating the Past in New Age Judaism 3 Rachel Werczberger
2 Kabbalah Through the Utilitarian Prism: Contemporary Neo-Kabbalah in Israel as a Form of Consumer Culture 21 Tomer Persico
3 Body and Soul in Yemima Avital’s Teachings and in Her Students’ Testimonies, Philosophies and Practices 39 Einat Ramon
4 Individualization of Jewish UnOrthodox (Alternative) Wedding Rituals in Israel 57 Anna Prashizky
Part II New Age Culture in Israel 81
5 The Incorporation of Spiritual Care into Israeli Medical Organizations 83 Nurit Zaidman
6 Inherent Paradox in Cultural Change: New Age Rituals as Case Study
Dalit Simchai
7 The State and New Religious Movements
Masua Sagiv
III Some Popular Currents in the Israeli ‘Scene’
8 Theosophy and Anthroposophy in Israel: An Historical Survey
Isaac Lubelsky
9 Messages for the End: Eschatological Thought in Twentieth Century Channeling
Adam Klin-Oron
10 The Menstrual Discourse in Israeli Yoga for Women: Narrative and Ritual, Agency and Control
Carmit Rosen Even-Zohar
11 Ritual Adaptations and Celebrations of the Mabon Sabbat (Autumn Equinox) by Israeli Neopagans
Orly Salinas Mizrahi
12 Pentecostal Ethiopian Jews and Nigerian Members of Olumba Olumba: Manifestations of Christianity in Israel
Galia Sabar
L ist of C ontributors
Adam Klin-Oron is an anthropologist of religion at the Zefat Academic College and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. He has studied vacation culture among the ultraorthodox, New Age channeling, the attitudes of New Age adherents to Jewish law, and the reaction of the Israeli state to new religious movements.
Isaac Lubelsky (PhD 2005, School of History, Tel Aviv University) is the academic coordinator of Genocide Studies at the Open University of Israel. His recent book, Celestial India (Equinox, 2012) is a comprehensive study of the history of ideas that evolved as the consequence of East/West encounters during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and deals extensively with the early history of the Theosophical Society and its contribution to the change of India’s image in Western eyes and to the birth of India’s nationalist movement.
Tomer Persico has for the last five years lectured at Tel Aviv University’s Program in Religious Studies. His dissertation dealt with techniques of meditation in the Jewish tradition, past and present, and analyzed the cultural transformations leading to the observed shifts in meditative emphasis through the generations. Persico is an expert on contemporary spirituality, and studies the varied current cultural phenomena of the New Age, specializing in its intersection, and tension, with the Jewish tradition in general, and Halakha in particular. He has contributed numerous articles to newspapers and periodicals in Israel, and has five forthcoming articles on these subjects.
Anna Prashizky received a PhD from the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Bar-Ilan University. She is a lecturer at Western Galilee Academic College. Her research interests are in the area of ritual studies, especially new alternative rituals in modern Israeli society.
Einat Ramon received her PhD in Religious Studies from Stanford University in 2000. Her dissertation (later published as a book in Hebrew) focused on maternal images and ethics in the religious thought of the Israeli Labor Zionist thinker A.D. Gordon. Ramon is a senior lecturer in Jewish Thought at the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies and the author of numerous academic and theological articles in the field of modern Jewish Thought. Ramon was among the founders of spiritual pastoral education and of its professional establishment in Israel. She is the writer of the standards and an ethical code for Israeli chaplains. Ramon is a certified Israeli chaplain and a graduate of the Israeli CPE educators’ program, and the founder of the Marpeh MA Program at the Schechter Institute—the only academic program for the training of spiritual caregivers in Israel. She is a prolific writer and researcher in this field.
Carmit Rosen Even-Zohar is a PhD student in the Unit of Folklore Studies, Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa, Israel. Her dissertation examines women’s journey narratives to India from the perspective of folk literature poetics. She is interested in questions of New Age spirituality and gender, literary, historical and psychological constructions of space, colonialism and post-colonial criticism. Rosen has travelled extensively to India and subsequently trained as a yoga instructor. She has specialized in yoga instruction for women, thus combining her theoretical interests in issues of spirituality and gender with her practical ventures.
Galia Sabar has been researching social and political issues related to Africa and the African diaspora since 1984. Her publications include five books, two edited volumes and 30 articles in academic journals. Since 1998, her research has focused on African labor migrants in Israel with special emphasis on their post-colonial organizations and their complex relations with Israeli society and politics. Since 2006, her research has focused on African Asylum seekers, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea, who have entered Israel via its lax border with Egypt. Her research focuses on a wide range of social, political and religious institutions the asylum seekers have established in an attempt to improve their daily struggles for survival.
Masua Sagiv is a PhD candidate and a research scholar at the Zvi Meitar Center for Advanced Legal Studies at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law. Her dissertation explores the endeavors of Israeli religious feminism to promote social change through the law. Sagiv is also a member of the board of directors in MEIDA— Israeli Information Center on Contemporary Religions. Her areas of research are law and religion, law and society, feminism, and family law.
Orly Salinas Mizrahi is a folklorist from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who studies various aspects of the Israeli Neo-pagan community in the course of her MA and her soon-to-be completed PhD dissertation. Her current research focuses on solitary and miscellaneous rituals, the Sabbats (seasonal) rituals and life
cycle celebrations within this specific Israeli spiritual community. Mizrahi has been a solitary Wiccan since the late 1970s and a member of the local Neo-pagan community for the past eight years. She lives in Jerusalem and has two grown sons.
Dalit Simchai attained her PhD at the University of Haifa, and teaches today at the Tel Hai Academic College. She specializes in the study of subcultures and new social movements, gender and feminism, as well as attempts to challenge mainstream Israeli society. Her work on Israeli New Agers focuses on the various paradoxes faced by these adherents. She has published books on the experiences of Israeli backpackers in India and on Israeli New Age festivals.
Rachel Werczberger is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department for Jewish Philosophy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and a visiting lecturer in the program for Religious Studies at Tel Aviv University. She received her PhD in anthropology and sociology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her work focuses on New Age spirituality, New Age Judaism and the anthropology of contemporary Judaism. Together with Prof. Boaz Huss she recently edited a special issue of Israel Studies Review on “New Age Culture in Israel: Social and Political Aspects”.
Nurit Zaidman is the Area Head of Strategy and International Management and Professor in the Department of Business Administration at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. She graduated from the Department of Anthropology at Temple University, Philadelphia. Zaidman has published extensively in the area of New Religious Movement and the New Age. Her work has been published in journals such as Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Journal of Contemporary Religion, Group & Organization Management, and Organization. Her current research focuses on the incorporation and translation of the New Age into mainstream organizations.
i ntrodu C tion
The study of New Religious Movements (NRMs) developed during the 1970s as a plethora of non-traditional religious movements were beginning to gain public visibility in the West in the wake of the decline of the Sixties counterculture. Initially, these movements held the attention of Western sociologists of religion, primarily due to the disputes that arose as a reaction to their rapid expansion. Religious studies scholars—who were then still in the process of establishing their discipline as a legitimate field of study distinct from theology and traditional biblical studies—for the most part showed no interest in the phenomenon, and preferred to leave NRMs to sociologists. This situation began to change in later decades, however, and presently NRM scholars from religious studies backgrounds outnumber those who hail from the social sciences; even historians have now begun to venture into the field.
Three academic journals currently focus on NRMs, Nova Religio, the International Journal for the Study of New Religions, and the Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review. There are furthermore at least three book series dedicated to the study of New Religions, and annual conferences and workshops organized by CESNUR and INFORM have been held continuously since the 1980s. Recently, an academic association devoted to the study of NRMs, the International Society for the Study of New Religions (ISSNR), was formed, and courses on NRMs are popular offerings in most religious studies programs of any size.
But despite the growth of this field of study, some NRM scholars—at least in North America—maintain that the longer-range prospects of the discipline are unfavorable, basing their argument, in part, on the perception
that relatively few younger scholars are choosing to specialize in the study of NRMs. Instead, it seems that most new research continues to be produced by the same scholars who joined the field back in the seventies and eighties. In Israel, though, the study of NRMs seems to be developing with gusto, as younger researchers join the field and many graduate students present new findings from their dissertations yearly.
In recent decades, Israel has become home to a bustling scene of New Age and alternative spiritualities, ranging from homegrown phenomena to overseas imports that are either adopted wholly, or adapted in varying degrees to Israeli Jewish culture. These new forms of spirituality also differ in their level of penetration into contemporary Israeli society. Some, as shall be seen below, are the preserve of foreign refugees and work migrants, and their existence is virtually unknown to most if not all Israelis. Others—while practiced by Israelis—similarly remain under the public’s radar, while certain groups and practices (whether imported from the West or produced locally) have permeated deep into the Israeli mainstream. In response, three academic journals have dedicated special issues1 to the study of these phenomena in Israeli society, and a short edited volume has been published in Hebrew (Tavory 2007). The present anthology, however, is the first of its kind to have been published in English. One of its goals, therefore, is to supply scholars with an opportunity to learn how New Age and alternative spiritualities—produced in Western countries within a predominantly Protestant or secular culture—transform and adapt themselves in Israel. Positioned in a strategic location connecting Europe, Asia and Africa, Israel is an ethno-national state which views itself as a Western enclave situated at the heart of the Arab Middle East, constantly attempting ‘to reconcile the two conflicting principles of a “Jewish and democratic state”’ (Ben-Porat and Turner 2011, 1).
Founded in 1948, Israel was built on an overwhelmingly secular vision. While Orthodox Judaism was (and still is) designated as the state religion, most Israeli Jews did not identify as religious, and were quite disinterested in either mainstream or alternative forms of spirituality. This situation changed in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which substantially destabilized the secular, modernist Zionist ethos on which the vast majority of Israelis based themselves (Ariel 2010, 4).
During the 1970s, several New Religious Movements were imported into Israel, and homegrown alternative spiritualities began to form as well. Masua Sagiv’s Chap. 7 demonstrates, from a Legal Studies point of view, how the state reacted to NRM phenomena through the actions
of its legislative, executive and judicial branches. Building on Marianna Ruah-Midbar’s and Adam Klin-Oron’s work (2013), Sagiv outlines governmental attempts to control the activity of NRMs by inter-ministerial reports examining the ‘phenomenon of cults’. She illustrates the existing legislation and proposed bills involving NRMs, and describes the judiciary’s approach to NRMs, as reflected in three central criminal law cases from the last decade. In trying to curtail or control the activities of NRMs and New Age religiosities, government authorities are obviously fighting a losing battle. In Chap. 5, Nurit Zaidman analyzes the recent growth of the spiritual care movement and its incorporation into core institutions of mainstream Israeli society—hospitals and homes for the elderly. Zaidman shows how this phenomenon is embedded within New Age spirituality in Israel, and is shaped by the specific characteristic of Israeli society on the macro level, as well as by the particular features of specific organizations.
The last 25 years have featured an explosion in both the variety of different groups and the sheer number of participants. Indeed, each year dozens of New Age festivals take place, with the primary festival drawing over 50,000 participants (Ruah-Midbar 2006, 144–146), enough to populate an average Israeli town. Ruah-Midbar and KlinOron (2010) suggested recently that New Age phenomena in Israel are located along two axes: one ranging from shared global (Western) forms to homegrown cultural products, while the other focuses on the relational approaches between New Age spirituality and traditional Jewish praxis, ranging from indifference and opposition to adaptation and preservation. Global New Age discourse is thus adapted in many cases into an Israeli ‘Jew Age’ through the use of Jewish symbols and practices. This ‘Jew Age’ spirituality is a direct outcome of Israel’s unique and complicated politics of identity as the nation state of the Jewish people. A good example of such mingling of New Age alternative spirituality and Judaism in Israel can be found in Joseph Loss’ (2007) research on Jewish-Israeli practitioners of Buddhism.
In Chap. 2, Tomer Persico focuses on expressions of Neo-Kabbalah in Israeli society, and describes the rise of what he terms the ‘Utilitarian Self’—a social reality which originated in late nineteen-century American religiosity, and began to play a significant role in Israeli contemporary spirituality in the 1990s. Einat Ramon’s chapter presents the story of Yemima Avital (1929–1999), a female mystic and student of psychology, who is recognized today as the leader of a contemporary ‘female – Hassidic’ movement. Avital developed a spiritual discipline known as ‘cognitive thinking’,
which she taught in Tel Aviv during the 1990s. She left no manuscripts, and her teachings were later published by her various students.
Chapter 1, written by Rachel Werczberger, focuses on the ways in which Jewish history is recovered, reinterpreted and remolded in Israeli New Age Judaism. New Age Judaism, argues Werczberger, maintains a spiritual neo-Canaanite narrative of the past by reformulating the biblical period as a sacred time, distinguished by non-institutionalized forms of religious experiences, indigenous pagan and nature worship, prophecy, as well as direct divine revelation. This reconfiguration of the past underpins New Age Judaism’s radical ideas and provides them with a sense of cultural continuity and authenticity. Its narrative emulates and subverts the ‘classic’ Zionist narrative, and ignores its particularistic and nationalistic constituents, emphasizing instead a universal spirituality, realized by indigenous religions and practices. This strategy caters to the identity needs of contemporary, non-Orthodox Jewish Israelis. Non-Orthodox forms of Judaism—which make up the majority of Jews in the USA—are not recognized as legitimate by the State of Israel, which grants Orthodox Judaism a monopoly in all official matters pertaining to religion in the country.
In Chap. 4, Anna Prashizky deals with an issue that has become highly contested in Israeli society in recent years—unorthodox wedding rituals. Prashizky explores the central characteristics of these ceremonies in modern Israeli society from a post-modern and post-secular perspective, and finds that they combine secular and antireligious components with religious components of Jewish orthodox rituals, basing their inspiration on Jewish texts and ritual practices. Her principal claim is that in contrast to the orthodox wedding rituals, which remain within the province of the Jewish collective and are replete with collective meanings, alternative rituals manifest a process of individualization, and mostly focus on the individual’s biographical memory, which joins or replaces collective Jewish memory.
To assume that the Israeli ‘enclosure’ remains unaffected by its ‘othered’ neighborhood would be tragically wrong—as the last 70 years would attest. Both mainstream (Jewish) religion and alternative spiritualities generally shy away from engaging with (primarily Muslim and Christian) practices or beliefs that either originate in the outlining Arab nations or are maintained by the country’s significant Arab minority. The interest in Sufism is a notable exception to this rule (Bram 2014). Indeed, while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is frequently covered by world media, outsiders generally forget that Israel proper (meaning, if we excluded its contested
hold in large parts of the West Bank) is not a religiously-monolithic state, and that roughly twenty percent of its population is (predominantly) Muslim, Christian or Druze. One hundred and thirty thousand adherents of the ethnoreligious and esoteric Druze faith live in Israel and have maintained a close alliance with the country’s Jewish population since the foundation of Israel. The Druze, however, do not accept converts (both in Israel and worldwide), and most Druze do not undergo the initiation that would entitle them to view the religion’s holy scriptures. It should also be noted that Haifa—Israel’s third largest city—functions as the World Centre of the Baha’i faith, though its adherents do not proselytize to Israelis.
In light of the above, we accept that one of the drawbacks of the present anthology—one that will hopefully be amended by future scholarship—is its lack of coverage of engagement with alternative forms of spirituality among Israeli Arabs. This lacuna was caused largely due to a shortage of available contributions that would be based on original research during our canvassing stage, but it should be noted that in recent years there has been some pioneering work done among traditional women healers in Israeli Arab society, as well as Israeli Arab women who engage in complementary medicine (Popper-Giveon 2009; Popper-Giveon and Weiner-Levy 2013). Israeli Arabs, however, generally do not take part in the country’s buffet of alternative spiritualities. This seems to be due to the fact that Arabs usually come from a lower socio-economic and relatively traditional background (Israeli New Age culture appeals mostly to the middle classes), but also because New Age festivals reflect a Jewish-Israeli sense of belonging. Dalit Simchai’s study of Israeli New Age festivals, presented in Chap. 6, attempts to problematize the ways in which the organizers of the Israeli New Age festival construct their identity as distinct from those whom they perceive to be part of Israel’s dominant society. They view the festival as an opportunity to meet with Israeli hegemonic society and influence it from within, without being limited or influenced by its containment and exclusion mechanisms. The organizers’ concerns for ‘authenticity’ and the ‘commercialization’ of the festival are also discussed.
Many of the NRMs and alternative forms of spirituality active in Israel are overseas products, and don’t necessarily adopt Jew Age values and ideas in order to compete in the local alternative spirituality market. Space limitations prevent us from devoting specific chapters to most of them, but individual studies can be found on Israeli Shamans (Yavelberg 2004), Rainbow festival goers (Tavori and Goodman 2010), Neo-pagans
(Feraro 2014b) and ISKCON (Zaidman-Dvir and Sharot 1992). In Chap. 8, Isaac Lubelsky provides a pioneering survey of Theosophy and Anthroposophy in Israel. He elaborates on the unique interest that both doctrines and movements have gained, and summarizes both movements’ current status in Israel. In Chap. 11, Orly Salinas Mizrahi examines the ways in which Israeli Neo-pagans reinterpret and adapt the Mabon festival—a Celtic-inspired seasonal festival developed and celebrated by British and North American Neo-pagans—into the local Israeli climate and agricultural setting. Adam Klin-Oron’s research, presented in Chap. 9, examines eschatological inclinations among Israeli Channelers, while Chap. 10 features Carmit Rosen Even-Zohar’s research into discourse about menstruation in Israeli Yoga for Women courses. Rosen claims that this new discourse attempts to ‘re-enchant’ the menstruation experience and to ritualize it. Simultaneously, she argues that the Israeli social order limits this new discourse and shapes it to conform to such principles as fertility and the modern project of self. Rosen’s chapter is also exploratory in its examination of this important facet of the country’s emerging women’s spirituality scene. A fuller examination of it remains to be written, but a short historical description of its development since the early 1990s can be found in Feraro (2014a).
Finally, Galia Sabar’s Chap. 12 deals with new forms of spirituality among African labor migrants living in Israel and centered mostly in Southern Tel Aviv, which takes on a distinct Pentecostal character. This Afro-Israeli Christian arena, Sabar maintains, has proved to be flexible and fluid enough to accommodate the majority of its varied members (albeit within certain limits), juxtaposing global trends with local realities and the needs of its members. One of the groups on which Sabar concentrates— the Nigerian-based Brotherhood of the Cross and Star—can arguably be construed as an NRM.
Shai Feraro James R. Lewis
1. See Nova Religio (2010), Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review (2014), and Israel Studies Review (2014).
b ib Liography
Ariel, Y. (2010). Paradigm shift: New religious movements and quests for meaning and community in contemporary Israel. Nova Religio, 13(4), 4–21.
Ben-Porat, G., & Turner, B. S. (2011). Introduction: Contemporary Dilemmas of Israeli citizenship. In G. Ben-Porat & B. S. Turner (Eds.), The contradictions of Israeli citizenship: Land, religion and state (pp. 1–22). London: Routledge. Bram, C. (2014). Spirituality under the shadow of the conflict: Sufi circles in Israel. Israel Studies Review, 29(2), 118–139.
Feraro, S. (2014a). “And not a word about the goddess”: On processes of making and displaying a pagan identity in Israeli women’s spirituality festivals and workshops by Israeli pagan women. Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review, 5(1), 9–30.
Feraro, S. (2014b). Two steps forward, one step back: The shaping of a communitybuilding discourse among Israeli pagans, 1999–2012. Israel Studies Review, 29(2), 57–77.
Goodman, Y., & Tavory, I. (2010). Crafting selves, building community, erasing the nation: A pragmatist reading of New Age gatherings in Israel [in Hebrew]. Israeli Sociology, 12(1), 29–56.
Loss, J. (2007). Universal experiences in Israel: On local modes of adaptation of the global path of the Buddha [in Hebrew]. PhD dissertation, University of Haifa.
Popper-Giveon, A. (2009). Adapted traditions: The case of traditional Palestinian women healers in Israel. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 10(2).
Popper-Giveon, A., & Weiner-Levy, N. (2013). Returning to ourselves Palestinian complementary healers in Israel. Qualitative Health Research
Ruah-Midbar, M. (2006). The New Age culture in Israel: A methodological introduction and the ‘conceptual network’ [in Hebrew]. PhD dissertation, Bar Ilan University.
Ruah-Midbar, M., & Klin-Oron, A. (2010). Jew Age: Jewish praxis in Israeli New Age discourse. Journal of Alternative Spiritualities and New Age Studies, 5, 33–63.
Ruah-Midbar, M., & Klin-Oron, A. (2013). “Tell me who your enemies are”: Government reports about the “cult” phenomenon in Israel. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 52, 810–826.
Tavory, I. (Ed.). (2007). Dancing in a Thorn field: The New Age spirituality in Israel [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Hakibutz Hameuhad Press.
Yavelberg, Y. (2004). Shamanism, rationality and womanhood in contemporary Israel [in Hebrew]. M.A. thesis, Tel Aviv University.
Zaidman-Dvir, N., & Sharot, S. (1992). The response of Israeli society to new religious movements: ISKCON and Teshuvah. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 31, 279–295.
PART I
Jew Age Spirituality
CHAPTER 1
A Sacred Time in the Sacred Land: Authenticating the Past in New Age Judaism
Rachel Werczberger
Judaism is ailing. It is lying, dying, right in front of us. Only we can nurture its recovery. In the linguistic code of Judaism, this malady is named ‘Exile’. The Kabbalah calls it the ‘Exile of the Shechinah’. What, however, is the meaning of ‘Exile’? In the tacitly understood code, it represents the infirmity of Judaism since the destruction of the Second Temple. As those who eat the bitter fruits of this status, daily, as Jews, and particularly—and ironically—as Israelis, we should try to better understand it (Ezrahi 2004, 32).
Throughout the centuries, the memory of the Land of Israel has been a salient component in Jewish identity. In contemporary Israeli society, this memory reifies and reinforces different discourses regarding the relation between the Jewish people and the land (Ben-Ari and Bilu 1997). Groups promoting contrasting national and religious ideologies attempt to use the historical memory of the Land of Israel as a resource for narrating an unbroken link with the past, and especially with the biblical past (Boyarin 1997).
R. Werczberger (*)
Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel
S. Feraro, J.R. Lewis (eds.), Contemporary Alternative Spiritualities in Israel, Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53913-7_1
Using the case of New Age Judaism’s (NAJ) narrative of the past, this chapter aims to shed light on some of the cultural transformations taking place in contemporary Israeli society and especially on the discursive configuration of the link between Jewish history, contemporary spirituality, and the land. In using the term spirituality, I follow Roof’s definition. Roof defines spirituality as ‘the inner life that is bound up with, and embedded within, religious forms, or … as a search on the part of the individual for reaching, through some regimen of self-transformation, one’s greatest potential’ (Roof 2003, 138).
A pastiche of Jewish tradition and New Age spiritual culture, NAJ attempts to renew Judaism by incorporating New Age thought and practice into the Jewish tradition (Werczberger 2011). In a manner similar to other modern endeavors of identity construction, NAJ uses the past as a symbolic resource to legitimize its claim on the present (Said 2000). By offering new perspectives on the Jewish history, NAJ attempts to authenticate its own spiritual vision for Judaism as the original, uncorrupted form of Judaism.
My analysis of the NAJ movement draws on the concepts of the invention of tradition (Hobsbawm 1983) and reflexive tradition (Mellor 1993). According to Mellor, the religious traditions of high or late modernity are characterized by the extensiveness and systematic use of reflexivity (Mellor1993). If the reflexivity of high modernity is understood as the continual and organized use of knowledge about social life in order to reorder and transform it (Giddens 1991), religious actors in high modernity constantly reappraise the knowledge they hold on their own religious values, systems, and so on and attempt to revise and modify them according to their needs (Mellor 1993).
Thus, NAJ’s aspiration for Jewish renewal and its invention of tradition can also be understood as the reflexive effort for the reappraisal and revision of Jewish tradition. While this endeavor is realized in NAJ in a number of ways—for example in ritualistic or discursive ones—this study focuses on the reflexive transformation of Jewish history through a spiritual New Age perspective. The resulting narrative should be understood through the context of contemporary Jewish–Israeli dialectics about Jewish collective memory and the relation of the Jewish people with the land.
I argue that the NAJ’s alternative narrative of the past is a countermemory (Olick and Robbins 1998) to some of the dominant Israeli historical narratives, which both differs from and challenges them. NAJ’s narrative emulates and subverts the ‘classic’ Zionist narrative1 (Zerubavel 1995; Feige 2002) and presents its own claim for a more accurate representation
of history. This narrative ignores the particular and national constituents of the Zionist narrative and emphasizes instead universal spirituality which is realized through the adoption of indigenous religions and practices. The result is what I call a spiritual neo-Canaanite narrative of the past.
The study presented here is based on a fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2006 in two NAJ communities in Israel: Hamakom (Lit. ‘the place’; also used as reference to God) and Bayit Chadash (Lit. ‘newhome’).2 While the fieldwork involved participant observation, formal and informal interviews, and textual analysis, the present chapter is primarily based on an analysis of the writings of Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi, the founder and leader of the Hamakom community.
New Age JudAism
As noted above, the development of the NAJ movement in Israel coincides with the expansion—in the last three decades—of contemporary modes of spirituality and the New Age in the Western world. Often referred to as the ‘New Age Movement’ (e.g. Heelas 1996), New Age is not a unified movement, but rather a segmented network of groups without central authority or leadership. Scholars of the New Age have identified characteristic themes or common teachings which New Agers share, such as the anticipation of a spiritual cosmic transformation, the use of meditative and healing techniques to achieve this transformation, psychological renderings of religious notions, and the sanctification of the self (Hanegraaff 1998; Heelas 1996). A notable aspect of New Age spiritualities is its religious eclecticism. New Age combines a wide range of traditions and practices derived from Western esoteric, Oriental, Native American, and pagan cultures, creating a cultural mélange (Huss 2007). In NAJ, these tendencies are realized in its eclectic assemblage of Jewish traditions and non-Jewish New-Age practices.
Emerging from the Israeli New Age culture, NAJ is a collective, partially organized phenomenon that has evolved since the late 1990s. NAJ in Israel is influenced by the North American Jewish Renewal Movement (Weissler 2008; Magid 2006), yet it remains a distinct local phenomenon. By 2001, two key figures had emerged in the Israeli NAJ scene: the abovementioned Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi and Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, who had established two separate communities. Both communities attracted the typical participants of New-Age culture in Israel, hailing from a secular, upper-middle class, Ashkenazi (European) background—the characteristics of Israel’s veteran élites (Kaplan and Werczberger forthcoming; Kimmerling 2001).
While NAJ thinkers claim that their ambition to renew Judaism largely relies on the Jewish mystical traditions, such as Kabbalah and Hassidism, de facto various New Age elements are embedded in their teachings and practices (Weissler 2008; Werczberger 2011). These characteristics include a strong emphasis on a personal relationship with God and on subjective religious experience; an eclectic tendency and the willingness to integrate non-Jewish—mostly Eastern mystical—practices into Jewish ritual; and a stress on personal development and growth. Through the integration of Kabbalist and Hassidic concepts with New Age values, symbols, and rituals, NAJ aims to transform and revive Judaism, and to offer a spiritual alternative to existing Jewish denominations. Considering the dominance of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel, NAJ’s hybrid form of Judaism is clearly breaking new ground, hence the need to legitimize and authenticate itself. This is achieved via the reconstruction of Jewish history.
In the following sections, I focus on the writings of Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi, leader of the Hamakom community. Ezrahi is well known for being one of the clearly articulated voices in Jewish New Age circles. Based on intimate knowledge of both Jewish and academic texts, his writings illustrate NAJ’s conscious effort to reinvent the Jewish tradition by reconstructing the past through the subversion of the ‘classical’ Zionist historical narrative.
ReNewiNg the PReseNt, RecoNstRuctiNg the PAst
In numerous essays, Ezrahi presents his proposal for the renewal of contemporary Judaism through the integration of Jewish mysticism with New Age spirituality. Following the establishment of his community, Hamakom, in 1999, Ezrahi explicitly stated that:
Hamakom wishes to incorporate methods and philosophies from various sources into renewed Judaism, many of them from Eastern religions—techniques of bodily movement and meditation methods. One cannot imagine the benefit that the integration of meditation into our verbal prayers might have. (Ezrahi 1999)
The key to understanding the need for renewing Judaism, Ezrahi claims, lies in the Jewish past, more specifically in the period of Exile. The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D. and the subsequent exile of the Jewish people from the Land of Israel mark the rupture between people and land in Jewish history, and the advance of what became known as
Rabbinic Judaism—which, he continues, is the source of the contemporary malaise of Judaism.
In a different essay, Ezrahi juxtaposes the image of Rabbinic or exilic Judaism with the biblical period and evokes a romantic image of biblical times—one in which the Jews are depicted as farmers and warriors who dwell on and are physically attached to the land and to Nature.
Before it [Judaism] became a religion of rabbis with hats and modest women covering every inch of their body, a religion of books blending erudition and Sabbath cholent [a traditional European one-pot Jewish dish served on sabbath], Judaism was a tribal culture of warriors and poets, such as King David, of women bathing naked on the rooftops like Bathsheba, the wife of Uria the Hittite. Judaism was a religion of peasants who lived on their ancestors’ land, like Naboth the Jezreelite; of farmers sleeping on the threshing floor, like Boaz, and celebrated the vintage with love rituals of Tu-B’ev, like the daughters of Shilo, who danced in the vineyard under full moonlight, enticing men to ravish them. It was a religion of shepherds who sometimes met angels in the field, like Samson’s parents, and saw colorful visions of God like Ezekiel. (Ezrahi 2007, 180)
Indeed, similar to other modern national and ethnic movements (Friedman 1992; Hobsbawm 1983), NAJ harnesses the past in order to provide itself with an account of its origins and development, which then allows for its self-recognition over time (Halbwachs 1980). In his seminal work on collective memory, Halbwachs (1980) argues that the past is a social construction, which is mainly, if not wholly, shaped by the concerns of the present. Collective memory is an organic part of social life, which is continuously transformed in response to society’s changing needs (Zerubavel 1995). Accordingly, the social concern with collective memory is often related to the formation of collective identities in times of rapid transformations. ‘Paradoxically’, Hobsbawm (1972, 11) argues, ‘the past remains the most useful analytical tool for coping with constant change’ (also Friedman 1992; Hervieu-Le´ger 2000). Referring to Jewish collective memory, Yerushalmi (1982) argues that the modern effort to reconstruct the Jewish past begins at a time marked by a sharp break in the continuity of Jewish living, which also entailed a growing decay of Jewish group memory.
At the same time, NAJ’s preoccupation with the past also reflects the contemporary, late-modern need for temporal anchoring, ‘in the wake of the information revolution [when] the relationship between the past, present and future is being transformed’ (Huyssen 1995, 7). In recent years,
this tendency has grown so strong that Huyssen deems it to be a cultural obsession. Conceived, then, as a post-modern phenomenon (Huss 2007), NAJ’s concern with the past, which it shares with other New Age spiritualities (Hanegraaff 1998; Ruah-Midbar 2006), seems to reinforce the idea that it may be the result of the ‘post-modern crisis’ (Huyssen 1995).
The articulation of a ‘pre-historical’ narrative of the past by many New Age groups, including NAJ, may grant these new cultural phenomena some temporal anchoring, which is absent from their eclectic assemblage of spiritual beliefs and rituals.
However, in order to fully understand NAJ, we also need to consider the specific socio-cultural context from which it emerged. Indeed, NAJ’s reworking of Jewish history is yet another voice in the cacophony of historical narratives and social agendas that is resonating in contemporary Israeli public space today. The first and foremost among them is the (now) diminishing ‘classic’ Zionist narrative.
The ‘classical’ Zionist historical narrative relates the greatness of the Israelite nation in ancient times, and the 2000 years of exile during which the Jewish people suffered and forfeited its national greatness until the glorious return to the ancient land (Feige 2002). However, beginning in the early 1980s, various social, political, and economic dynamics have led to the erosion of the Zionist cultural–national hegemonic center and the waning of the Zionist hegemony (Ram 2007). The consequent critical social thinking was directed at deconstructing basic elements in the Zionist historical narrative (Kimmerling 2001; Feige 2002).
Moreover, today groups promoting sharply contrasting ideologies have joined in an attempt to use Jewish history as an ideal model for a Jewish state. Various groups attempt to construct new ethnic and religious identities and in doing so construe new narratives of the past (Kimmerling2001). The radical right-wing Zionist-Religious Jews, for instance, substantiate their claims for a ‘Greater Land of Israel’ and for settlements in the Israelioccupied West Bank by pointing to the places where the biblical stories allegedly happened. They thus verify the ‘right’ of the Jewish people over these places (Aran 1991).
In this sense, the distinctness of the NAJ narrative arises from its New Age premises and the related universal perceptions. NAJ simultaneously emulates and transforms the classical Zionist narrative in a way which plays down its national and particular elements and emphasizes what might be perceived as universal spirituality. This is primarily achieved by the division of Jewish history into two periods: The Rabbinic period and the Antiquity.
the NAJ’s NARRAtive of the PAst: the RAbbiNic veRsus the biblicAl PeRiod
As noted, NAJ’s narrative divides Jewish history into two main periods: the earlier period, the biblical past or Antiquity, comprising the pre-tribal, prenational history of the patriarchs, the Israelite conquest of ancient Canaan, and the period of the First and Second Temple; and the later or Rabbinic period, extending roughly from the first century A.D. to the beginning of the twentieth century. In juxtaposing the two, the NAJ regards the time of Antiquity as a source of inspiration for the original, authentic spiritual Judaism. Its significance lies in the perceived affinity between the ancient Israelites and the land and nature that supposedly existed at that time. Conversely, the Rabbinic period is regarded as emblematic of the decline of Judaism. I now describe the two phases in turn, starting with the Rabbinic period.
In line with its criticism of contemporary Judaism and Rabbinic culture, NAJ conceives the Rabbinic era as the period when Judaism declined and its institutionalization as a text-based religion was initiated. The destruction of the Temple and the separation of the people from the land (the Exile) led to the evanescence of all rituals that connected humankind, land, and nature, which in turn led to the Orthodox Jewish ‘obsession’ with the ‘correct’ application of textual laws and traditions. As Ezrahi states:
If we return to the simple origins of Judaism and through them explore the system of which the Bible [Torah] speaks, we will soon discover that it does not speak of a world of rabbis who instruct eternal students who marry their ever-pregnant wives, and not of the Orthodox political parties with their religious courts, and not of the bookshelves holding the books with tiny letters, in which you need to burrow in order to discover whether you are permitted to open the refrigerator on the Shabbat, and what you should do if, God forbid, you opened it and the light was switched on. No. The Bible speaks of a people who dwell on their land, people who are warriors and farmers. (2004, 33)
In an apt metaphor, Ezrahi describes exile Judaism as a ‘take away’ religion that, like a laptop computer, may be plugged into a power source in any location. By replacing nature and Temple rituals with texts, Rabbinic Judaism reconstructed Jewish practice in a manner that allowed its adherents to overcome the geographical specificities and to practice their
Judaism in exile. The disassociation of practiced Judaism from nature and the land consequently led to its decline.
While the NAJ cannot entirely disregard the contribution of the Rabbinic period to Jewish spirituality, namely the importance of Kabbalistic and Hassidic writings, Ezrahi gives far greater consideration to the biblical period or Antiquity ending with the destruction of the Second Temple and the exile from the land of Israel.
In its reconstruction of this period, NAJ focuses on its so-called spiritual aspects—the pagan traditions that existed alongside Judaism, the agrarian rituals that took place in the Temple, and prophecy. By accentuating these dimensions, the NAJ reconstructs Antiquity as a sacred time, a period distinguished by non-institutionalized forms of religious life, pagan, and nature worship, as well as direct divine revelation:
Up to the Babylonian Exile which followed the destruction of the First Temple, the Hebraic faith was powerfully associated with the land and the temple. The early Israelites were tribal people, who, although reaching this land after a long journey in the desert, were still conscious of the revelation of God in heaven and on earth, in the rain and drought, in the desert wind, the natural springs of water and the wild deer, and consolidated their faith and rituals accordingly. Many of our traditions, our holidays and festivals are based on Canaanite traditions which the Israelites, coming to this land, adopted with slight changes in order to accommodate their faith and customs to the local traditions. (Ezrahi 2002, 42)
Ezrahi’s conjecture of Canaanite worship draws on earth and naturebased spiritualities, such as Neo-paganism (Albanese 1990; Pike 2004; Taylor 2001). In these earth-based spiritualities, nature is perceived to be sacred and participants are motivated by their pantheistic and animistic perceptions (Taylor 2001). Concomitantly, Ezrahi’s effort to reformulate the pre-Rabbinic Jewish past in spiritual terms entails the ‘re-discovery’ of these spiritual aspects in Jewish history. It also echoes many existing reconstructions and idealizations of a mythic, pre-Christian past in accord with New Age spirituality (Hanegraaff 1998; Ruah-Midbar 2006).
In his reconstruction of Jewish history, Ezrahi draws on two textual resources: academic scholarship and biblical and Talmudic writings. Drawing on these texts, Ezrahi underscores three aspects in this period that are regarded as spiritual: pagan rituals—which celebrate the immanence of God in nature; agrarian Temple rituals—which affirm humanity’s relationship with the cycles of nature; and prophecy—the experience of unmediated and un-institutionalized divine revelation.
Drawing on biblical and archeological works, Ezrahi argues that the ancient Hebrew religion, as practiced during Antiquity, developed from direct contact with the local pagan religions. Quoting the works of scholars such as Raphael Patai and Yehezkel Koifman, Ezrahi presumes that during Antiquity the Israelites concurrently worshipped Yahweh, the Hebrew God, and local deities, such as the Canaanite goddess Asherah.3 For Ezrahi, the significance of this detail is that by accommodating Canaanite paganism in the monotheistic worship of Yahweh, the Israelites allegedly acknowledged the immanence of God in nature. From this, he concludes that the Jewish rituals of that time were pantheistic, with the immanence of God revealed in the forces of nature and their celebration.
Moreover, by re-reading biblical and Talmudic texts, Ezrahi asserts that even in the days of the Second Temple, long after Canaanite pagan worship had disappeared from the area, pagan or pagan-like traditions may have existed alongside mainstream, monotheistic Temple worship. For instance, Ezrahi recounts a story from the Talmud according to which an ancient ceremony took place during the festival of Simchat Beit Hashoeva. This involved Jews leaving the Temple to draw water from the Shiloh spring, but, while doing so, they turned their backs to the Temple and bowed to the sun. According to Ezrahi, this tradition and the fact that the Jewish sages abolished it later validate the existence of pagan-like rituals even in the Temple.
Furthermore, in the essay quoted above, Ezrahi reminds his readers that during biblical times, ecstatic prophecy—the unmediated experience of God—was common among both the local pagans and the Israelites. He substantiates this claim by drawing on a description from the first Book of Samuel. The passage narrates a spontaneous prophecy that occurred among King David, King Saul, and their men. According to the story, David the would-be king was hunted and persecuted by King Saul; he hid in the backyard of the prophet Samuel and his disciples. When Saul’s soldiers approached, all those present, including the soldiers and King Saul, suddenly experienced a spell of ecstatic prophecy.
comPetiNg NARRAtives of the PAst
Given its ideological (re)-appraisal of the past, the explicit periodization of Jewish history, and the emphasis on the connection between people and land/nature, NAJ’s historical narrative is analogous to the Zionist construction of the Jewish past (Zerubavel 1995). Both narratives divide Jewish history into similar time periods: Antiquity, when the Jewish people
lived on their land; the period of the Exile, when the Jewish people were separated from the land and forced to live elsewhere; and the present time. Furthermore, both regard the earlier period, Antiquity, in favorable terms and negate the time of exile. For the Zionists, the Exile—which scattered the Jewish people—undermined the Jews’ shared experience of nationhood (Zerubavel 1995); for NAJ, the Exile means the separation of the people from the land and thus severance from nature and the unmediated experience of the sacred.
Importantly, though, in term of the appraisal of Antiquity, the Zionist narrative emphasizes the collective aspects of this period, constructing it as the national ‘golden age’, when the ancient Hebrew nation flourished and enjoyed political autonomy (Zerubavel 1995). NAJ, however, shifts the emphasis from the collective and political to the personal and spiritual. In this version of the past, Antiquity is a mythological time of genuine Jewish spirituality, before it was corrupted by the Rabbinic establishment. Here, the land does not symbolize nationhood but spiritual and personal affinity with nature. It is only when the Israelites lived on the land, in proximity to nature, that they could experience the sacred in a personal and unmediated way.
In other words, while both movements ground their claims in the historical association between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, they profoundly differ in the way they articulate this relationship. The Zionist movement accentuated the link between national ambitions and territory, transforming the idea of the land from the religious myth of the sacred homeland into a concrete secular and political actuality. The Zionists celebrated the natural beauty of the Land. Yet, at the same time, they also aspired to ‘conquer’ it—to develop and transform it for national ends. In Zionist writings, the land was often referred to as a desolate, unsettled terrain which the Jewish pioneers would cultivate and develop (Schnell 1997).
Formulated at the end of the twentieth century, NAJ’s vision of the ideal relationship between people, land, and nature negates the Zionist approach and leans toward environmental awareness. Subverting the Zionist modern national claim for the ownership of the land, NAJ’s spiritual perspective advances an eco-centric approach—depicting a non-hierarchal, holistic relation between the land, human beings, and nature. Moreover, influenced by New Age and Neo-pagan spiritualities, the land is considered to be the site of sacred nature and godly immanence (Taylor 2001).
In this sense, NAJ’s historical narrative is both an adaptation and a subversion of the Zionist narrative. It is constructed on the juxtaposition
of Antiquity/Exile and connection with/severance from the land, while simultaneously subverting the secular–national model and positing a spiritual–religious model in its place. In this nature-centered model, the local nature religions of the Land of Israel (Canaanite paganism) become a source of inspiration for authentic Jewish spirituality and for the correct relation with the land. Playing down the traditional Jewish theme of the return of the chosen people to the Promised Land, NAJ’s concept of the land as a site of natural, sacred geography amplifies the significance of the native place and indigenous pagan cultures.
The transformation of the land from a symbol of nationhood to a symbol of nature and local indigenous spiritualities coincides with existing schisms in Israeli identity regarding ‘place’, belonging, and indigenousness. Gurevitch ( 1997 ) points to ambivalence and constant struggle in the Israeli and Zionist idea of the return to the land—to the place. The Zionist pioneer was the long lost son who returned to the promised Jewish homeland and also the native of the land who has chosen to turn his back on history and religion. The early pioneers and their Israeli successors continuously attempted to establish a sense of indigenousness and belonging to the land through many practices, such as the imitation of the native Bedouin dress or hiking in nature (Almog 2000 ; Ben-David 1997 ). This unspoken tension between the new Jew (Almog 2000 ) and his/her locality was never more apparent than in the Canaanite ideology of the early twentieth century.
The Canaanite movement was an intellectual and artistic movement formed in the 1940s. Its members, among them the poet Yonatan Ratosh and the authors Aharon Amir and Benjamin Tamuz, opposed the Zionist model of historical nationality and proposed a native nationhood instead. Offering a counter-narrative of the Jewish past, its ideology was based on an interpretation of Jewish history which posited an ancient entity of peoples known as the Hebrews. This entity, which supposedly included the Amorites, Moabites, Ammonites, Phoenicians, and the Israelites, was considered to be the original inhabitant of western Palestine. The Canaanite movement urged the Zionist settlers of Palestine to reject the Diaspora Jewish religious civilization, and to reestablish the ancient Hebrew entity together with the indigenous peoples of the region—to form a new nation exclusively based on territorial residence (Diamond 1986).
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Beyond the stars
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Beyond the stars
Author: Ray Cummings
Illustrator: Jack Gaughan
Release date: February 9, 2024 [eBook #72913]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: Ace Books Inc, 1963
Credits: Marcia Brooks, Greg Weeks, Alex White & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEYOND THE STARS ***
[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
An Ace Book, by arrangement with Gabrielle Cummings Waller.
Magazine version serialized in Argosy All-Story Magazine. To D A. W
With affectionate regard and appreciation of his loyal friendship through the years.
Printed in U.S.A.
RAY CUMMINGS’
novels in Ace editions:
THE MAN WHO MASTERED TIME (D-173) BRIGANDS OF THE MOON (D-324) BEYOND THE VANISHING POINT (D-331)
WANDL THE INVADER (D-497) THE SHADOW GIRL (D-535)
ONE OF THEIR ATOMS—OUR UNIVERSE!
“The scene outside my window was a chaos: showers of white sparks were rushing at us. I tried to shout a warning, but instead I laughed with a touch of madness. I realized then that these sparks were really stars—and they were passing through us. I could see their luminous white points beaming within the vehicle as the stream flowed through. These stars were mere electrons and our vehicle comparatively was a puff of vapor.”
Racing through the vast depths of space in a vehicle larger than the universe itself—a fantastic concept and one that only the mind of a master pioneering science-fiction writer could conceive and then translate into a classic tale of exciting adventure in a cosmos BEYOND THE STARS.
Beyond the Stars
I
“CALLING FOR HELP!”
There is a saying in the Service that when Liner 40 N runs late the whole world waits. It may be true enough; I suppose it is. But to me, as Commander 3 of Liner 40 N on that night in May, 1998, it was a particularly annoying truth.
For I was running late; at the Azores I was a good twenty-eight minutes behind where I should have been, and it hardly made things any easier for me to contemplate an impatient world awaiting me.
All the way from Madrid our port meter 8 had been giving trouble. Then at 15 W. I had no sooner left the coast than a surge of wind from the northwest had swung down upon us, and I lost a good eight minutes trying unsuccessfully to climb over it. A mood of ill-nature possessed me. I was just twenty-four years old, the youngest of the three commanders who alternated on successive flights of the 40 N; this was only my seventh circle since promotion from the small equatorial liner of the East, and running the famous 40 N late under the eyes of a disapproving world disgruntled me.
At Meridian 45 W the connecting Director at New York called me up. The Northern Express, flying north on Meridian 74 W., was already at New York waiting for me. The Director wasn’t very pleasant about it. If I held up the express in its flight over the Pole and down 106 E., every connection in the Eastern Hemisphere would be disarranged.
The mercurial screen on my desk glowed with its image of the director’s reproving face.
“You can’t expect McIleny to make up your lost time,” he told me. “Not on a night like this. The Bureau reports head winds for him all up to Baffin Land.”
“I’m having a few head winds myself,” I retorted.
But I grinned, and he caught my grin, and smiled back at me.
“Do the best you can,” he said. And disconnected.
I made no ocean stops; but the director at 55 was a fussy fellow. I was due to pass him at ten thousand feet, to clear the north-south lanes for the non-stop Polar freighters; and with this wind and the fog which was now upon me I knew I would receive a sharp rebuke from 55 if I passed too high.
A hum sounded at one of the dozen mercurial screens beside me. Director 55 already annoyed! But it was not he. The small rectangle of screen glowed with its formless silver blurs, took form and color. A girl’s face, ash-blond hair wound around her forehead, her white throat, with the square neck of a pale-blue jacket showing. And her earnest azure eyes searching mine, lighting with recognition as on her own screen she caught my image. Alice!
My annoyance at the threatened director’s call-down died. I seized my headphone, heard her voice.
“Len?”
“Yes, Alice.”
“I’ve been trying to get you all the way from Greenwich. They wouldn’t let me through, not until I told them it was important—I had to get you.” She spoke fast against the moment when the Vocal Traffic Timer would cut her off. “Len, grandfather wants you to come up and see us. At once—when you’re through with this circle. Will you?”
She saw the question on my lips.
“Don’t ask me now—no time, now, Len. But it’s important, and grandfather . . . do you know where I can find Jim? We want him too, you and Jim.”
“He’s in the Anglo-Detective Division, London Air Service, New York Branch.”
“Yes, I know. But he’s in the air tonight. How can I get him?” Her smile was whimsical. “When I asked for a tracer, the Timer over there told me to get the hell off the air I guess he thought I wanted to find Jim just to tell him I loved him.”
Her image blurred.
The Mid-Atlantic Timer’s voice broke in. “Fifteen seconds. Last call.”
“I’ll get Jim,” I said hastily “Bring him with me. Soon as we can get there.”
“Yes. We’re waiting for you. And Len, you won’t need to sleep first. You can sleep after you get here. And tell Jim—”
A click silenced her. The screen went dark.
What could she want of me? It was pleasant to have seen and heard from her, this granddaughter of old Dr. Weatherby. In the stress of getting my appointment and continuous examinations and tests between voyages, I had not seen Alice since leaving the Equatorial Run. Nor Jim Dunkirk either I went after him now. The tracers could not rebuff me as they did Alice. They found him at last—at 120°E., 85°N. He was coming up over the Pole, and down Baffin Bay making for New York. His jolly face, with its ever present grin and the shock of fiery red hair above it, glowed on my screen.
“Well, Len, say, it’s great to see you!”
“Alice just called me—Alice Weatherby. Doc wants us both—you and me—something important. Wants to see us. You off at New York?”
“You bet,” he grinned. “Had a chase down through Tibet; every cursed murderer thinks the grand idea is for him to swoop it for Lhasa and parts unknown. I have one here, now. When I get him in his airy cage I’m off duty for a while. Alice wants us?”
“Yes. I don’t know what for. She didn’t have a chance to—”
“Fifteen seconds. Last call.”
“The infernal bedamned it is!” came Jim’s belligerent voice.
“Last call, Liner 40 N—limit ninety seconds by general orders.” The Timer was imperturbably impersonal.
But not Jimmy Dunkirk. “You cut me off,” he roared. “I’ll have the General Inspector tell you who you are in thirty seconds. This is Chief Dunkirk, Patrol Liner A 22, Anglo-Detective Division. I’ve got a murderer here—understand? A murderer! Important official business.”
With the Timer cowed, Jimmy would have talked all night. But I was on duty.
“Good,” I said. “I’ll call you at your office after you get in.”
“Old Weatherby wants us?”
“Yes. Off, Jim.”
It was well toward dawn when I hooked up with him; together we flew up the river, where on the Tappan Zee, at the northern borders of the city, Dr. Weatherby had his home.
Alice was under the landing stage when we descended in the hand lift.
“Len, Jim, I’m glad to see you.” She gave each of us one of her cool white hands. “Grandfather is waiting to—Jim, let go of my hand; you’re squeezing my fingers. That hurts!”
He flung it away. He had always done that with Alice, to devil her.
“Next time,” she said soberly, “you bow to me. That’s all.”
He laughed gleefully. “Right. Sure, that’s safer when you look so pretty.”
She was indeed pretty. A tall, slender girl—an inch taller than Jim. Big, serious blue eyes she had, and that braided mass of ashblond hair. She was dressed now in a pale blue jacket like a tunic, to her thighs, and long silver stockings from beneath the China-silk trousers that flared above her knees.
She smiled at Jim. “I’d never take you seriously. Dolores says—”
Jim sobered. “Dolores.”
“Dolores is waiting to see you both. She’s very excited.”
Dolores, the little sister of Alice. I never saw her without a pang. In this great age of science she is a pathetic example of what science cannot do.
Our wonderful, marvelous age of science! We pride ourselves on it. But this girl had been born blind, and she was one of those rare cases where all the learned surgeons of our learned world could not bring the light to her.
Jim called, “ ’Lo there, Dolores.”
“Jimmy! Is that you? I’m so glad to see you!”
See him! There was, to me, a grim pathos in her conventional words.
“Len is here too, Dolores,” Alice said gently.
“Len? Oh, how do you do, Len?” Her hand reached and touched my hair in recognition. Then she turned back to Jim. “I’m glad you’re here, Jimmy. They told me you were coming.”
He swept her up, whirled her through the air like a child, and set her gasping upon her feet.
“Well, well, how’s my little friend Dolores, huh? Want to do that again? Come on!” He whirled her again and panted. “Getting too big . . . all grown up. Say, Len, she’s prettier every day, isn’t she?”
Dr. Weatherby was seventy-five years old at this time when he sent for Jim and me. He met us on the lower terrace of his home. He was a squat, powerfully thick-set figure, with long ape-like arms and a thick back slightly humped.
His head was overlarge, made to seem larger by its great mass of iron-gray hair. His face, large of feature, was unlined, save by the marks of character stamped upon it. A kindly face it was, smiling with friendship, but always stern in repose.
“Well, my boys, you came promptly,” he greeted us. “That’s fine. Come in.” His huge hands gripped us with a strength that made Jim pretend to wince and grin mockingly at Alice. “Come in. We’ll sit in the garden upstairs.”
He led us up the inclines through his rambling house and to its roof, where in the starlight we sat on leafy couches in a garden blooming with flowers, shrubs and coned ferns.
It was about an hour before dawn, cloudless, moonless—a brilliant firmament of gems strewn upon their purple velvet. Venus was rising now to be the morning star and herald the dawn; red Mars, lying opposite and low, glowed like the ashless end of a cigarro.
Below us over the parapet of roof was the crowded countryside, wan and still in the starlight, with the thread of river beyond—a river of silver with the blue-white lights of its boats skimming the surface. A few planes were overhead, the small local airline from Albany skimming past with a whir of its fans.
Dr. Weatherby chatted with us, rebuked me smilingly for running the 40 N late, and listened gravely, with occasional interested questions, to Jim’s vivid account of his world chase after the murderer, while Dolores snuggled up against him, thrilled, and timidly held his hand.
“Well, well, you boys do have an interesting life. Youth coming forward. Youth can do anything—the world waits on youth.”
“It did tonight,” said Alice, with a sly glance at me.
I wondered what Dr. Weatherby wanted us for. He had not hinted at it. He had spoken of a morning meal, and then we must have some sleep.
Then, abruptly he said, “I should not have sent for you unless it was important. It is. The fact that I need you—” He stopped as suddenly as he had begun.
I don’t know why a great tenseness should have fallen upon us all. But it did. I felt it. And in the insuing silence little Dolores left Jim and crept to her grandfather, leaning against him.
I began, lamely, “We came, of course—”
Dr. Weatherby was staring off at the stars moodily, with a look so far away I could have fancied he was gazing, not at the stars, but beyond them. And then he tore himself back, and smiled, lighting a cigarro, flipping the torch at me and asking me to step on it.
“I have so much to tell you,” he said. “I hardly know how or where to begin. You know, of course, something of my life, my work.
“Leonard, and you, Jim, I believe you’re familiar in a general way with what the physicists think of the atom? Radiant matter—these electro-rays that seem to solve everything and yet only add to the mystery?
“You know that savants would tell us that space is curved; so Einstein told us years ago? Well, I will tell you this. To-morrow, after you have slept, I believe I can make clear to you the real construction of our material universe.”
His hand checked us. “I have been working since 1970 along these lines. Alice recently has been helping me. And then Dolores—
“This child here, in the dark, it has been given her to see things denied to our science. Years and years ago a scientist proclaimed that thoughts themselves are a mere vibration, like light and heat and sound, and all these mysterious rays and flying electrons— electricity itself. They are all the same, though we name them differently.”
He had been talking swiftly, but quietly. “Tell them, Dolores.”
“A big open space,” she said slowly “Mountains and a broad valley. A cliffside. People there on a ledge. A young man and a young woman, very white and pale, with blood on the man’s face. They were standing on a height, with a dark cavern behind them.
“Other people, or monsters down in the valley: something vague but horrible as a nightmare with a nameless horror. And the man was calling, Help. Not the word. I could not hear that, but I knew. Calling to me. He keeps on calling. I can hear him so often. Calling to me!”
She said it so strangely. At once it seemed uncanny, weird, almost gruesome. A thrill very akin to fear ran over me. This was not science. But Dr. Weatherby’s calm, precise voice was scientific enough.
“That was several years ago. We have found since that she is receiving thought-vibrations, not from here on earth, not from the planets, or the stars, but from beyond the stars. The greater realms out there, suspected to exist for so long, which now I know and can prove to exist!”
His voice had risen in an excitement, an exaltation. He went on more swiftly, “But all that is nothing. I wanted you to come here and help me. Dolores has had thoughts from out there beyond the stars . . . and her own answering thoughts have been answered. Communication!
“Oh, I have guarded against delusion! I have sent messages through Dolores of scientific import, and been answered with scientific thoughts all beyond this child’s comprehension. Communications with the great unknown—the infinity of distance unfathomable.
“That started a year ago. Now I have done more. I have learned how to get there. I can transport myself, my girls and you! I am ready to make the journey now. That is why I want you, and need you. We are going. We want you to come with us, out beyond the stars!”
THE DEAD WHITE THING
“In the plan of the universe,” said Dr Weatherby, “we find a conception gigantic, infinite, and yet it all has a simplicity. I want most earnestly to have you understand me, Leonard and Jim.”
He gazed at us with a gentle smile. We had had our morning meal, and had slept long and heavily, and now it was evening twilight. We sat in the big livingroom on the lower floor of the Weatherby home. Dolores, as before, cuddled against her grandfather’s side. Alice busied about the house, but presently she joined us. Dr. Weatherby’s manner was as earnest as his words. He added, looking at me, “I want to be very clear, Leonard. This thing that we are to do—this journey, in which if you will not join me I shall make alone—”
“By the infernal, you won’t make it alone while I’m alive,” Jim cried. “The detective service loses its best tracker, beginning right away!”
Dr. Weatherby held out his hand. “My boy!” He could say no more. And on Dolores’ face was a radiance. Then Dr. Weatherby turned to me.
“And you, Leonard—will you go?”
The direct question startled me. Would I go out there into eternity? Beyond the stars, into eternal time, and over space unfathomable, to encounter what now no human mind could grasp? But, like Jim, I was practically alone in the world and I was free to make any decision without fear of hurting others.
Nevertheless, to give up my commission, as youngest commander of the great 40 N, to disappear, lose all I had earned, gave me pause. To return, perhaps never. Wanderers beyond the stars! Was this not, perhaps, too bold a thing for human endeavor?
I heard my voice saying quietly, “Why, of course I’m going with you, Dr. Weatherby.”
I was aware that Alice had come in to sit beside me, her cool white hand impulsively pressing mine. And Dolores was saying, “Alice, they’re going! Isn’t that wonderful? We’re all going, just as soon as we can get ready!”
“A strange simplicity,” Dr Weatherby was saying. “First, let me make this clear: when I say universe—the construction of our universe—I mean everything that exists, or has, or will exist, the smallest entity of our infinitesimal atomic world to the greatest conception of what may lie beyond the stars. Does that sound complicated? Let me say again, it is simple.”
He leaned toward us, with his thick, strong hands gripped in his lap. “I want you to realize first that we are dealing with infinities. The human mind is so finite, so limited. You must cast off most of your instinctive methods of reasoning. You understand me?”
“We’ll try,” I said.
He nodded and went on.
“Conceive a void of nothingness. No space, no time, no material bodies. Just nothing. That was the beginning. Do not try to wonder when it was. A billion years ago . . . a billion billion. Not at all. You must not think of when, because when implies time. There was no time. There could be no time without material bodies to create movement and events. For time in itself is nothing but the measurement between events.
“We have then, a nothingness. A vortex. A whirlpool.”
“A vortex of nothingness?” I exclaimed.
“Exactly. Why, back in the 1920’s, Leonard, scientists recognized that the basic entities of matter were only whirlpools. They hoped then to find some fundamental substance, like ether. But there is none.
“A whirlpool, by its very motion, simulates substance. And, in the last analysis, that is all which exists—an apparent solidity. Divide anything, probe into anything, you find only a motion of something else smaller which is apparently real. But then take that smaller thing. Divide it. You find more empty spaces, more nothingness. And other yet smaller things in violent motion.
“Why, Leonard, don’t you realize that’s what puzzled scientists? From 1900 on, they puzzled over it. They found a solid bar of iron to be composed of molecules. They said: ‘Oh yes, we understand. This solidity of iron is only apparent. It really consists of molecules of iron with empty spaces in between them, and the molecules are in motion.’
“But then, Leonard—this was way back—they suddenly found that the reality of the molecule was only apparent. It was just like the iron! Empty spaces, with atoms in motion. Ah, at last they had got to the bottom of it. Atoms.
“But then they found that an atom was no more a solidity than the molecule, or the iron bar. Still other spaces, with other vibrating particles. And fatuously they said: ‘We have found electrons, revolving around a central nucleus.’ But that meant nothing, and at last they began to realize it.
“Let your mind leap beyond all that, Leonard. It is too fatuous to think that each division of matter is the last, simply because you cannot make another division. Let’s go back to that original vortex of nothingness. It created an apparent solidity, exactly as the vibrating molecules of iron create iron. That’s clear, isn’t it?”
“But,” said Jim, “how small is this smallest vortex?”
Dr. Weatherby laughed. “It has no size. It is infinitely small. An abstract quality, beyond human conception. If you try to name its size, then no longer is it infinitely small. It is not the smallest vortex; there is no such thing. It is the infinitely small vortex, which is very different.
“Conceive, then, this vortex, which creates an apparently solid particle of matter. I call this particle an intime. This intime, in turn, with myriads of its fellows clustering about it, vibrating with empty nothingness between, creates another, larger entity—another apparently solid substance. And so on up to what we now call an electron.”
“Well,” I said, “between the intime and the electron, how many separate densities might there be?”
“An infinite number,” he replied smilingly. “A number that cannot be conceived. Each has distinct characteristics, just as iron differs from lead or gold.”
He paused a moment, but none of us said anything. “With this conception,” he went on, “we can build the definition that a material substance is a density of other substances. It maintains its separate existence by virtue of having around its exterior an emptiness greater than the emptiness of its interior. Think of that a moment.
“The earth itself is such a density The space around it is greater than any of the spaces within its molecules, its atoms, its electrons— down to its finitely small intimes—to the ultimate nothingness of which it is composed.
“That is our earth. It is in movement. And another density near it we call Venus, and another Mars, vibrating with a space between them. All our starry universe; you see, Leonard?”
My mind leaped with the thrill of it. The great vault of the heavens with its myriad whirling stars shrank before my far-flung imagination into a tiny space teeming with its agitated particles!
Dr. Weatherby added gently, “A fragment of iron is microscopically no different in structure from our starry universe. The distances between our heavenly bodies compared to the size of them are quite the same as the distances between electrons, or intimes, compared to their size. You get my point?”
“I do,” Jim exclaimed. “What we call the sky would seem a solid mass of matter—like a fragment of iron—to some greater viewpoint?”
“Exactly. Our microscopes show nothing which is actually more solid than the sky itself. From here, on earth, to the Milky Way is to us a tremendous distance. But suppose that we were so gigantic— so vast in comparative size—that we needed a powerful microscope even to perceive that space. What would we see? A multiplicity of vibrating particles! And without the microscope the whole space would seem solid. We could call it . . . well, say a grain of gold.”
For a moment we were silent. There was to all this an awesome aspect. Yet its actual simplicity was overwhelming.
Dolores said timidly, “It seems strange that so simple a thing should have been unknown for so long.”
“Not at all,” said Dr. Weatherby. “The knowledge came step by step. It is only the final conception which seems so startling. To me it is the logical, inevitable conclusion. How could the facts be otherwise?
“Always, therefore, we have conceived ourselves and our earth to be some masterful dividing line between what is smaller and what is larger than ourselves. That is fatuous.
“We call the one our microscopic world. The other our astronomical world. And we sit between them, puzzling over their difference! They are both one, and we are in them—a mere step of the ladder.”
“It makes me feel very small,” said Alice.
“Or large,” I said. “According to the viewpoint.”
I added to Dr. Weatherby, “I realize now why no size, no motion, no time, nor density can be absolute. Everything must be relative to something else.”
“Exactly,” he nodded.
Jim was puzzling. “This voyage we’re going to make—beyond the stars. How are we going to make this trip? What in? By what method? By the nine airy demons, Dr. Weatherby, there’s an awful lot you haven’t told us yet!”
“Not so much,” said Dr. Weatherby smilingly.
“Because,” I interposed, “you don’t need to know very much, Jim.”
“We’re going in a projectile,” said Dolores. “At least they say it looks like a projectile.”
“Like Mallen’s moon rocket of 1989,” Tim exclaimed.
Dr. Weatherby shook his head. “The various anti-gravity methods devised so far would help us very little, except Elton’s electronic neutralization of gravity. I use that principle merely in starting the flight. A trip to the moon, such as Mallen’s rocket made, had nothing in common with this journey of ours.”
“They say Mallen is going himself next year—to Mars,” Alice remarked.
“Let’s see our projectile,” Jim demanded.
“In a moment,” Dr. Weatherby said. “There is, first, one conception I want to make sure you have grasped. Forget our earth now. Forget yourself. Conceive the material universe to be a vast void in which various densities are whirling.
“From the infinitely small to the infinitely large, they are of every size and character. Yet all are inherently the same, merely apparently solid. I will ask you, Leonard, this space between the earth and Mars—of what would you say it is composed?”
I hesitated. “Nothingness,” I ventured finally.
“No!” he exclaimed warmly “There is where you fail to grasp my fundamental conception. The void of space itself is a mass of particles, a mass of densities, of every possible size and character.
“The earth is one; a wandering asteroid is another. And meteors, meteorites, down to the smallest particles of dust. And still smaller, are the particles of light, far flung everywhere through space. Other entities are again still smaller—call them intimes—down in size to infinity.
“Space then, you must realize, is not empty. The emptiness, the nothingness, is only the infinitely small. Ah, I see now that you begin to understand!”
I said slowly, “I’m imagining space as . . . as a jelly. Unsolid, because we ourselves are more solid, and it seems unsolid to us. But . . . if we were less dense, and larger . . . gigantic—” I stopped.
“That,” said Dr. Weatherby, “is precisely the point of view I’ve wanted you to get. You can understand now why to beings of some greater outside realm all our interstellar space would shrink into apparent solidity, and they would call it an atom.
“Conceive yourself now a scientist of that vast universe outside. You are living on a density—a great conglomeration of particles clinging together—and you call it your earth.
“One tiny particle of your earth is beneath your microscope. You call that particle a grain of gold. You examine it. You find it is not solid. You see ‘empty spaces.’ They are not really empty, but the particles of matter swimming in them are too small for you to see. But you do see what you call molecules of gold.
“You increase the power of your microscope. You examine just one molecule of this gold. Now you see more supposedly empty spaces, with smaller whirling entities which you choose to call atoms.
“You examine one atom. The same result and you call the still smaller particles electrons. Down and down—who can say how far? Until, at last, you are looking into one intime. You see yet smaller particles whirling in space. That is the space between our stars!
“And these whirling points of light—perhaps you can distinguish no more than a million of them. They are the million largest, brightest
