The Elements of Euclid: A Prolegomena

If you spend enough time in Masonic discussion groups, you will find Masons who are interested in Kabbalah, in astrology, in alchemy, in Tarot and many other arcane sciences. Some are very knowledgeable in these fields, and are keenly aware of how these areas of knowledge shape Masonic ritual; but many more, while they might be eager to learn, do not yet know much about these fields. Do these fields have an influence on Masonic ritual? Quite clearly they do, although more as allusions than as central sources. These ideas are very attractive to the esoteric Mason, and the tantalizing hints in our ritual dropped by Preston, Webb, Cross, Gleason and others make the Masonic study of these fields something like a treasure hunt.

And yet, there are things explicitly in our ritual that are of profound spiritual importance that we seem not to notice. We don't have to speculate as to whether the authors of our ritual intended for us to contemplate these ideas; they tell us directly to study them. I would like to see more works of Masonic spirituality take advantage of what is explicitly in our ritual for topics of study that will both enlighten us and make us better Masons.

Tom Worrell's essay, A Spiritual Vision of the Liberal Arts and Sciences, published in Ahiman: A Review of Masonic Culture and Tradition, Vol. 1 is a good example of this. We all know that Fellows of the Craft are told during their Passing that they are to study the Seven Liberal Arts and Sciences for the rest of their lives, and to thereby improve themselves in Masonry. But how many do? The essay gives us an inroad into starting a study of these arts and sciences, and an excellent explanation of the spiritual imperatives for doing so.

In that spirit, I would like to engage in an extended study of The Elements of Euclid. Although our ritual talks about Pythagoras, it mentions the 47th Problem of Euclid (actually, Proposition 47 of Book I of The Elements). Until about 1900, an educated man studied The Elements in every society that had access to the text. We know that the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Arabs, Turks and Europeans studied The Elements, and there are translations and commentaries on Euclid in every major language in the Indo-European language family. Therefore, pretty much all the framers of Freemasonry studied Euclid. Preston tells us that of the Seven Liberal Arts and Sciences, Geometry is most essential to Masonry. He even goes so far as to say that Geometry is Masonry. No Mason can claim ignorance of Geometry, and yet few Masons actually study Geometry. I would like to change that. I would like to use my years of mathematics education, both as a student and as a teacher, to encourage Masons (and people in general) to gain a grasp of this subject so central to both Operative and Speculative Masonry, and give them a hand getting started.

To this end, I'm going to be blogging about The Elements a lot for a while. I'm also going to be preparing a Euclid class. While I encourage Masons to attend, there will be nothing in my Euclid class that would violate my Obligation for a non-Mason to hear, and so I'm going to open it to whomever wants to attend, and do the work. Over the next few months, I am going to blog about Euclid, and especially The Elements, a lot. If you want to follow along, I cannot recommend more highly the three-volume paperback translation by Sir Thomas L. Heath, published by Dover. I am not sure a more exhaustive annotated version exists in English. I will also be using an online version. My goal is to make reading Euclid easier for someone without a background in geometry, so that they can tackle this work of immense profundity.

Terumah: And let them make Me a sanctuary; that I may dwell among them.

In this week's Torah portion, God gives Moses instruction for building the Tabernacle, or Mishkan. It is to be made out of materials gathered by all the people, out of precious things in their possessions. Everyone is to contribute to it. There is to be an Ark made of gold and acacia wood to store the Tablets of the Law. The cover of the Ark (the karopet of ha-aron) will be made of gold and will have two cherubs made of the same piece of gold as the cover itself, facing each other with faces downcast but wings spread wide to cover the whole Ark, carved into the top of the cover. God instructs Moses that He will instruct him when Moses puts his head between the two cherubs over the Ark.

There was also to be a table made of acacia wood plated in gold, on which would be placed the showbread. These were twelve loaves of bread (one for each of the twelve tribes) specially baked to sit before the Presence of God. After which, they would be divided among the priests and eaten. It is mentioned in 1 Samuel 21: 4-7 that King David was given the showbread to eat by the High Priest.

The lampstand, or menorah,  was to be made of one enormous, solid piece of gold, hammered into six branches to hold seven lamps. Cups, spheres and flowers were hammered out of the gold to decorate it. The menorah was roughly 150 pounds, made of a single piece of gold.

The cloth of the Tabernacle was to be made of linen and wool, dyed with expensive dyes like techelet and  crimson worm. The Torah forbids wearing clothing made of a mixture of wool and linen, but also insists that the garments of the High Priest be made of a mixture of wool and linen. The dyed cloth was to be woven into a tapestry with cherubs decorating the fabric. Ten such cloths would be made, with each curtain 42 feet by 6 feet in area. They were sewn together in two groups of five with golden fasteners to attach them together, with eleven sheets of goats' wool, of area 45 feet by 6 feet, forming a cover. Five sheets were sewn together, and six sheets were sewn together, with the sixth sheet forming a tent flap for the Tabernacle. A roof was made of ram skins, processed with a type of tanning that made them red, with another roof made of skins processed with a type of tanning that made them blue, called tachashim (תְּחָשִׁים). Some interpreters think that the blue-processed skins were dolphin skins, while others think they were badger, or cow leather that was heavily processed.

The tent beams of the Tabernacle were made of acacia wood plated in gold, and shod with silver. Similar to the cloth of the Tabernacle, a curtain (parokhet) would be made, hanging from the rafters, to shield the Ark from view. As I have previously blogged, parokhet and kaporet are anagrams of each other, as are ha-Aron and Aharon (Aaron). The curtain, along with the wall of the Tabernacle, demarcated the extent of the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle.

Interestingly, in Kabbalah, the word parokhet takes on a transcendental meaning, as the barrier between adjacent higher realms of being. Between the world of Action (or Assiah) and the world of Fomation (or Yetzirah) is a curtain or barrier. And between Yetzirah and the world of Ideas (or B'riah) is a curtain. This barrier is inadvertently amusingly described by OTO devotees as "The Veil of Paroketh" (literally, "The Veil of a Curtain").  And between B'riah and the world of Archetypes (or Atzilut) is a curtain, which the Hermetic tradition calls "The Abyss".

An altar was to be made of acacia wood plated in copper, square with protrusions (literally, "horns") emerging out of each corner. This was for burnt offerings.

The Torah will repeat everything in this Torah portion later on once the people come to actually build these things. Next week, the instructions for preparing the Tabernacle will be given, and then there will be a rather disappointing interlude where Aaron, in Moses' absence, will build a Molten Calf for the Children of Israel to idolize. This will have unfortunate consequences. After which, the people will do what God commanded, and it will be described nearly identically with what was written in this week's Torah portion, with different verb tenses.

Of course, to Masons, "the Tabernacle was a model for King Solomon's Temple, of which this and every well-governed lodge is a representation." If it weren't a few hours before Shabbat, I'd explore this in a lot more detail.

The Haftarah for this Torah portion is from the First Book of Kings [1 Kings 5: 26 - 6:13]:

And the LORD gave Solomon wisdom, as he promised him: and there was peace between Hiram and Solomon; and they two made a league together.

And king Solomon raised a levy out of all Israel; and the levy was thirty thousand men.

And he sent them to Lebanon, ten thousand a month by courses: a month they were in Lebanon, and two months at home: and Adoniram was over the levy.

And Solomon had threescore and ten thousand that bare burdens, and fourscore thousand hewers in the mountains;

Beside the chief of Solomon's officers which were over the work, three thousand and three hundred, which ruled over the people that wrought in the work.

And the king commanded, and they brought great stones, costly stones, and hewed stones, to lay the foundation of the house.

And Solomon's builders and Hiram's builders did hew them, and the stonesquarers: so they prepared timber and stones to build the house.

And it came to pass in the four hundred and eightieth year after the children of Israel were come out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month Zif, which is the second month, that he began to build the house of the LORD.

And the house which king Solomon built for the LORD, the length thereof was threescore cubits, and the breadth thereof twenty cubits, and the height thereof thirty cubits.

And the porch before the temple of the house, twenty cubits was the length thereof, according to the breadth of the house; and ten cubits was the breadth thereof before the house.

And for the house he made windows of narrow lights.

And against the wall of the house he built chambers round about, against the walls of the house round about, both of the temple and of the oracle: and he made chambers round about:

The nethermost chamber was five cubits broad, and the middle was six cubits broad, and the third was seven cubits broad: for without in the wall of the house he made narrowed rests round about, that the beams should not be fastened in the walls of the house.

And the house, when it was in building, was built of stone made ready before it was brought thither: so that there was neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron heard in the house, while it was in building.

The door for the middle chamber was in the right side of the house: and they went up with winding stairs into the middle chamber, and out of the middle into the third.

So he built the house, and finished it; and covered the house with beams and boards of cedar.

And then he built chambers against all the house, five cubits high: and they rested on the house with timber of cedar.

And the word of the LORD came to Solomon, saying,

Concerning this house which thou art in building, if thou wilt walk in my statutes, and execute my judgments, and keep all my commandments to walk in them; then will I perform my word with thee, which I spake unto David thy father:

And I will dwell among the children of Israel, and will not forsake my people Israel.

This should be familiar to every Freemason.

Vayeitzei: Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.

Fearing for his life from his brother Esau, Jacob flees from his parents' home in Beer-sheba, hoping for sanctuary (and a possible future bride (or two)) from his maternal uncle Laban. Jacob has been fighting his brother since they were in their mother's womb; indeed, although Esau was born first, Jacob was born clinging to his brother's ankle. This archetype of feuding twin brothers exists in many legends in many cultures. Rome was founded by one of two feuding twin brothers. Gilgamesh and Enkidu were twins in the Sumerian epic, as were Ahriman and Ahura Mazda in Zoroastrianism. In this case, Jacob has extorted Esau's birthright and has stolen his blessing from their father through fraud, and his mother warns him that Esau will kill him unless Jacob flees the country, so he flees.

After the end of last week's Torah portion, the reader must be wondering how ethical and how spiritual this scoundrel could possibly be. It doesn't take long before the sun sets and Jacob is forced to find a place to sleep. Fetching a stone for a pillow, he lays down in a familiar place (The King James Version calls it "a certain place" [Genesis 28: 11], but from the Hebrew, it seems the place is familiar to Jacob). Although his life to come, for decades, will be in a foreign land surrounded by people he cannot trust, for his first night away from home, he can sleep in a familiar place, even if in the wilderness.

In his sleep, he has a vision in his dreams. In the Jewish tradition, very few prophets behold God while awake. Most behold God or have visions in their dreams. The rabbis of the Talmud therefore regard Divine visions in dreams as being less definitive than Divine visions had while awake. Nonetheless, Jacob's vision has entered our collective psyche, and has had great influence on Kabbalah, as well as Freemasonry.

In the vision in the dream, a ladder is standing on the ground, and the top of the ladder reaches up to heaven. As he watches, God's angels (malachey Elohim) are ascending and descending the ladder. Suddenly he notices that God (YHVH) is standing over him. God introduces Himself as the God of his father and grandfather, and tells him that He will give Jacob's descendants the land he is lying upon, and they will be as numerous as the dust of the earth. They will spread forth in the four cardinal directions, and all the tribes of the earth (kol-mishpechot ha'adamah) will be blessed through Jacob and his descendants. God tells Jacob that he is under His protection through his journeys and until he returns to his homeland.

This image of a ladder to heaven cannot fail to catch hold in the psyche, and many traditions have been fascinated with this metaphor. In the Kabbalah, there is a diagram of the Tree of Life, with ten steps going from the material world (in Malkut, or the Kingdom) to the highest reality distinguished from non-reality (Keter, or the Crown). I have blogged about this diagram many time previously. There is a tradition that suggests that ascent up or descent down the Tree is the same as the angels ascending and descending the ladder, showing us how to do it.

Interesting then that Freemasonry has two differing traditions about Jacob's ladder, one of which has three rungs and one of which has seven rungs (7 + 3 = 10).

In the York Rite Entered Apprentice degree, the candidate is told that Heaven is accessible by Jacob's ladder, and that it has three rungs, called Faith, Hope and Charity, the three Theological Virtues from 1 Corinthians 13. Much of the description of these virtues is taken from Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians. I regard this chapter as having some of the most beautiful language of the New Testament. It is important to note that Charity refers to caritas, rather than the modern conception of charity. The parallel Hebrew concept is chesed (חסד). The parallel Greek concept is agápē (ἀγάπη). It can be translated as lovingkindness. The Kabbalists regard chesed as the highest intellectual consciousness, acting without any cause except love.

In Preston's original lectures, and also in the Emulation ritual, the ladder rests on the Volume of Sacred Law sitting on the altar, rather than on the ground. Thus the Mason has access to the ladder only through the study of scripture, or through attendance in a tyled lodge with the Volume of Sacred Law open.

In the 30th degree (Knight Kadosh) of the Scottish Rite, in Albert Pike's version of the degree, the candidate is shown a ladder with seven rungs, one for each of the three Theological Virtues, and one for each of the four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude. He gives them Hebrew names:

1. צדקה, (tsedakah) a word that means charity (in the modern sense), but also truth, justice and righteousness.
2. שוה לבנה, (shavah lavanah) literally, "merit the white", which Pike translates as "Pure or perfect Equity".
3. מתוק, (matok) pleasantness or amiability.
4. אמונה, (emunah) faith, or as Pike translates, "Good Faith".
5. עמל שגיא, (amal saggi) a lofty effort, or as Pike translates, "Much Labour or Exertion".
6. סבל, (sabbal) a word meaning a bearer of burdens, or as Pike translates, "Patience or Endurance".
7. Three words: גמול, and בינה, and תבונה. (gemul, binah, tevunah) The first is deed or action, which Pike translates as "Elaboration". The second is wisdom or insight, which Pike translates as "Prudence". The third is understanding, which Pike translates as "Discrimination" [Thanks to my friend Shawn Eyer for these translations from Tom Worrell's excellent article in Ahiman, Vol. 1: A Spiritual Vision of the Liberal Arts and Sciences].

Pike also associates these seven rungs with the Seven Liberal Arts, in descending order.

1. Astronomy
2. Music
3. Geometry
4. Arithmetic
5. Logic
6. Rhetoric
7. Grammar.

Since the three Theological Virtues are in both the three-rung and the seven-rung versions, I don't think the Masonic rungs added together correlate with the Tree of Life in any simple manner.

When Jacob wakes from his dream, he exclaims, "Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not." This to me is the most meaningful line in the whole Torah portion. God is everywhere. We say that so glibly but we rarely sense the full extent of this. Jacob is suddenly aware of the full extent of this. Genesis 28: 17 tells us that Jacob was afraid, but the Hebrew uses the word יירה, (yirah) which means both fear and awe. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi describes this word not as the fear one feels when his life is threatened, but rather the fear that comes when you think you are alone, and you suddenly realize that someone else is in the room with you. This is the fear in Psalm 110: 10 (Psalms 111 in the Christian reckoning): "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." In the Hebrew, it is Yirah YHVH. Rather than being afraid that God is going to harm you, it is the sudden awareness that the Ineffable One is in your presence, and you in His. This is what Jacob feels when he wakes from his dream. He says, "How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." [Genesis 28: 17].

The gate of heaven (sha'ar hashamayim) appears a lot in Kabbalistic literature. There are great books called "Sha'arei Or" (the gates of light), and "Shaarei Tzedek" (the gates of righteousness), and "Sha'arei Emunah" (the gates of faith). Indeed, by the word "gate", the Kabbalist refers to a sudden transition to another state of consciousness or an alternate reality. This concept of gates reminds me of the famous quote of William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience:

One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite discarded. How to regard them is the question—for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes, though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region, though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.

Here is a gospel choir singing Psalm 118: 19: Pitchu li sha'arei tsedek, avo vom odeh Yah. Open to me the gates of righteousness: I will go into them, and I will praise the Lord.

The Error of Antitheism

Originally posted on October 19th, 2009

September 30th was Blasphemy Day, a day chosen by a small subset of the atheist community to challenge the notion of sacredness. To quote one of the organizers, “There must be nothing sacred in a logical world, because for something to be sacred it would have to be left a mystery, and if you don’t want to know, you are not logical.”

The day was chosen to coincide with the anniversary of the Danish cartoons in 2005 that were seen by some as mocking the Islamic religion, and were received with rioting and great anger by many Muslims. People died in these riots. The level of anger astonished many here in the West. Since then, the UN has had discussions about making blasphemy an international crime. As an American, the idea that freedom of speech might be curtailed around the world is chilling. International blasphemy laws also infringe on religious liberties. After all, the Catholic Church regarded the King James Bible as blasphemous when it first came out, and the Church of England regarded the Douay Bible as blasphemous. And plenty of Christians today regard Today’s New International Version as blasphemous. Should these translations, used in religious services throughout the English-speaking world, be outlawed?

The organizers of Blasphemy Day do not merely want to preserve the right to form one’s own opinion on spiritual matters, however. They assert that blasphemy is a moral imperative: “Blaspheming the sacred is an obligation that every logical person must embrace.”

The author of the above quotes does not distinguish between critical analysis and blasphemy, and I find that really disturbing. There is a critical facility missing in the author’s argument that betrays the great error indicative of all hostile antitheism.

Underlying the assumptions of the vast majority of those who are hostile to spirituality is that no higher consciousness exists than everyday waking consciousness; the voice one hears in one’s head pretty much constantly when one is not asleep. In the Kabbalah, this notion is called Malkuth (מלכות), or the Kingdom, and forms the base of the Tree of Life. This is the ordinary state of consciousness we find ourselves in most of the time. The agnostic wonders if this is all there is. The atheist asserts that this is all there is, and the antitheist denies anyone else any other form of consciousness.

How do these three attitudes play out? The agnostic is open to higher forms of consciousness, but in not engaged in any practice to bring them about. The atheist is content never to elevate consciousness beyond the ordinary. The antitheist, however, wants to control the consciousnesses of others, preventing them from experiencing any consciousness other than the ordinary. That is why an enlightened society can leave atheists and agnostics in peace, but cannot allow antitheists to succeed in their objective of eliminating higher consciousness from human existence.

Freemasonry is founded on two principles that are important to this discussion: a belief in a Supreme Being, and tolerance for the religious beliefs of others. While neither are necessary prerequisites for enlightenment, both together ensure that one’s own consciousness can elevate to a higher level, and that other people can do the same in their own way, under their own free will, subject to their own consciences.

Not every mason will agree with me, but I believe that one can assume higher levels of consciousness without recognizing the existence of the Great Architect of the Universe. Not all Buddhists are theists, and yet achieve very high meditative states. There is nothing in meditation as a spiritual practice that demands belief in a Supreme Being. In mathematics, the concept of quantity begins with three numbers: 0, 1 and ∞. None, one, and all. Nothing coalesces into something, the void materializes and thus becomes distinct or material. The one creates, or replicates, and then there are two, three, four, many, uncountably many, all.

In the cosmology of the Kabbalah, there is Ain (אין), or Nothing, which becomes Ain Sof (אין סוף), or No End, No Limit, and then becomes Ain Sof Or (אין סוף אור), or the Limitless Light. The Limitless Light coalesces into Adam Kadmon, the Manifest Absolute, which forms the Tree of Life, enters the Universe in Kether, and cascades down that structure until eventually creating our everyday world in Malkuth. Nothing becomes the One, which becomes the Myriad, which becomes All. Thus one in meditation can devote one’s attention on Nothing, on the One, or on All.

One of my rabbis remarked that “God is the ultimate atheist.” What he meant is that at the level of God, there is nothing higher. On our side of consciousness, we need to merge All into One before finding Nothing, but at the level of the One, there is no other. God only has non-existence when nothing else exists either. How do we merge All into One? By elevating our consciousness one step at a time.

What elevates consciousness? Prayer, meditation, fasting, trauma, ritual, a high fever, hyperventilation, entheogenic drugs, and dancing can do this, but are not guaranteed to. One person in a higher state of consciousness can bring others with him. A ritual can provide a structure for elevation, and if the principals of the ritual elevate themselves, they can bring the others with them. That is why most religions have group prayer. In the Jewish religion, when a Minyan, or ten men pray together (for egalitarians, ten people), they can generate more spiritual energy than one man can. The liturgy has certain prayers that can only be said when a Minyan is present. Similarly, one man cannot open a masonic lodge.

In C. S. Lewis’ book, The Great Divorce, Hell is described as a big city. A fairly bleary, dull place, everyone is unhappy, ranging from ennui to torment. None of them realize that they are in Hell. A bus route goes through the main street of the city, and buses regularly arrive and depart, taking passengers to Heaven. Anyone can get on the bus at any time, but most choose not to. Some wait for a bus, but at the last minute refuse to board, and others board very hesitantly.

Once on the bus, the passengers get more anxious and alarmed until the bus arrives at the outskirts of Heaven. Nearing Heaven, the passengers realize they are ghosts, and that Heaven is actually substantial. A single blade of grass can cause them great pain, and a single leaf is too heavy to lift. Blessed spirits from Heaven come forth to greet the ghosts, and encourage them to face the pain and ascend, but most of the ghosts refuse.

In the book, a blessed friend of the protagonist comes down to persuade him to remain. He explains that the period of time spent in the gray city was temporary, but only if he chooses to remain in Heaven. From the perspective of Heaven, Hell is miniscule and insignificant, insubstantial and irrelevant, but from the perspective of Hell, Heaven is awful and terrifying, far less comfortable than the soothing banality of Hell.

Using C. S. Lewis’ analogy, there is a bus that runs through Malkuth and takes us to higher realms, but we have to get on the bus. From the perspective of Malkuth, our earthly kingdom, other realms seem insane, irrelevant, irrational, dangerous, foolish, deluded, and wrong. But from a higher perspective, Malkuth itself fades in significance.

Using C. S. Lewis’ analogy, an agnostic either does not know about the bus, or knows about the bus and has formed no opinion about it. An atheist dismisses the bus as irrelevant to his life. An antitheist wants to destroy the bus, the road it drives on, and any traces of its existence.

As Fellows of the Craft, we are deeply devoted to science and reason. “Follow Reason” is the motto of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts. Reason and Doubt are allies, good allies, and we should approach the objects of our inquiry with healthy skepticism. But Denial is not Doubt, and Denial is the enemy of Reason. Those who assert that religious faith and scientific reason are mutually exclusive follow neither when they do so. We can find this assertion among the godly and the godless, but either way, the assertion is toxic.

Religion, Science and Philosophy are distinct mental disciplines, governed by faith, observation, and reason respectively, asking who, what, and why respectively. I pursue my religion by meditation and prayer, study of sacred texts, and communion with others in my faith. I pursue science by formulating hypotheses, conducting experiments, observing their outcomes, and refining my hypotheses in light of observed outcomes; conferring with others observing the same phenomena, amassing data until a cogent theory can be formulated that predicts the phenomena I observe. I pursue philosophy by asking really hard questions and using logic and reason to derive answers to these questions in a conscious manner. I need all three in my life. My mother is not a scientist. That doesn’t make her a bad person, but science has no appeal to her. My father is not religious. That doesn’t make him a bad person, but religion has no appeal to him. Not everyone is a philosopher, and that doesn’t make them bad people.

But denying another their religion, their science, or their philosophy is dangerous. If my religion demand that I murder children, as the ancient followers of Moloch did, we might have a problem. If my science involves performing vivisection on human beings, as Dr. Josef Mengele’s did, we might have a problem. If my philosophy tells me that other people are worthless animals, as the KKK does, we might have a problem. That is why Freemasonry demands tolerance and compassion of its brothers. We neither deny others their beliefs, nor allow others to deny others. Good religion abhors human sacrifice of its practitioners. Good science seeks to eliminate human suffering. Good philosophy advances the well-being of not only its adherents, but also those affected by the behavior of its adherents.

The Italian philosopher Noberto Bobbio warned us that politics obsesses about who when it should worry about how. Communists want to seize the means of production from the owning classes and deliver them to the working classes for their governance. Communists care about who is in power, but because they don’t worry about how they rule, they invite their adherents to commit atrocities. Nationalist movements are similar. What spared American Patriots from this kind of totalitarianism was a keen interest in how the British ruled America, and a firm resolution that how they would rule when they seized power would be just: under the rule of law, subject to the Bill of Rights.

Antitheists believe that faith is inherently evil, and must be eradicated from human consciousness. The only antitheists who were able to act upon this belief have been Communists, and they have an unbroken record of atrocity in pursuit of eliminating faith. The current crop of antitheists disavow Communism, but do not address how their eradication of faith will be any different from the Communist attempt. None that I have engaged with will address how they will achieve their goals.

Most religions have spread through mass violence. A nation invades another nation, and forces its faith on the conquered. In more enlightened times, religions have used reason and persuasion to spread their faith, some with substantial success. Similarly, the largest atheistic mass movements have been spread through mass violence. The People’s Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have spread atheism more powerfully than Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris and the like have done. That being said, the four authors I have mentioned have used reason and persuasion to spread their lack of faith, and have done so in an entirely peaceful way, and they are to be commended for not using violence to achieve their aims.

But the question remains: how will antitheists eliminate religion, faith, altered states of consciousness? How ethical will they be in the pursuit of their goal? Considering that reason is their rallying cry, it’s not unreasonable for us to ask. Contending that religious fanatics use violence to advance their ends does not absolve the antitheist. I oppose any, religious or atheist, who would seek to keep me from my own connection with the One. Where does Blasphemy Day lead? Are celebrants of Blasphemy Day going to mix pig’s milk into the creamers at Starbucks? Burn a Torah Scroll in my synagogue? Are they going to firebomb a church? Shave a Sikh’s head? What are the boundaries? If antitheists eliminate one tenet of human decency, how safe are the others?

Added on October 19, 2009

It has been pointed out to me that agnostics can be on a spiritual path. I agree.

Added on October 20, 2009

I think it’s crucially important to distinguish between the tolerant atheist and the intolerant antitheist. I can live peaceably with tolerant atheists.

Added on October 22, 2009

I think Fundamentalism or religious exclusivism in general contributes to this. Adherents of a particular sect are warned that if they reject even a single tenet of their sect’s practice that they are rejecting God by doing so. It’s no wonder that once a person questions some of the glaring flaws in such a sect’s theology, he is prone to reject religion in general as a result. It’s a naïve error, but no less naïve than the exclusivism that spawned it.

Agnostic literally means “without gnosis, or a direct experience of the Divine.” Positing my own dogma here, the only reason to believe in God, as far as I’m concerned, is either because of an experience of the Divine, or strong signs that such an experience is imminent. Every religion in its original inception guided the adherent, through prayer, ritual, meditation and other devotions, to such an experience. Only later did a hierarchy of rules and restrictions come up to interfere with such an experience. The atheist sees the interference but despairs of having a true religious experience, and ultimately regards religious experience as a hoax or delusion.

In my outreach to atheists, I really don’t care if they believe in God. I care that they are open to higher realms of consciousness, to a consciousness more encompassing than their ordinary waking state. If I can get a person to understand that the rambling interior monologue that is their constant companion is not the full extent of self, and if I can get them to seek what else other forms of consciousness have to offer, I have done enough. To most atheists, the obsequiousness of most religions is deeply repugnant and offensive to them. I prostrate myself before the One because while the One includes me, it is greater than me, beyond my tiny jurisdiction, encompassing all. To an atheist, that’s no different than groveling before an idol. We both despise idolatry, but to the atheist, there is nothing beyond idolatry. There is nothing beyond Malkuth.

If there are higher forms of consciousness, the logical question that follows is how high does consciousness go? What is the apex? But without an experience beyond ordinary consciousness, there’s no point in such a line of inquiry.

God and reason

I was going to write this when I first created this blog, but the story is much older.

I was raised without religion. I was made aware that I was Jewish, but I've lived most of my life outside of the Jewish community. My mother's side of the family has been secular for at least five generations. My mother's mother has a letter that her grandfather wrote to his father. In the letter, he describes meeting a Hasidic Jew on a train, sitting next to him, and asking him about his religious beliefs. It is clear in the letter that my great-great grandfather had no religious education of his own. My mother's side of the family were wealthy German Jews, who moved to the USA some time in the mid-19th century, not as refugees but from a position of strength. They did very well over here. The author of the letter was invited to President Garfield's inauguration, and my grandmother still has his invitation in a scrapbook. They had rather a poor estimation of their less wealthy, more pious coreligionists from Eastern Europe. In this, they shared the prejudices of the mainstream.

My grandmother married a Polish Jew who became very religious later in life. My grandmother had no objection to this, but did not share in his piety, nor did her children. My mother married a Galitzianer from a working-class family, and her snootier relations were mortified.

My father's father's father was rousted from his bed, in his shetl in the Ukraine in the middle of the night, as Cossacks were burning the village to the ground, murdering men and raping women. He and his pregnant wife ran for their lives and made it to a safe haven many miles away. He had stored some emergency money there, and they used the money to buy passage to Boston. My grandfather was born in Lynn, Massachusetts a few months later. He worked in a dress-making factory, then he was a foreman at the factory, then he ran the factory. My father's mother's father also ran a dress-making company, Siren Dresses. His eldest daughter was born in Moscow, and the rest of the brood were born in Lynn and Swampscott. My grandparents were born in the midst of the Great Depression. It took them several years after their marriage to afford wedding rings.

For my father's side of the family, being Jewish was a means of mutual protection rather than a spiritual thing. They could find protection, solace, company, and assistance from other Jews. The first two generations here in the USA spoke Yiddish, and could travel throughout the Jewish world this way. My great-grandfather still kept his business contacts in Russia, and my grandfather had business in New York, and later in Brazil, all through speaking Yiddish. I doubt my mother's side of the family spoke Yiddish after the Haskalah. My grandparents observed Passover, but it was more of a dinner with a story than a religious event for them. My grandparents would take me to their synagogue for the yahrzeits of relatives, but that was the only time they ever went. I doubt my grandfather owned a tallit, let alone tefillin.

So it's somewhat odd for me to be a religious Jew, who prays twice a day and goes to synagogue every Friday night and Saturday morning. My father's mother's brother Morris was devoutly religious, as was my mother's father, but I can't think of any others in my family.

My father is a strongly rational agnostic, and my brother and I were raised that way. I thought my father was an atheist, but he objected to being called an atheist when I called him that, saying that he respected the religious beliefs of others (including his devout Catholic third wife, and their children), and that he wasn't willing to assert the non-existence of God. He has been very supportive of my religious life, which frankly came as a surprise to me. His second wife was a hostile antitheist ex-Catholic who aggressively mocked any show of piety anywhere near her, and my father never voiced any objection to her behavior in that regard, so I assumed he shared her attitude.

I always had a clear sense of my Jewish identity, as most secular Jews in the USA do, but we never lived in a predominantly Jewish community, never belonged to a synagogue, and never observed any Jewish holidays except the occasional Passover Seder with the grandparents. When I was about ten years old, my father gave me the choice of Hebrew school, or Pee-Wee hockey, and I chose the hockey. I went to two or three Bar Mitzvahs as a boy, but never wanted one myself.

I grew up regarding myself as a spiritual agnostic. I dabbled with Unitarian Universalism, mostly because most of my teenage sexual experiences happened at YRUU retreats. I also tried Quakerism, for which I will always have a deep respect. I was active in Young Friends, and gained a lot from going to Quaker meetings, but I was kicked out of Young Friends for a reason I will blog about later.

I bought my first Tarot deck when I was twelve, a Rider-Waite deck. As I got older, I became interested in Ritual Magick, first through Wicca, and then through the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and the work of Aleister Crowley. I deeply distrusted the OTO, and never joined them (no offense to OTO brethren out there, but your priority disputes and court cases are not very good advertising), but I knew people in the OTO and A.˙.A.˙. and learned a lot from them, but never felt comfortable entering their hierarchy. I also fundamentally distrust the cosmology Crowley published, and the law of Thelema does not speak to my condition. The best thing I gained from all this was a deep and abiding love for Hermetic Qabalah.

I first began to consider the actuality of God in graduate school. I was working on the Comprehensive Exams for my MS in mathematics. These exams are hard. It is difficult to describe how hard they are to someone who has never experienced something like them, but I will try. There were four subjects: Real Analysis, Complex Analysis, Algebra, and Topology. Each subject exam was two hours long, and had four problems on it. You submitted your best three answers, and had to get two of them right to pass the exam. That meant you scanned the test for the "zinger", the problem that was deliberately too hard, and skipped it, and then you had 40 minutes to solve each remaining problem. Each problem took about a week to solve. That meant that if you didn't already see the problem and solve it while you were studying for the exam, you probably would not be able to solve it at the exam. You had to remember the solution to every problem you solved while studying the prior exams going back about 10-15 years, and regurgitate the answer on the day of the test. At your first try, you could take as many exams as you wanted, but you had to pass at least two exams in order for your passes to count. You had to pass all four exams to graduate.

I was studying for the algebra exam, and I was working on an old test problem from a previous exam. I worked on the problem from 9:30 PM to 1:30 AM, and I got too tired to continue, so I reluctantly went to bed. That night, in bed, I dreamed the solution to the exam problem. I felt a rush of euphoria, which made me snuggle into the bed and ride out the feeling of bliss. I was rudely interrupted by a voice that told me, "Schmuck! That's the real answer! Wake up and write it down!"

I did, and went back to sleep. In the morning, I looked at what I had written. It was elegant, succinct, direct and powerful. With a minimal about of exposition, it attacked and immediately solved the problem. I was amazed. And that problem showed up on the exam I took.

My advisor had a theory that the mind we walk around with most of the time is not particularly smart. It can follow orders, and at can memorize and shuffle facts it knows, but it is not equipped for bursts of genius. If we find an interesting problem, we can attack the problem with the mind we walk around with most of the time, but if the problem is sufficiently interesting, our waking mind cannot solve it by itself. It works and works and works on it, and with one's will, one can drive the waking mind to continue its pursuit of a solution. If the waking mind sufficiently exerts itself, a deeper mind will notice that the waking mind is working on something. That deeper mind, its interest piqued, will decide to involve itself in the problem. There is a blinding flash of inspiration, and the deeper mind generates a solution. Then it is up to the waking mind to shape that solution into something workable, conveyable, capable of being printed and shared with others.

The job of the waking mind is to be disciplined enough, to work hard enough on a problem that the deeper mind pays attention to its exertions. The waking mind has to have all of its tools in perfect working order. It has to know all working definitions down cold, and make clear cognitive leaps that obey the laws of logic and reason. But for any truly interesting problem, the waking mind is not equipped to find a solution. The world of knowledge is full of really hard problems, problems the solver has to live with for days, weeks, and even years. The waking mind can work on the same problem day after day if properly disciplined, and it can tackle the easy sub-problems associated with the problem at hand, and it can clear away everything that is not the kernel of the problem, but it cannot get at the heart of the problem. It's just not smart enough. Nobody is smart enough.

The waking mind has to realize when to step away, and leave room for the deeper mind to work its magick. Afterwards the waking mind has to leap into action, molding and shaping the solution into something that truly fits the problem, and has to justify that the solution delivered by the deeper mind actually solves the problem.

There are many smart people in the world, but nobody is smart enough to solve the most difficult problems with their everyday consciousness. The most successful problem solvers know how to do the ground work for the deeper mind, and then know how to shape the work of the deeper mind into something that covers every aspect of the solution. The deeper mind is totally disassociated with ego. This is somewhat akin to what Ouspensky calls the "False Intellectual Center" and the "True Intellectual Center". Ouspensky also talks about the "False Emotional Center" and the "True Emotional Center".

Using the language of Kabbalah, I would say that, starting in Malkut, one ascends to Yesod. From Yesod, an intellectual problem is tackled in Hod, by the False Intellectual Center. The False Intellectual Center struggles with the problem (G'vurah), and attracts the attention of Chokmah, the True Intellectual Center, channeled through Da'at and Tiferet. Similarly, from Yesod, an emotional problem is tackled by Netzach, by the False Emotional Center. The False Emotional Center tries to relieve the emotional distress (Chesed), and this attracts the attention of Binah, the True Emotional Center, channeled through Da'at and Tiferet. If someone has a better explanation of these processes, I would love to improve this theory. A good argument could be made that Binah and Chokmah should be switched here, but I'm sticking by my original assessment.

The point is not that the voice that visited me in the dream is God, nor that the deeper mind is God, but that all higher consciousness flows from God. Once you encounter an consciousness greater than your own, that dwells not where you dwell, but is accessible in certain circumstances, after much preparation and exertion, it is not hard to allow for other such consciousnesses, cascading upwards until a single, supernal Consciousness is reached, from which all lesser consciousness flow. A river of light that immerses you when you make yourself available for such an immersion.

Without reason, this experience is drastically limited. Without the ability to feel deep emotion, this experience is drastically limited. And yet the prime mover of these experiences is beyond emotion or reason. Reason is very high, very nearly the highest form of consciousness. But not the apex. That is why a belief system that puts the False Intellectual Center (or the False Emotional Center) at the apex is patently absurd to me. We are small fishes, and there are big fishes out there that want to share their wisdom with us, and all fishes are just fragments of God, who is the entire world of oceans and everything in them, and beyond ocean, and who wants us to glow with the light He has to share with us, but wants us to find that light through our own exertions.

Tom Robbins gave the advice that, in seeking a spiritual tradition, the first place one should look is in one's people's tradition before looking at other traditions. We carry ancient racial memories that are much easier to awaken than the memories universal to all beings. A Jew should learn Kabbalah, a Celt should learn Celtic paganism, a Greek should study the Greek mystery traditions, a Hindu should study the Vedic tradition, etc. (This is deeply unsatisfying to people with universal faiths like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Baha'i, etc. Having never been raised in such a tradition, I can only sympathize from afar. From an intellectual standpoint, I agree that universal faiths are an improvement on tribal, parochial faiths, but I will blog about this debate elsewhere).

When I pledged my lodge, I listed my place of worship as First Parish Unitarian-Universalist Church in Cambridge. My former roommate is a member there, and I had visited many times with him, and liked that community. There is a sizable Jewish presence there (or Junitarian) as well. But upon reflecting about that choice, I realized that I was being disingenuous. A voice in my head asked me: "Why did you say you were a Unitarian? Schmuck, you're Jewish." (My inner voice calls me schmuck a lot). The next Friday night, I walked into Havurat Shalom for Kabbalat Shabbat services. I visited a number of synagogues over the next month or two, and chose Temple Beth Zion as my congregation, and have been a member ever since.

Kabbalah: Permuting the Letters

Like being a good Freemason, being a good Jew requires education. I don't mind if non-Jews study Kabbalah (to be honest, I'm delighted). But if you want to learn, learn the real spiritual technology. Please don't mimic superstition and assign to your mimicry a profundity it does not possess. Masons go through the degree work, and then spend a lifetime figuring out what it means. If we did not, the degree work would just be mimicry. Jewish children cram for their b'nei mitzvah and then spend adulthood figuring out what it all means. If they did not, their Torah portion would just be mimicry.

Kabbalah is part (but not all) of "what it all means". Kabbalah is imbued throughout with meaning. There is a sense in most Kabbalah work that the Grand Architect of the Universe is trying to communicate with the practitioner, and most of the details of Kabbalah practice are how to clean up the input stream, because everyday consciousness is too crude to perceive the holy message from above.

Putting your head in a blue wooden box with gold letters painted on it is a good idea if it brings you closer to the GAOTU, and a stupid idea otherwise. If you do it without any real focus, feeling or understanding, it's probably a stupid idea. Please note that I'm not aware that anyone actually puts their head in blue boxes with gold letters painted on them. The purpose of spiritual practice is connection with Deity, and without that connection, it is either rehearsal for a future connection, or it is nonsense.

I thought I would share some real Kabbalah with my readers. Nothing too fancy, just something simple to start out with. Rabbi Abraham Abulafia had a method called tzaraf, in which the letters of a word are permuted, making new words. The Hebrew alphabet is actually an abjad rather than a true alphabet. The consonants are written down, and before the Masoretes of the 7-11th centuries, there were no vowels. In English, "tar" and "rat" are palindromes of each other. In Hebrew, there are two letters for "t", so they might not be. Also, assuming they are spelled with the right "t", "shirt" and "trash" could be palindromes, even though the vowels are different. Palindromes, anagrams, and letter transpositions fascinated the early Kabbalists.

Studying the weekly Torah portion a few weeks ago with a group of students, we noticed a fairly obvious example, but one I'm still meditating upon.

The passage I'm going to use is the verse Leviticus 16:2. In the story from Scripture, Moses and Aaron are at the debut of the Tabernacle. Moses ordains Aaron and his sons as priests before the entire congregation, all 600,000+ Israelite men, and even more women and children. The first sacrifices are offered, and the Glory of the LORD (K'vod YHVH) comes down and consumes the burnt offering on the altar. Two of Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu, rush forward with fire pans full of "alien fire" and enter the Holy of Holies, and are instantly struck dead. The other sons drag their corpses away, and the ceremonies continue, sons unmourned. There is a long deviation from the plot of the story as Moses explains the dietary laws, postnatal cleanliness, the rules of leprosy, excema and psoriasis, and how to handle mold infestations in clothing or in a house, before the LORD explains to Moses the proper way to enter the Holy of Holies.

I'm sure that all the Master Masons reading this have pricked up their ears at the mention of how to enter the Holy of Holies. The LORD says to Moses:

וַיֹּאמֶר יְהוָה אֶל-מֹשֶׁה, דַּבֵּר אֶל-אַהֲרֹן אָחִיךָ, וְאַל-יָבֹא בְכָל-עֵת אֶל-הַקֹּדֶשׁ, מִבֵּית לַפָּרֹכֶת--אֶל-פְּנֵי הַכַּפֹּרֶת אֲשֶׁר עַל-הָאָרֹן, וְלֹא יָמוּת, כִּי בֶּעָנָן, אֵרָאֶה עַל-הַכַּפֹּרֶת.

To translate: "The LORD said to Moses: 'Tell your brother Aaron that he is not to come at will into the holy place behind the curtain, in front of the cover that is upon the Ark of the Covenant, or he will die; for I appear in the cloud over the cover.'" My grasp of Hebrew is weak, so please correct me when I'm mistaken.

Some words to point out: Aaron is אַהֲרֹן or Aharon, and the Ark of the Covenant is הָאָרֹן or ha-Aron. The first two letters are transposed in an odd (1 2) cycle. While the vowels are different, in this case, in Modern Hebrew pronunciation, they sound the same. Aaron is the High Priest, and his ritual takes him before the Ark of the Covenant. A man becomes a holy vessel, a container for the Ten Commandments.

Also, and even more interesting, the curtain is פָּרֹכֶת or parokhet, and the cover of the Ark of the Covenant is כַּפֹּרֶת or kaporet. The ת is fixed in this case, and the other letters are cycled rotationally in an even (1 3 2) cycle. ת is the final letter of the Aleph-Bet, the path from Malkut to Yesod on the Tree of Life, the "The World" card in the Tarot deck. It makes sense for this to be the final letter, and makes sense for it to be fixed, grounded on Earth in our waking reality.

In Kabbalah, the word parokhet is used to mean the veil between worlds, or between states of consciousness. Between waking consciousness, the world of Assiah, and the dream-state of Yetsirah, there is a veil, or parokhet. Between Yetsirah and the world of ideas, Briah, there is another parokhet. Between Briah and the world of archetypes, or Atsilut, there is a veil. The cover of the Ark is described as having two winged Cherubim sitting on top of it. In the Torah, Moses is able to listen to the Voice of the LORD coming from between the two cherubim atop the kaporet. That makes the kaporet a very holy place, the focus of an enormous amount of spiritual energy.

The LORD is telling Moses to tell Aaron (Aharon) when he is allowed to draw back the parokhet and enter the sacred space where the Ark of the Covenant (ha-Aron) rests, the holiest space inside the Holy of Holies. The cover (kaporet) of the Ark is covered by a cloud, and the LORD appears in the cloud. Aharon visits ha-Aron, drawing back the parokhet to reveal the kaporet. The energy released by this is so powerful that Aaron may not do this at will---this is why his sons were struck dead, because they did this heedlessly. It's clear that Nadab and Abihu were killed not as punishment for sin, but because of an accident of spiritual technology, like touching a live wire. There's no moral judgement (necessarily) in getting electrocuted; it just happens.

The scripture passage goes on to describe the ritual for Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Hebrew calendar, and explains that only on Yom Kippur, dressed in the proper clothing, with the proper sacrificial animals may he enter the Holy of Holies, and only to atone for all of his sins, the sins of his family, and for the sins of the whole Israelite community.

Thus we can only pull back the veil and face the Holy of Holies when we do this not for ourselves, but for a higher purpose. This holy space is not ours in our mundane state of consciousness-- it would destroy us in our regular state. We have to purify ourselves and our motives, atone for our sins, and act for all humanity (v'al kol Yisrael often is taken figuratively to mean all of humanity in scripture). That is why not even a Fellowcraft may enter a lodge of Master Masons unless he is taking his third degree. We have to be someone duly and truly prepared, worthy and well-qualified, to enter the Holy of Holies, and must enter at the right time.

Notice that a simple transposition turns Aaron into the Ark of the Covenant, but a three-cycle is needed to turn the veil into the cover of the Ark of the Covenant. A simple transposition turns a man into a vessel for sacredness, but it takes a 3-cycle to turn the veil into the place from which one can hear God's voice. A 3-cycle can be decomposed into two transpositions, like switching the middle two letters, and then switching the first two letters afterwards. We can decompose the transformation from veil to cover into two steps by first sliding back the veil, and then putting your ears between the cherubs on the cover of the Ark. Thus it is takes a single transformation to convert oneself into a holy vessel but two transformations to hear the Voice of God.

Jewish Mysticism in Judaism

As a religious Jew, the study of Kabbalah is part of my religious devotion. I use Qabalah to describe Hermetic Qabalah and Kabbalah to describe Jewish Kabbalah, just to simplify and clarify what I'm talking about. While the tools are similar, there are significant stylistic differences. If you tell a religious Jew that you are studying Kabbalah, he or she may caution you about your priorities: learn Torah, then learn Talmud, and only after you are comfortable with these can you learn Kabbalah. There is an ancient warning that Kabbalah is to be studied only by married males over 35 who have made significant study of other religious writings first, but there is a contemporary qualification to this. The Holocaust wiped out the majority of Kabbalistic practitioners then living. Whole schools of Kabbalah were eliminated. We have such a severe knowledge vacuum that the old restrictions have been relaxed. This is a good thing, because in our time there are many Jews that leave their faith for Buddhism, Hinduism, Wicca, Unitarianism, and other spiritual paths because they don't find what they are looking for in their own faith. While I am sympathetic with these faiths, I think losing Jews to them is a shame, and a failure of contemporary leadership. Judaism has its own tradition of meditation, of dances very much like Sufi or Dervish dances, of something similar to Ceremonial Magick (but without the idolatry), of Solstice observances, observance of the Sun and the Moon, of contemplation of nature and silence. Judaism is astonishingly rich in a variety of spiritual practices, but most of them are on the down low. Why?

Two big reasons come immediately to mind. First, in most of the places where Jews have inhabited over the last two millennia, outsiders have oppressed and murdered them for very little cause. There was an intense antipathy between Greeks and Hebrews in antiquity, which has since been uncritically adopted by the Romans, the Seleucids, Byzantines, Helenized Christians and Muslims, and from there, Christians and Muslims in general. For most of the previous millenium, Christians were worse than Muslims in oppressing Jews, but just when the Christians became more humane (in the Enlightenment era--- and we Freemasons had a significant role in this), Muslims became crueler. While no Muslim regime has been as awful as the Christian Russian Empire (let alone Central and Eastern Europe of the middle of the last century: we rightly condemn the Germans, but Hungarians, Rumanians, Croats, Ukranians, some Poles and Italians, and others were pretty awful as well), since the establishment of the State of Israel, people in many Muslim countries have gone insane with anti-Semitic rage. If they are mad at the State of Israel, so be it, but to murder their own people who are Jews is another issue entirely. Yemen and Iraq, which have had Jews for thousands of years, are expelling their last Jews these days, and Jews are being abducted and murdered throughout the Ummah, from Pakistan to suburban Paris. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion have been bestsellers in Syria, Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, (as well as Russia) and even made into a mini-series in Syria and Egypt. The Protocols condemn Freemasonry as well, so wherever people believe this forgery to be real, not only does hatred towards Jews increase, but hatred towards the Craft increases as well.

The result of this has been that Jews have historically felt less-than-comfortable appearing too strange to the majority inhabitants of the countries they dwell in. Polygamy, while historically part of Judaism, was outlawed by Rashi, a Medieval French rabbi. Public parades on Purim have historically inspired pogroms. While the Koran insists that a Muslim show some respect to believers of the other "Religions of the Book" (namely Christianity and Judaism, the other Abrahamic faiths), there is no such restriction in the Christian Gospels, and Jesus' intelligent critiques of Pharisaic Judaism have in the past been warped to convey a hatred for Judaism that Jesus never intended (himself being Jewish). Jews who chanted all night, or were found in the woods performing Hitbodedut were often exposed to violence as a result.

Deeper than this, Jews became deeply discouraged. They wondered why their Messiah did not come and save them through their awful hardships. Isolated in ghettoes, they became frightened and superstitious. Waves of false Messiahs arrived, seducing the populance with wild mystical techniques, only to be dashed down to ignominity, dragging their followers with them. Mysticism in general began to be associated with false Messianism.

The second reason is an internal censorship that is part of a long dialogue between mystics and clerics in Judaism, and has been the cause of many Jewish movements, like Hasidism, Reform Judaism, Reconstructionist Judaism, and Jewish Renewal today. Mysticism is a powerful force to shake things up. Anyone who reads the Prophetic books of the Old Testament knows that the Prophets were not kindly received by the Kings of Israel and Judea. Reading Ezekiel and Elijah, we see the visions produced by their mystical schools. The earliest Kabbalah schools studied the Prophets intently, trying to learn their techniques, but this was deeply frowned upon by the authority figures of their day. Many of their techniques remind me of Kundalini Yoga.

There were three power structures historically in Judaism, none of which were sympathetic to such mysticism. The king, the Kohanim (or priesthood), and the Rabbis. Kings and prophets disagreed, so for people to adopt techniques that would generate prophecy was not in the interest of the monarchy. The Kohanim had a monopoly on ritual animal sacrifice, ritual holiday observance (which often included animal sacrifices, like the Passover lamb and the Yom Kippur scapegoat), and the control of the Temple, including the Sanctum Sanctorum, or Holy of Holies. Mysticism, in contrast, is egalitarian. The Hebrew Prophets were common-born people, sometimes poor or unlearned, and ran roughshod over tradition, especially when observed sanctimoniously or hypocritically. For those of you who are Christian, the image of Jesus casting the money-changers out of the Temple gives an example of the conflict between mysticism and the Kohanim. The rabbis were not as hostile as the other power groups, but they very clearly wanted whatever mysticism that took place to occur under their leadership and guidance, and would declare a mystic an apostate if the mystical practice looked too different from traditional religious practice.

In the last few centuries, two big movements have had mysticism or anti-mysticism as their focus. The first is Hasidism, and the second is Haskalah, often called "The Jewish Enlightenment". Hasidism was a response to the false Messiahs, Sabbatai Zevi, and Jacob Frank. While these men failed, their followers learned Kabbalah and other mystical techniques from them, and wanted to incorporate these ideas into their religious practice when they returned to traditional Judaism. A school of Kabbalists settled in Ts'fat (in modern-day Israel) and under the tutelage of Rabbi Isaac Luria, they created Kabbalah in its modern form (this is a controversial statement which the reader is free to disagree with).

There was an earnest attempt in Eastern Europe to fuse Lurianic Kabbalah and Orthodox Judaism, and Hasidism was the result. This was bitterly opposed by the rabbinical authorities at the time. The founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezar, the Baal Shem Tov (master of the Good Name), taught Kabbalah even to those unlearned in Talmud, which was very threatening to a Yeshiva structure that placed great importance on Jewish law. The Baal Shem Tov was more egalitarian, less careful with particulars, and demanded that passion be the center of religious devotion. His followers began to tell fantastic tales about him and his students, and this was very worrisome to the Mitnagdim (or opponents of Hasidism). While some Mitnagdim, like the Vilna Gaon, were themselves Kabbalists, they were very strict about who got taught their techniques, whereas the Baal Shem Tov and his students would teach to anyone who would listen. Hasids tended to be more superstitious, poorer, and certainly more oppressed than the Mitnagdim, who worried that Hasidic mysticism would ruin minds, dilute scholarship, and bring the wrath of the surrounding Christians upon all the Jewish people, not just the wild mystical ones. Indeed this division among the Orthodoxy between Hasidim and Mitnagdim only began slightly to abate when both groups became vastly outnumbered by non-Orthodox Jews, and still further when the Holocaust forced both groups to work together.

Haskalah was a response to Jewish integration and desegregation, which happened slowly as a result of the Enlightenment. Jews were being invited to become Freemasons, and from there were gaining civil rights and some freedom in Europe. Some Jewish writers were enjoying success and a readership among the surrounding Christians, and were finally being allowed to attend university, to own property and to socialize outside the ghetto. There was a sense that this opportunity might snap shut hard unless Jews were willing to conform to the societies they were being invited into, and much reflection took place about how deeply to integrate. While the biggest result was Reform Judaism, even the Orthodoxy was shaped by Haskalah. Reform Judaism sought to question the more fundamentalist aspects of the Jewish religion, and to have reason govern faith. The dietary laws were abandoned, prayers were translated into the language of the country of residency, and Yiddish was abandoned. There was a ruthless excising of superstition (or what was believed to be superstition, whether it was or not), and a lot of social conformity. In Germany and the USA, synagogues clamored to mimic the prominent Protestant Churches of the affluent, even putting in pipe organs and pews in the synagages.

Some of the methods of the leaders of the Reform movement were fairly hostile to other Jewish communities, such as holding a banquet for the Jewish community and feeding forbidden foods to everyone. This created a backlash, which formed into Conservative Judaism. The Reform movement, and to a lesser extent, the Conservative movement, was so ruthless about abolishing superstition and what were felt to be the side-effects of ghetto phobias, that they became very anti-mysticism as a result. If it didn't look analoguous to something their wealthy Protestant neighbors were doing, it often was abandoned.

Thus, by the 20th century, a majority of Jews had abandoned mystical and esoterical practices, and saw them as an embarrassing hold-over of more primitive times. But in Europe, this conformity and respectablity did not save them from the gas chambers. They died alongside the Hasids they saw as throw-backs from a more primitive time. When the survivors emerged on safer shores, they brought with them either the tiny fragments of what remained of the mystical tradition, or a new-found respect for those who held these traditions. With the spiritual crisis of the second half of the 20th century, there was curiosity about these traditions, and whether or not they had anything to say to a world thirsting for more authentic spiritual experiences. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a scion of a Hasidic family, and a survivor of the Holocaust, established a Mysticism department at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and Gershom Scholem did the same at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Both men were regarded very critically by their peers, and met with a great deal of resistance, but influenced generations of students, including my rabbis.

By the 1960s, two forces moving in opposite directions collided. In one direction, there were mystics seeking a modern audience. Chabad, a Hasidic movement from the 18th century, began doing a lot of outreach under the leadership of their last rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson. He believed that the Messianic Era was at hand, and that all Jews needed to be educated about their religion, to be brought back into Orthodoxy, and to be introduced to a mystical curriculum to enlighten them, in order to prepare for the coming of the Messiah. His outreach was enormously successful, but also inspired other Jewish groups to pay more attention to Jewish mysticism. Two of his emissary rabbis, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, began by doing college outreach, and ended up leaving Chabad and forming their own groups, more liberal and open than Orthodox Judaism, allowing Jews of the Reform and Conservative traditions to enjoy the mysticism they had learned as Hasids. The philosopher Martin Buber had romanticized Hasidism in order to describe a Jewish mysticism that Buber felt was vital for his time. While not accurate (and not intending to be accurate), his description was very evocative, and inspired many Jews to seek a deeper understanding of Jewish mysticism.

The other force were young Jews unhappy with the stale liturgical regurgitation pushed upon them in their b'nei mitzvot. Some looked to other traditions to find what the could not find at home. Others, thankfully, looked within Judaism for what they were seeking, and found it there in detail vaster than they had dreamed. The process of incorporating the rich history of Jewish mysticism back into regular worship is daunting, but fascinating. We have a nearby rabbinical seminary run by a Jewish mystic, with one of the largest collections of mystical writings outside of Israel. We regularly have rabbinical interns who are very well-educated in Jewish mystical traditions, and we encourage them to share with us what they have learned, and to show us parallels in other faiths.

At my synagogue, we have had rabbis who were Zen masters visit and show how Zen is similar to Jewish meditation. We have other Jewish Buddhists show how to be syncretist without violating either religion. We have had Sufis come, and show how much of Sufi tradition is actually Jewish originally. At a given Friday night service, or Saturday morning Torah Study, there will be Jews, but also a few Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Unitarians, syncretists of various stripes, all doing a specifically Jewish ritual that speaks to their conditions. The D'var Torah may do a textual analysis of the weekly parashah, a kabbalistic midrash, a funny personal observation, or a mix of all of them. While the liturgy is in Hebrew, and the traditional psalms are sung, we all enter with different levels of learning and different levels of observance, but all are welcome. We are actively involved in interfaith dialogue, and have active conversations with Christians and Muslims about our similarities and differences, treating each other as cousins rather than strangers. My synagogue is explicitly LGBTQ friendly, and when passages come up in the Torah that address them in a negative light, there is always a lively, humane, respectful discussion.

There is not much explicit instruction in mystical techniques, except for a Monday night Jewish meditation class. The layout of the main chapel incorporates the Tree of Life, and during the Amidah prayer, we are encouraged to stand near the s'firah that best resembles the condition we find ourselves in. There is a lot of encouragement to read Kabbalistic texts, and with the encouragement of some of the leadership of the synagogue, I have read some of the works of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero and Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto. I am currently interested in the Jewish ethical practice called Mussar, and both authors combine mysticism and ethics in a compelling way. I will blog about Mussar in more detail, because it is fascinating, exports nicely into other traditions, making it something easy to share with non-Jews looking for an ethical practice.

I had originally intended to give an example of Kabbalistic textual analysis, but this post is long enough as it is. Hopefully I will share more later.

Lodge of Exemplification; Jewish Renewal

Last night was amazing. The officers of eight lodges met at the Arlington Masonic Temple. The Grand Lecturer and the District Deputy Grand Master held court as, over the course of the evening, the officers of each lodge performed the Entered Apprentice degree for mock candidates. The District Deputy Grand Secretary called the role for the officers for each lodge, and the attendance was noted (the higher the attendance among the officers, the better the lodge's evaluation), the DDGM gave us instruction as to how the evening would proceed, and then it began.

This is how it worked: our lodge was called up first, and we all took our places in the lodge room. As we did not have a full compliment of officers (no lodge had a 100% compliment of officers, for various reasons. One officer of ours is a police officer, and was on duty that night. Another was in a government meeting he could not avoid, etc.), officers from other lodges substituted for our officers. With this new line of officers consisting of mostly our officers, and a few substitutes, we opened the lodge on the First degree, and did the long form of the opening. When the opening was done, the Grand Lecturer stopped us and critiqued our performance, and then opened the lodge to questions about procedure. The Grand Lecturer is astonishingly knowledgeable about ritual, and it was astonishing to see him display that knowledge. I was fascinated to see the level of detail of the questions on very precise technical matters. I really felt like I was taken to ritual school. It is worth pointing out that Grand Lodge has a certain way they want ritual done, but that being said, there still is much room for each lodge to demonstrate their own particular style or customs. This is especially the case in older lodges. There are at least three lodges in my district that have enjoyed a bicentennial (I call them bicentennial lodges), and have preserved a lot of lodge-based customs. As long as this does not contradict the guidelines for ritual given by Grand Lodge, this is perfectly acceptable, even encouraged.

After a brief Q&A period, the next lodge was called up. They did not have an Inside Sentinel, so I stayed in my chair and continued with the ritual as an officer of their lodge. One or two other brothers from my lodge stayed in their chairs as well. After about ten minutes of ritual, the Grand Lecturer stopped us, and critiqued our performance. Then the floor was opened up to more Q&A. There were again very detailed questions, which led the Grand Lecturer to explain some very fine points of ritual. Then the third lodge was called up. They had an Inside Sentinel, so I was relieved of my post, and could watch the next six lodges exemplify from the sidelines with the rest of my lodge's officers.

With very few exceptions I will not relate, everyone did an excellent job. It is the duty of the Grand Lecturer to point out every single error made during the ritual. If the lodge being exemplified is doing a good job, there's nothing for him to say. If even one brother messes up his bit, he is called out in front of everyone and corrected on every erroneous detail. That can be very painful, but necessary because the ritual we perform is supposed to exemplify the correct ritual. It can also be uncomfortable to watch. There was not much of that last night, however. All of the lodges did a very good job.

One lodge in our district is a Spanish-speaking lodge, and it was very interesting to see the ritual being done in another language. In North American and British lodges, the ritual is memorized, but in Continental lodges, the ritual is read out of the ritual books. This lodge read their ritual, which was very confusing to a lot of brothers present who did not know that this was the custom. My Spanish is very weak, but I still could make out some of the ritual, knowing the English. I still don't know how to say worshipful in Spanish.

I got there a bit late (commuting from work) and I wish that I'd had more time to socialize. It was really remarkable to see so many excellent masons congregating in one place. It was also very satisfying to know most of the officers in three other lodges, and a few in two or three more. Some I know from Scottish Rite, others from visiting their lodge or they visiting mine, and some from meeting them at Grand Lodge communication. We really have a great district, and since the redistricting earlier this year, we lost two excellent lodges but gained five, so I would say we've come out ahead. I ended up driving home a past master of another lodge whom I know through Lodge of Perfection at the Scottish Rite (we were in the 6th degree ritual together).

If you are a Master Mason in the State of Massachusetts, even if you are not an officer, and your lodge is competent at ritual, I would strongly encourage you to attend the next Lodge of Exemplification in your district. You will learn an enormous amount and meet most of the active senior masons in your district. Our mock candidate was raised in March, and I could tell this was an eye-opener for him, and I'm delighted he got to see it. You get to support your blue lodge, and meet people from every other lodge in the district in the bargain. And they feed you dinner. What could be wrong with that?

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This weekend, the president of my synagogue is stepping down, and we're having a celebratory oneg tonight, and kiddush tomorrow to celebrate his time in office, and to thank him for his service. He's a good man, and I really like him, and am very grateful to him for his extraordinary selflessness towards the synagogue. The synagogue has asked everyone to contribute something towards the oneg and kiddush, and I have have donated money towards them. Last Friday night, I sponsored the oneg on my own, to celebrate and express my gratitude for my new job.

My synagogue is in an interesting situation. The senior rabbi is on administrative leave until the end of this month, for reasons I'd prefer not to discuss. The junior rabbi just had a baby daughter the Tuesday before last, and is on maternity leave. That means we have no rabbi. We do not have a denomination, and we are very open to having people from differing denominations share with us the way that they enjoy ritual and learning. The Hebrew College in Newton has given us a rabbinical intern, and other rabbis throughout the area are stepping in to help until our senior rabbi returns. The Jewish chaplain at Mass General, the rabbi for MIT Hillel, some of the staff at Nishmat Hayyim: the Jewish Meditation Collaborative, and many congregant lay leaders have taken over Torah study, Psukei d'Zimra, Kabbalat Shabbat, Shabbat Ma'ariv, Shacharit, and Musaf services. It has been lovely having so many different Jewish perspectives presented to us, but I think everyone will be relieved when both rabbis return to work and everything gets back to normal.

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I consider my own personal affiliation to be Jewish Renewal, and I regard Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi to be my rebbe (although probably not in the same way a Hasid does). My synagogue is unaffiliated, with the senior rabbi being ordained through Ohalah, which simultaneously calls itself Jewish Renewal, and transdenominational. The Hebrew College rabbinical program also considers itself to be transdenominational. The rector is Rabbi Arthur Green, a Jewish mystic who was a big influence on the formation of Jewish Renewal, and the havurah movement. Both he and Reb Zalman are considered to be neo-Hasids. This idea is very compelling to me. I will most likely never be an Orthodox Jew, but I am fascinated with, and committed to Jewish mysticism. That being said, I worry that most forms of Jewish mysticism are tainted with superstition (which I mean in a pejorative sense). Please allow me to explain.

To an atheist, any theism whatsoever is superstition, and the avoidance of religion in any form is the avoidance of superstition. The problem with that attitude is that there actually is a God. One God. That God is more real than even ourselves, the universe, or the aggregated consciousness in existence. One cannot make that go away merely by wishing it to be so, or failing to perceive the actual situation one finds oneself in. Because we are created with free will, we can dismiss our perception of God, but we cannot dismiss God, any more than an atom can dismiss physics. Most atheists I know equate God with a big angry bearded man in the sky who is always pissed off and smiting people for following their biological impulses. That's so stupid a conception of God that anyone who believes that the image of God is an angry bearded man in the sky sitting on a throne and scowling, is a total idiot, an idolater, and pretty much hopeless in a conversation like this. I cannot stress too highly how wrong that image of God is. I'd much rather have someone be an atheist than believe in an angry anthropomorph in the sky.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the British Mandate of Palestine, which became the State of Israel, wrote:

“Atheism (heresy) comes as a cry from the depths of pain to redeem man from narrow and alien straights—to raise him up from the darkness of the letters and aphorisms to the light of ideas and feelings until faith finds a place to stand in the center of morality. Atheism has the right of temporary existence because it is needed to digest the filth adhered to faith for the lack of intellect and service.”

This is a fascinating idea. Atheism despises idolatry even more than any religion, and idolatry is absolutely unacceptable to any real monotheist. If you worship anything that isn't God, you are an idolater. Rabbi Kook would prefer an atheist to an idolater: even though he regarded atheism as a grave sin, he regarded idolatry as an even graver sin.

Two more quotes immediately spring to mind, one from a contemporary atheist, and one from a Hasidic rebbe.

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."
— Stephen F. Roberts

and

Once R. Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev saw the town apostate approaching. With a loving smile, he drew near him and embraced him: “Don’t worry,” he told him. “The G-d whom you don’t believe in, I don’t believe in either.”

Stephen Roberts is performing the virtue of idol-smashing that the Prophet Elijah did before him. But he suffers from the arrogance particular to many contemporary intellectuals. He assumes that the believer does not understand his/her own process, and that Mr. Roberts understands the believer better than the believer understands himself. Talk to a college freshman who has had their first serious complicated idea penetrate their brain-pan, and they will project their previous ignorance onto everyone they meet, and assume that nobody understands their new idea (which usually isn't their creation) but themselves, and possibly their teachers and comrades who share their idea. If you happen to run into one of them in the fulmination of their fervor, it will not matter that you have read the same books that have inspired them as long as you do not entirely agree with their slant on this idea. You are ignorant and they alone have wisdom. People who grew up forced into a religion that never really spoke to their condition, who reject that religion and all religions as an adult, often have the same close-minded zeal. I'm perfectly aware that religious people often make even more annoying zealots but I'm addressing atheist zeal here.

Roberts assumes that we dismiss false gods because they are rivals to our false god. If all gods are imaginary, then there really is no difference between any two such imaginary gods. He forsees a day in which we contemplate why we don't worship any of the myriad of fetishes that people have bowed before, and realize that our current worship is similar idolatry, that worship of any kind is idolatry. He believes that when we understand this, we will abandon our silly attachment to the concept of deity and join him in enlightened atheism.

The problem with his argument is that God is real. There is one God, a real God, a universal God. Every monotheist worships the same God. Every monotheist worships the same God. Every monotheist worships the same God. Most polytheists worship different aspects of God differently, and the more enlightened polytheists believe in a Supreme Being. Thus Vaishnavites worship the one God, and call God Vishnu, and focus upon the aspects of the one God that their religion focuses upon. Krishna, as an avatar of Vishnu, is the embodiment of the one God upon the Earth, like Jesus is for Christians. Jews are very uncomfortable with the idea of avatars, because our religion is very drastically wired against idolatry. In our region of development, we saw idolaters murder their children in front of idols, or sell their daughters as temple prostitutes, and were horrified by what happens when people petition dead objects for divine assistance. Indeed, every religious sentiment runs a drastic risk of being directed at something less than God, because conceiving of God with our everyday mentality is not possible.

Please understand, I know that Christians also worship the one true God. I don't understand the concept of the Trinity at all, and historically, many Jews and Muslims have accused Christianity of polytheism; of having three gods instead of one God. I give Christians the benefit of the doubt that the Trinity is one God rather than three gods, even though I don't understand how that works. I don't need to understand it because I'm not a Christian.

Because there actually is one God, any being conscious of that fact needs to contemplate their relationship with God. That is why Freemasonry insists that every brother believe in a Supreme Being.

Some people have a blind idiot god hypothesis: that no connection with God can be formed; or even a retired god hypothesis, that God created the world and set it into being, and then retired from Godhood (the Divine Watchmaker hypothesis). But when you experience God's love for you yourself, those hypotheses are proven false. When you experience God communicating with you, you become aware that a conscious, present God earnestly seeks to connect with you, and have a Vulcan mind-meld with you. This will obliterate you or drive you insane if you are not ready to handle it, so you have to practice. God is really big, much bigger than you, and wants to do this gently, but you have free will, so you can do this any way you choose, or not bother to do it at all.

A few thought exercises for non-believers:

1. Assume for the purposes of this exercise that telepathy exists, that two conscious beings can link their minds together somehow. What would that experience be like? Spend at least five minutes playing out in your mind a true experience of telepathy, leading to a total mental connection with another conscious entity. If you despised that other being, this would be horrific, but if you loved that other being, it could be ecstatic.
2. Imagine if you could connect with a stone, or a lake, or a hill, or a tree, and share consciousness with it. In order to do this thought exercise properly, you have to focus your imagination intently upon this experience. Spend at least five minutes imagining this experience, and how it would play out.
3. Imagine a house where a group of people live. There are different interpersonal dynamics at play, lovers, parents and children, friends, rivals, tensions. There are shared meals sometimes, and other times individuals in the house are in isolation. Imagine that there is a mental connection between all of the people in the house, that they are barely conscious of most of the time. If each individual really focuses, he or she can get a fleeting sense of some sort of consciousness superstructure linking the people in the house together, along with the pets, the plants, the furniture, and even the walls, roof, siding and doors of the house. Focus on the consciousness superstructure I have described and try to sense what it is, what are its dimensions, and how it perceives. Continue this exercise until you can perceive the house as an entity in and of itself, even for a brief snatch of a glimpse of such an agregate consciousness.
4. Stare at an analog clock, one with three hands. Stare at the minute hand, and try to mentally hold it back. Ignore the second hand, and just try to make the minute hand slow down. Alternatively, try to make the minute hand speed up. Try to make it slide from one number on the clock face, to the next adjacent one, at your pace. Play with a computer software calendar, and look up various dates in history using it, and keep returning to the present. Move to dates in the future, either within your lifetime or clearly beyond it, and then return to today.
   
5. At this point, you can make the units larger. What is the aggregate consciousness of your block, your neighborhood, your town? What is the aggregate consciousness of the spot you currently find yourself in, from the creation of the world to the present? What is the aggregate consciousness of your entire network of friends, and their friends, and their friends, and so on? What sort of entity is the Israel referred to in the prayer, "Listen Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One"? Is the Earth conscious of itself as a whole? What about the sun? the Solar System, the Milky Way Galaxy?
6. What is the aggregate consciousness of all of existence? How long is eternity? Imagine a consciousness capable of creating all of this but fine-tuned enough to zero in on you alone and engage you deeper than your current level of perception. An entity which includes everything and every consciousness in the universe but is not contained by it; which could in an eyeblink annihilate this universe and replace it with something totally different.
7. Now imagine that the thing you imagined is trying to communicate with you specifically. It has watched you from your beginning and loves you with a love so deep it would literally kill you to feel so much love, and wants the best possible outcome for you, but respects your autonomy enough to leave you alone and let you figure out your own way. Who knows, maybe this entity is astonished by the choices you make (and only you in the entire universe could have made)? Maybe you provide a crucial component for this entity, and your purpose on this earth is to supply what only you can supply to this entity.

I strongly urge you not to worship the result of this thought exercise. But if any of this has any emotional, intellectual, or spiritual resonance for you, keep a channel open for you to continue these thought experiments.

I haven't told you what God is, because I don't know how to do that. I'm categorically not asserting that the result of your thought experiments is God. God is bigger than anything we can imagine. The Hebrew phrase Adonai Eloheinu is often translated as "The Lord is your God", but more accurately, the phrase is "YHWH who Gods you". See, the root Eloah, or God, is being used as a verb here. This is similar to R. Buckminster Fuller's idea: "I seem to be a verb." God is not really a noun, not even a proper noun. God is a quality that acts upon you.

All that being said, I define superstition as a behavior that steers one towards idolatry, a behavior that is not the result of being Godded but pretends to be. Jewish mysticism, as are all forms of esoteric knowledge, is laced with superstition like veins of mold in a blue cheese. Given a new spiritual practice, how can you tell the method that will bring you closer to God from superstition? I don't always know, but the rabbis tell us that if you take one step towards God, God takes two steps towards you, and if you lift an ounce to get closer to God, God will lift a ton to get closer to you.

I'll give you an example of what I feel to be superstition: the Hasids wash their hands before morning prayers. The opinion has been expressed by Chabad that when a Jew sleeps, demons perch on his/her fingers, so that the fingers are corrupted by sin, and the Jew has to wash that corruption off before doing anything devotional with the hands. I regard that as superstition, although I am willing to be proven wrong. Some mornings I wash my hands when I first wake up, because I'm willing to test the hypothesis, but my intuition about God does not urge me to wash my hands when I wake up, for the most part. I have a lot of trouble believing that demons perch on my fingers while I sleep, and I therefore regard this as a superstition. The Jewish tradition has a number of things like this, and they do not feel right to me. They feel like residual anguish from millenia of oppression, of living in ghettos in terror of the surrounding populace, of powerlessness and disenfranchisement, rather than a path towards God.

I want to have a religious life free of superstition. I believe that, within Jewish mysticism, there are techniques to bring me closer to God, and I want to master these techniques. But I don't want to assume the emotional baggage of a terrified, abused, traumatized people in order to master these techniques. And I don't feel I have to. What appeals to me about Jewish Renewal is it encourages me to know God better without insisting that I adopt a lot of superstitions.