Misunderstanding tradition
Sometimes traditions are misunderstood by otherwise sane people. My partner - Jewish - just gave me two example which I though I might share.
The first example is that of Kabbalists wearing a red string bracelet around their wrist to ward off the 'evil eye'. The evil eye is basically understood in Jewish tradition as "being nasty", "backbiting" and "gossip". The traditional method of warding off the evil eye is to be a nice person. There are however simple superstitions regarding the evil eye which date to more modern times - valid ones simply make sense if we consider them without esoteric knowledge.
The other example is of the Rosh Chodesh ceremony. Traditionally this is a few short simple prayers - as little as a few extra lines - added into daily prayers to mark the new moon. Some modern non-Jewish kabbalists perform 45 minute rituals during certain astrologically alignments that have nothing to do with the new moon - and still call their ritual a Rosh Chodesh in the Kabbalist tradition.
Let's think about this ... One the one hand we have individuals trying to follow the tradition, and on the other ignoring the significance of the language of the tradition.
My advice on this one is either follow the tradition properly, or don't pretend to follow it at all - anything else is lying to oneself.
posted by witch-hunter at Sunday, December 05, 2004
2 Comments:
Kabbalah was my major area of study back when I was a divinity student, and it's fair to say that this form of mysticism can only be understood in an explicitly Jewish context. Kabbalah is really a mish-mosh of a variety of ideas, some pure superstition (the evil eye?), some abstract symbolic symbols for understanding the physical nature of God, all related to the way Medieval Jewish scholars understood the world — which is, I should point out, quite different from the way contemporary Jews see the world, even if they are Medievalists like some ultra-Orthodox sects. Anyone who thinks that Kabbalah can be useful to them simply because they read the Zohar — a fraudulent book, by the way, although historically an important one — and because they were a red string around their arm is delusional. There's a popular idea that all the world's religion can be cherry picked from, that select elements can be absconded with, and it will retain its meaning in this big smargasborg of New Age metaphysics. Not only does that viewpoint seem monumentally naïve to Dr. Mysterian, but it also is insulting to the original religions that have been so grotesquely distorted by the process.
I'm a witch-hunting victim reborn, so I'm not sure if I should say hello or throw something at you. Anyway, peace in this lifetime, at least (and a MUCH better death for me, thank you very much).
http://peacebang.blogspot.com
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