I WAS BORN TO BE A TECHER OF ANIMIST EARTH BASED JUDAISM

I’ve been contemplating what if I had actually been given the kind of advice and support I needed when I was a young man, how would my life have looked different? It’s an impossible question of course. It’s also for me a really painful question that motivates me to be the kind of mentor I wish I had when I was younger.

I was born to be a teacher of Animist Earth Based Judaism. Only Animist Earth Based Judaism has been so thoroughly suppressed for almost three thousand years, that even this term was unthinkable forty years ago, maybe even heretical. It’s been a long wander through a desert.

Lately I’ve been doing visioning exercises about imagining a time when an authority figure or the divine actually understood me. I’m asking what would they have said and how would it have changed my life? I’m imagining myself sitting on the rocks overlooking Lick Creek in the Ozarks on the commune I lived on after college. I would be asking what’s the next step is in my spiritual development. The divine would be saying to me that you are an Earth Based Animist Jew. You know the whole world is alive and you know that you are a Jew. Now you need to find a chevre, a community of others who believe and practice this. Not the path of Rabbis, but the path of your ancient ancestors.

And in my imagination, I respond, how on God’s green earth am I supposed to find such people? And the divine would be silent.

Of course, a silent God is well within the Jewish tradition, that’s for sure. There’s this undercurrent of Jewish thought where God is powerless just like the Jewish people and s/he is in exile along with the people. (this is often associated with the Shekhinah, the feminine aspect of the divine). But even if the divine were silent, and even if there were no obvious teachers I could turn towards, at least I would have had a north star—Animist Earth Based Judaism, a guiding light for both studies and practices.

I went to Graduate school after my time on the commune, and it’s not as if there were any programs in Animist Judaism. It’s not as if I could have become that sort of Rabbi or earned a Doctorate in Judaism as what was called then an “archaic” religion—what today we would call an indigenous religion. The Jewish studies professor at the program where I studied both indigenous religion and Buddhism would have simply said no way to my heresy. Maybe Anthropology or History? But the problem with Academia for me was always going to be that I’m a believer and a practitioner, not just a scholar. My Japanese Religion professor did me a great favor when he fired me as a graduate student. Even if it was an inadvertent one.

Maybe having this North Star would not have made a difference because I couldn’t have figured out how to put it into practice. Hell, even as a mature 67 year old, I still don’t know. The advice of find a community would have been great advice back then, it’s great advice now, and it’s not as if there’s some Animist Earth Based Jewish prayer circle I can join.

I’ve been writing about the dissolution that is currently working through me. On the other side is me much more fully and differently embodying Animist Earth Based Judaism. But what that looks like is murky. There’s a promised land in the future, but I’m like an Israelite before Moses sends out the twelve scouts to report on the land. Moses tells him to report on “how is the land, is it fat or meager, does it have trees or not?” (Numbers 13:20). I believe the land will be a land flowing with milk and honey and that is why I wander through the desert.