The Mystical Exodus in Jungian Perspective

Transforming Trauma and the Wellsprings of Renewal

Shoshana Fershtman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000364200
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Mystical Exodus in Jungian Perspective explores the soul loss that results from personal, collective, and transgenerational trauma and the healing that unfolds through reconnection with the sacred. Personal narratives of disconnection from and reconnection to Jewish collective memory are illuminated by millennia of Jewish mystical wisdom, contemporary Jewish Renewal and feminist theology, and Jungian and trauma theory.

The archetypal resonance of the Exodus story guides our exploration. Understanding exile as disconnection from the Divine Self, we follow Moses, keeper of the spiritual fire, and Serach bat Asher, preserver of ancestral memory. We encounter the depths with Joseph, touch collective grief with Lilith, experience the Red Sea crossing and Miriam's well as psychological rebirth and Sinai as the repatterning of traumatized consciousness.

Tracing the reawakening of the qualities of eros and relatedness on the journey out of exile, the book demonstrates how restoring and deepening relationship with the Sacred Feminine helps us to transform collective trauma.

This text will be key reading for scholars of Jewish studies, Jungian and post-Jungian studies, feminist spirituality, trauma studies, Jungian analysts and psychotherapists, and those interested in healing from personal and collective trauma.

Cover art: 'Radiance' by Elaine Greenwood

Chapter 1

The beloved, knocking

I was asleep but my heart stayed awake.

Listen! …

Song of Songs 5:2–4¹

I remember the dream I had the night before I got my mother’s call. In it, I am wandering desperately down long hallways, perhaps a museum. I pass by paintings on the walls, but one in particular compels me—a painting of the Rock of Gibraltar, on the coast between Spain and Morocco. I see the rock breaking apart and falling into the sea. A voice in the dream says, “My Rock of Gibraltar is crumbling.” The next morning, my mother calls and tells me she has been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, which has now spread into her stomach. I am speechless, my dream coming back into my awareness and taking on specific meaning.

That next day I had been invited by my German therapist at the time to attend a Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance service, at the Jewish temple in Mendocino, near where I was living. He had been invited to speak at the service on his healing from the war. He was born into a Gentile family in Germany during the war and spent his earliest years as a refugee with his mother, fleeing from Allied bombing raids. During our work together I had not yet come into any conscious relationship with my Jewish spiritual identity, but recall having had powerful dreams of being part of a German Jewish family that was emptying our home and fleeing Nazis, although I have no immediate ancestors who were in Germany during the war.

I agreed to attend, but after receiving the call from my mother, began having second thoughts. I was concerned that being in temple might open floodgates of grief about my mother that I would not be able to contain. Perhaps my concern about attending a Yom HaShoah service for the first time in my life was related to a fear of being overwhelmed with collective grief as well.

The night before the service, I had another dream. I was on my way to visit Jeane TuBears Jacobs, the Native American spiritual teacher with whom I had been studying for many years. In the dream, my car broke down on the side of the road. Instead of continuing the way I’d planned, I left my car on the road and walked back toward home. The dream felt powerful and puzzling.

The Yom HaShoah observance was preceded by a one-hour meditation that I decided to attend. When I arrived, I was the only one in the sanctuary; my therapist arrived soon, and after a while, Rabbi Margaret Holub, whom I had never met, joined us. I could not remember the last time I had been in temple—likely for a wedding or Bar Mitzvah in the family. This temple was different from those of my youth; it was in a simple room in a beautiful setting near the ocean, with hand-hewn, earthy woodwork.

As the three of us sat in silence, I focused my gaze on the ner tamid, the eternal light suspended above the Ark that held the Torah. At the time, I was not aware of the meaning of the ner tamid but found myself drawn to the humble yet powerful light it emitted in this otherwise darkened room. At some point, I had a sense of many pairs of hands, crossed over my heart, beginning to separate, as if my heart were being unlocked in subsequent layers. As each pair of hands separated, I felt my heart opening and becoming more and more present. As the hands unlocked successive layers of my heart, I heard a voice saying, “And it is a Jewish heart. And it is a Jewish heart.” The words surprised and moved me deeply. Tears flowed from my eyes as I allowed myself to silently surrender to, and be transformed by, this experience.

I began to allow myself to feel my sadness and fear about my mother’s illness. As I did so, I understood that I did not need to fear that my grief could not be contained, for the temple itself was the container, designed to hold us in the depths of our suffering. Feeling held by the temple, I allowed myself to surrender to the grief that was present in me for the first time since receiving the news.

Following the Yom HaShoah service, I walked out to my car. I discovered that I had parked the passenger wheels in a ditch off the side of the road and was unable to get out. I went back inside the temple to call the towing service. As I entered, I suddenly recalled my dream from the night before of my car getting stuck on the side of the road. It felt important to pay attention to what was unfolding. I entered the temple and found that everyone had gone except Rabbi Margaret, who graciously helped me contact AAA. Thankfully, this was before the advent of cellphones, which meant I spent an hour with Rabbi Margaret as we waited for the tow truck to arrive. As we sat together, I immediately felt drawn to her open and radiant presence, but I also felt awkward, a feeling that typified my feelings in Jewish religious settings—perhaps a holdover from my teenage years of attending temple with friends when my family were not members and burning with the shame that I literally did not “belong.”

Rabbi Margaret, much to my surprise, asked directly about my relationship with Judaism and inquired about whether I felt like an outsider. I was raised in environments where if you did not “belong” to the temple, you were held at arm’s distance. This feeling of exile took up residence inside me. In addition, my maternal grandparents, who had both been raised in Orthodox homes had, in the years before I was born, become messianic Jewish missionaries—Jews who believed that Jesus was the Messiah.

As a young girl, I spent a lot of time at their mission in the Lower East Side of New York, feeding the homeless in the basement soup kitchen and wandering in and out of the chapel where my grandfather led services. As I was growing up, my grandparents were often referred to as “crazy” by others because of their spiritual beliefs, which did not help my conflicted sense of shame around their orientation. Our immediate family maintained our Jewish identity, and I was raised in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, went to Jewish summer camp throughout my childhood, and went to temple for Bar and Bat Mitzvahs of friends and family. Although I was drawn to Judaism as a teenager, as a young adult I never seriously considered Judaism as a spiritual path, and instead found myself drawn to earth-based and indigenous traditions.

Rabbi Margaret’s questions offered a way to talk about something taboo—to reflect on my conflicted relationship to Judaism—something I had never been invited to speak about before and certainly not with a rabbi. I shared with her, in words that I had never spoken, even to myself, feelings of being an outsider in the temple growing up, feeling embarrassed that my family did not belong to the temple, and having internalized the judgment I received toward my grandparents. As we spoke, a light turned on inside me that allowed me to view my own relationship to Judaism, a burgeoning awareness of feeling so much shame and a fear of rejection, a hidden fear that there was something defective about my Judaism—so defective that maybe I could not even call myself a Jew.

Rabbi Margaret responded by sharing her own experience of having felt like an outsider to Judaism as she was growing up. That a rabbi was sharing this with me seemed remarkable. How could a rabbi have felt that alienated from Judaism? I always assumed that people who practiced Judaism had always felt a sense of inclusion that I lacked.

The most striking part of her story for me was when she described being part of a Christian commune for a short time during the early 1970s. “Wow!” I thought. A rabbi who had explored a Christian path! This touched the deepest part of my sense of outsiderness—in that moment, I realized how unconsciously I felt fear and shame that my grandparents’ messianic Judaism had rendered me ineligible for membership in the Jewish community. Through the generosity of Rabbi Margaret’s sharing of her personal struggle with me, I felt something I had always experienced unconsciously as a wall, turn into a gate—a gate that was swinging open for the first time in my consciousness. When the tow truck arrived, I left the temple, realizing that something had profoundly shifted in me.

And it is only now, in this writing, after returning from a recent trip to southern Spain, that I wonder about the imagery my psyche chose. The Rock of Gibraltar, situated between Spain and Morocco, crumbling, losing my foundation as I contemplated my mother’s terminal illness, at the same site that hundreds of thousands of Jews passed through during the Inquisition in the late fifteenth century, wrenched from the land that had been home to Jews for over a millennium.

My return to Judaism arose from my depths, unbidden. A powerful unconscious process overtook my life, and being a follower of my dreams and visions, I responded. About two years prior to my meeting with Rabbi Margaret, I had attended a massage therapist training at Heartwood Institute in Northern California, where I was invited to participate in a Shabbat dinner. I was honored to be included, and after dinner we formed a circle, held hands, and sang Hebrew songs together. I did not know any of the songs, but I felt them resonating within me. My tears flowed freely, and I had the sense that even though I had never learned these songs, something deep within my soul recognized them.

After the week at Heartwood, I came across the work of Rupert Sheldrake, speaking about a phenomenon he calls morphic field resonance. Sheldrake states that when we enter into ritual, we constellate the morphic field of all people through all time and space who have engaged in this ritual.² I found myself wondering if, at Heartwood, I had experienced a morphic field of Jewish ancestors throughout time who engaged in the ritual of Shabbat.

I was not seeking a return to Judaism at the time. Although I resonated with the tradition as a child and a young teenager, my burgeoning feminism made it difficult to relate to the prayerbooks and services that felt overbearingly patriarchal. Instead, my spiritual longings led me first to feminist, earth-based spirituality and then to Native American spiritual practices, which I was honored to engage in as part of my advocacy work on behalf of tribes facing dispossession and cultural genocide. I was completely floored when my Cherokee–Choctaw (and part Jewish) spiritual teacher, Jeane TuBears Jacobs, suggested that maybe I resonated with Native American teachings because I too came from a tribal people, as I in no way related to myself as being part of a tribe.

Practicing and learning Native American rituals raised concerns of cultural appropriation. At a legal conference I attended on ecological concerns, a Native American elder instructed the non-Native people there to discover the indigenous traditions we each came from. I longed for a tradition that felt like my own, but that carried the depth of the Native American practices of unceasing gratitude, interconnectedness, humility, and blessing. When I began to practice the morning blessings in Hebrew, I was profoundly surprised to discover that such gratitude and humility are central to Jewish daily practice.

Shortly before my conscious re-engagement with Judaism, TuBears taught me a shamanic journeying practice of connecting with my ancestors. I found myself receiving visitations from my eight great-grandparents, whom I experienced as a quaternity of four couples surrounding and guiding me. All of them came from the Pale of Settlement in Poland and Russia and almost all were Orthodox, although their religious practices were never discussed in my family.

After my encounter in the temple with Rabbi Margaret, as I deepened my relationship with my ancestors, I found myself seeking opportunities to engage with Jewish rituals, practices, and teachings. I began studying at Chochmat HaLev in Berkeley, a center for Jewish meditation, and took a yearlong course in Jewish healing, taught by Jewish Renewal rabbis and others immersed in the Jewish mystical tradition.³

I began attending annual nationwide gatherings or kallahs, organized by Aleph Alliance for Jewish Renewal. What I experienced was remarkable. In Jewish Renewal, no longer were Jewish rituals conducted in a staid and rote format. Teachers ordained by Reb Zalman, as well as Jewish feminist theologians and those inspired by the havurah (egalitarian self-study) movement, gave rise to a flowering of spiritual expression that reclaimed the mystical Hasidic and earlier kabbalistic traditions of Judaism as a psychospiritual practice. The use of prayers, rituals, and teachings helped participants come into relationship with the Divine and be transformed by that engagement. The atmosphere of creativity, spontaneity, depth, and authenticity was both awe-inspiring and heart-opening.

The resonance was not just with the philosophical aspect of the teachings, but with the experience of embodiment and deep feeling, so absent from much of the Judaism I had experienced as a child. I attended my first Jewish Renewal kallah gathering several months after my mother’s passing. When I registered, I was asked if I was in mourning. When I said I was, I was given a black ribbon to attach to my nametag and told that in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, mourners would enter through a separate door during the first year of mourning. I was stunned to have my bereavement honored, so unlike my experience in the secular world in which my grief was rarely acknowledged beyond the first weeks following my mother’s death.

I usually tended toward theoretical learning, but my intuition guided me to take a movement workshop with Rabbi Miriam Maron. As I moved with the others in our small group, the grief began to find its way out from the darkened crevices to the surface of my body. I felt the safety to allow my tears to flow. Miriam came close and began whispering Hebrew prayers into my ear, and as I surrendered to the grief, its inte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1 The beloved, knocking
• PART I An historical overview of Jewish mysticism and psychology
• PART II The rupture
• PART III The awakening
• PART IV The healing
• PART V The promise
• Index