Mysticism and Identity
DURING the first quarter of the twentieth century, shortly after the end of the First World War, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) - the world's leading kabbalist - believed that his people's tendency to concentrate almost exclusively on the mournful aspects of Jewish history and suppress the more 'magical' and 'demonic' aspects of their religion, was having a detrimental impact on the Jews as a whole. The 'good', in other words, was being accentuated at the expense of the 'evil', and both had an important role to play in the religion itself. In the words of his biographer, George Prochnik, "the powers of Jewish mysticism, if simply bottled up inside, distorted and deadened Jewish identity." Scholem, he adds, believed that one "had to understand what was happening in the depths of the national self in order to free up potential for dynamic growth."
In many ways, Scholem's efforts to revive kabbalistic practice as a way of influencing the collective Jewish psyche is similar to what Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) wanted to achieve in a personal capacity with his notion of unconscious psychic energy, or what he described as 'id'. Both men, of course, would have agreed that a failure to apply their respective solutions leads to a form of repression. In the twenty-first century, at a time when one political tendency is seeking to suppress these instincts completely and another is trying to express them in the most base and exaggerated fashion, we can see for ourselves the extreme psychological consequences that arise from the long-term containment of such inclinations.
If we are to resolve this problem and create a sense of balance, therefore, it is necessary to take a leaf out of Carl Jung's (1875-1961) book and ensure that both our personal and collective 'unconscious' are assimilated into our personalities by allowing them to become 'conscious' through dreams and the active imagination. Only then can the sanity of individuation replace the polar opposites that are becoming an increasingly common sight on the streets of our towns and cities. Self-reflection, it must be remembered, enables us to become inwardly whole and thus leads to the Primordial Man.
Yes, Jung seems to offer some important resolution of the entirely spiritual and Dr Pangloss view and the complex mysticism of evil. I want to know more about Scholem and Benjamin and the rest of the circle. I was taught by Enrst Gombrich briefly in the mid 1960s, and what I absorbed from then was a kind of bland scientism that iugnored the extaraordinary connections between these people - Scholem, Buber, Landauer, Benjamin, Rosenszweig, Heidegger, Arendt, The rest of the Frankfurt School, etc. and Gombtich himself must have been aware of these people as refugee Jewish intrellectual of the 1930s
When I was required to read Benjamin's Essay on art in the age of mechanical reproduction, Benjamin was just another Marxist writer of the 1930s so revered by the embryonic Cultural Studies mob I was a part of.
But I had no idea he as a friend of Martin Buber, Arendt, Heidegger, and Scholem who brough ius the kabbalah. Buber I reached via RD Laing, and I remeber reading his I and Thou for the second time to get it - its language flummoxed me at first - in the tea rooms of Derry and Toms Department Store in High Street Kensington waiting for Janine to finish her shopping - or rather internal window shopping, she was a poor medical student. Janine was whip smart, teasing, born of an Irish dentist and Cockney sparrow and grew up in Ventnor Isle of Wight, going to medcial school at the age of 17, and complaining that medicine was a low level discipline, using the crudest of empirical methods. I loved her.
Had to wait until I ma 80 to make these connections. Thanks for this.